Wild Mushroom Stew with Grass-fed Beef

Mushroom stew, my little boy’s goal after a long foray in the woods near our home, seemed a lost cause after our first outing when we ended up with a only handful of porcini, slippery jacks and chanterelles – just enough for a wild mushroom butter, but not much else.  He wanted it so badly, that wild mushroom stew, and every few feet into our journey he’d stop and ask, “Can we eat this?” or “Is that poisonous?” and we’d consult our mushrooming guidebook which would give me the confidence in what I knew to be correct.  My husband joined us on our next trips and we’d delve deeper in the woods, uncovering even more mushrooms to satisfy my little boy’s craving for mushroom stew.

We gathered slippery jacks with their sticky peel-away skin and creamy white flesh and the charming cinnamon-dusted porcini, too.  We found tiny hawk’s wings whose cap of concentric brown scale-like protrusions resembles a hawk’s feathers, to the imaginative, anyway.  We were lucky, too, fellow mushroomers who, without a short-legged companion in tow, were able to journey deeper into the woods, often sharing their bounty with us.  And, in that way, more than our fair share of golden chanterelle mushrooms landed in our stew pot.

But all the while we trampled through the muck of a forest floor littered with pine needles, dank puddles and rotting logs, there was only one topic of conversation: mushroom stew.  How do you make a mushroom stew, he’d ask.  Can we add this mushroom?  How many do we need? And on.  And on.

So when we’d amassed enough edible wild mushrooms to build a decent stew, about two pounds, more or less, we headed home – tired, hot, a bit dehydrated.  My little boy and I got to our work preparing mushroom stew, he by insisting on cleaning and chopping the mushrooms when he’d use the opportunity to carefully recite the names of the mushrooms.  Suillus.  Bolete.  Chanterelle.

I combined our other ingredients: clarified butter, fresh herbs, carrot, celery, shallots and potatoes the size of marbles.  We’d add the stew meat too – grass-fed beef from thirty miles down the road, though any red meat should do – elk, venison or even bison.