Oregon Truffle Hunting - Rd. 2

Jonathan is at the Trail Blazer's game tonight - sitting behind the coach's bench nonetheless (is that what it's called?)! I tried to find the game on tv so I could see him, but I don't think anyone actually cares about basketball and I was unsuccessful. Instead I get to watch Wipeout and drink wine... and tell you about the awesome truffles we found today!

I didn't tell you before, but those truffles we found the other week? They were no good. I'm pretty sure they ended up in the trash. Or maybe in the compost. They were indeed truffles, just not the good kind. After going out today with people who knew what they were doing it seems so obvious - but at the time we had no idea.

So today we went to another coworker's property - one where they had found many (good) truffles before! (This is where the first truffles came from that Jonathan looked at under the microscope and we made the truffle butter out of.) Today was absolutely beautiful out, which made looking for truffles even better! There were about a dozen of us who showed up, and I'm pretty sure everyone found truffles. It's so much more fun when you are consistently finding them! Here is our loot:

Not very appetizing, are they? They look a little better when you clean them off (although not much really - sorry truffles). Here is one of the larger ones that we found - we were pretty excited about how big most of these ones were!

 I'm not sure what we will do with the actual truffles this time, but we got an idea from Sue (our coworkers mom, owner of the property) to flavor some oil and rice with the truffles while we store them! We got some arborio rice so that eventually we can make a mushroom risotto. See how much better they look now that they are cleaned? You can pretend with me.

You know, I never thought I would actually say this - but I love Corvallis. I love Oregon (but that was less surprising). How neat is it that we can drive 10 minutes from our house and have these kinds of adventures? I have tons more wild edibles to learn about so that I can start using that Vegan Wild Edibles cookbook that Julie and Elliot got us for Christmas!

-C