Fungi Friday - The Slime Soup

Here's a few slimey mushrooms for this #fungifriday

It was cold, rainy and dreary but this witch's butter really stood out from the dark dead leaves and branches.

I usually find a bit each year but only in small amounts. Who knows if there might be a motherload of it somewhere I have not discovered yet.

This early in spring is good for finding all sorts of edible slime mold like this amber jelly roll.

The amber jelly roll appears in all sorts of shapes and textures. As it airs out it tends to form leafy shapes.

This example is halfway between its wet slime state and the dry leafy shape.

Next up I found a huge batch of wood ear. This stuff works great in soups like the amber jelly roll and the witch's butter.

Some other common names are judas ear or jews ear fungi.

This batch looks the most like a bunch of ears. The texture is similar to a gummy bear with tougher cartiladge textures near the wood.

This batch has dried out a bit and kind of resembles it having veins. Wood ear is easy to dry out and store for use later. Just boil it in water to rehydrate it.

Wood ear is a fairly bland tasteless mushroom but it has anticancer and antitumor compounds in it. I like to eat it as a preventative, plus it spices up well for cooking.

This was all the slime mold I found out on the foray. It worked out to be about a pound worth of slime. If it wasn't so windy and cold out I probably could have found another pound worth.

Now its time to cook. After cleaning, washing and soaking it in salt water I put it in a pot to boil with spices. I like to squeeze a lime in along with chili powder and cumin to add flavor to these bland fungi. I also add soy sauce, these slime fungi like to absorb all the flavors.

My favorite recipe for this fungi is menudo soup. Basically you soak a few guancho dried peppers along with fresh peppers and make a chili paste. Then you add some stew beef, oregano, hominey and any additional spices and let it simmer for a couple hours. Towards the end add in the limed up slime fungi and you have a nice menudo soup. Traditional menudo calls for beef tripe but I prefer slime fungi to tripe anyday. They both end up having around the same texture in the soup.

After eating slime mold I am starting to eye these slugs... maybe they can be used in soup somehow too lol j/k. Happy #fungifriday