Pennies in the Moss: Chanterelle Season is Here

This round of fall seasonals is here from November 5 through November 24

After the long, dry summer, some of us welcome the fall rains. In one last blast of glory, the leaves turn brilliant shades of orange, yellow, and red before succumbing to the wind. Lawns grow green again and new snow blankets the mountains. For the adventurous, it’s a chance to dig out the Gore-Tex and go hunting for savory treasures in the local forests. Golden chanterelles, often abundant, are one of the prizes. They are usually found in mossy areas of second-growth forests among the ferns and salal, especially near Douglas firs.

The writer Annie Dillard, who died in September at the age of eighty-one, would have understood the mushroom hunter. And she knew our rain. The year her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize, she moved to Bellingham, and for four years she lived and wrote there, and on nearby Waldron Island. In that book she remembers being six or seven years old in Pittsburgh, where she liked to hide a penny of her own along the sidewalk for a stranger to find. Then she would take a piece of chalk and draw arrows down the block, pointing the way to the surprise.

Dillard came to believe that the whole world is like that sidewalk. The pennies are everywhere. The only question is whether we are paying enough attention. A chanterelle lies shadowed by salal or a fern, bright as a coin. Nothing is more ordinary than a mushroom in the forest in the rain — and yet, what joy a find can bring.

Most of us are not out in the salal. When the dark comes early, we set the lights ablaze and spend the long evenings indoors. We eat and laugh and read. We binge shows, cheer for the Seahawks and the Kraken, play cribbage, work jigsaw puzzles, and debate whose turn it is to walk the dog. Dillard had something to say about those evenings, too. “How we spend our days,” she wrote, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” By that reckoning, an ordinary Tuesday supper is no small thing.

And guess what? We can deliver to your door an extraordinary pizza laden with chanterelles. They come to us from Foraged and Found Edibles, whose mushroom hunters know exactly where to look. (You can find them at farmers markets throughout Seattle.) On our Chanterelle Prosciutto Primo, we pair the earthy, meaty mushrooms with thin slices of tender prosciutto and creamy mozzarella over a base of fresh garlic oil.

The chanterelles turn up again on our Butternut Sage Primo, this time in the company of roasted butternut squash, sage, and prosciutto. The squash is nutty and sweet. The sage is fried until crisp. Paper-thin slices of prosciutto lend salty depth, and the mushrooms add their earthy complexity. We layer all of it on a creamy blend of mozzarella and fontina over an olive oil base.

For dessert, we have Molly Moon’s Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream. It is made with pumpkins from Stahlbush Island Farms in Corvallis, Oregon, which are roasted, puréed, and cooked until they reach the rich, velvety consistency of classic pumpkin pie filling. The spices are ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and clove, but the earthy sweetness and complexity come from the pumpkin itself. If you think you’re over pumpkin spice, a scoop of this may change your mind.

Both pizzas and the ice cream will be with us from November 5 through November 24. The rain, we expect, will stay a good deal longer. We suggest you spend one of those long evenings with a seasonal pizza and the people you like best.