An Appalachian Love Story

Many moons ago, when I was a young child, my mother headed into our beloved Appalachian Mountains and didn’t return home until late in the evening, when I was already asleep. The next morning I woke to see her standing in my bedroom doorway with an absolutely enormous boletus mushroom in her arms. It had a round brown cap and a thick white stalk. She held it like a trophy that she couldn’t wait to share with me.

I’d never laid my eyes on anything more beautiful.

She’d found it, she said, close to home, in a little mossy patch by itself, hidden away in the forest surrounding us. I don’t know how that boletus had grown to be that size without being eaten by something, but it seemed like some kind of miracle in her arms that day.

It’s one of my favorite core memories, my mother holding that giant boletus. And though it was edible and we ate mushrooms at nearly every meal back then (and still do, as it happens), none of us would touch it. We couldn’t—it was just far too beautiful. Eventually, it rotted away. And though I’ve continued to live in this part of Kentucky, and so has my mother—in fact, my family has lived in this same thirty square miles of land for more than 200 years—none of us have seen a mushroom that big before or since.

That boletus is what sparked my lifelong love for mushrooms, along with its bearer, of course. My mother was and is the bona fide mushroom queen, a real child of the ’70s. She was the one who was always hunting and cultivating and collecting mushrooms, and she seems to have passed that gene on to me.

In addition to foraging, growing, and cooking with mushrooms, I often incorporate marzipan and whatever other kind of baked sugary mushroom I can dream of into my confections. For this mushroom-dedicated issue, editor Carolyn Turgeon suggested I create four new ultra-special mushroom-themed desserts and let my imagination go wild.

So of course, my mind went straight back to that boletus, which I re-created as the chocolate toadstool cake, as an homage to my mother and to my love of mushrooms generally. I was a bit intimidated at first, since I’d never made a stacked cake like that and wasn’t sure it’d hold, but the support dowel worked great and in the end it was pretty easy. Most things are, I find. The cake looks exactly like the mushroom my mother was holding that summer morning, just down the road from where I’m writing this now. And you can imagine her surprised and delighted reaction when I presented my creation to her the way she presented her long-ago trophy to me!

I’ve also created a spring mushroom pie, some lavender shortbread tea cookies that look just like the little purple mushrooms (wood blewit to be precise) that pop up all over our garden in spring, and a carrot-cake log covered with oyster mushrooms like the kind that grow up and down the road I live on (except, sadly, mine aren’t that same gorgeous pink).

I hope you enjoy them all. I, for one, can’t imagine my life without mushrooms and the magic they bring us. How lucky we are to live in a world full of fungi!

Spring Mushroom Pie

5 cups mixed mushrooms*
¾ cup pearl onions (halved)
1 cup carrots (peeled and sliced) 1 teaspoon fresh thyme
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary (roughly chopped) 1 teaspoon fresh sage (roughly chopped)
3 cloves garlic (minced) 1 cup peas
3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons butter (plant-based or dairy)
¼ cup white wine
⅓ cup vegetable stock
3 pie crusts (your favorite recipe or store-bought)
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Melt 2 tablespoons olive oil in the bottom of a large skillet. Add onions, carrots, herbs, and garlic to pan. Sauté for 1 to 2 minutes over medium heat until carrots are softened slightly. Add mushrooms and cook 5 to 7 minutes more. Mushrooms should be just slightly softened.

Add flour and butter. Stir to coat the veggies. Slowly add in your white wine and then the vegetable stock. Allow to simmer several minutes until a thick sauce forms. If your sauce isn’t thickening up properly, add another tablespoon of flour. Season with salt and pepper. Add the peas and stir to distribute. Remove from heat and allow to cool. While the filling is cooling, roll out the three pie crusts.

Turn your pie plate upside down on top of one of the pie crusts and trace around the pie plate so that the crust will perfectly fit on top. Set aside.

Fit your pie plate with one of the crusts and fill it with your mushroom mixture. Bake your pie, without the top, for 30 minutes or until the crust is golden.

While the pie is baking, take the second pie crust, the one you traced to fit perfectly on top of your pie, and paint it blue with gel food coloring. (You could also use ground butterfly pea blossom mixed with a little high grain alcohol.)

Then take the third crust, which you’ll be using as surplus dough, and cut out mushroom shapes, leaves, vines, stars, the moon, and even pansies—all things that remind you of spring—using cookie cutters or simply a knife and your imagination! Paint your shapes with pretty shades of gel coloring that will stand out against the blue crust. I painted my pansies purple and my moon and stars yellow and my vines bright green.

Arrange them on your top crust.

This next part is unconventional, but it’s much less stressful and keeps your pie decorations colorful and neat. (Trust me on this.) Bake the top decorated pie crust flat on your parchment paper on

a baking sheet until golden brown. This usually takes about 20 minutes. Allow to cool completely and carefully place the top pie crust onto the baked bottom crust and filling. It should sit right on top like a giant cookie. Enjoy!

*You can use any combination, but I used a mix of wild morel, oyster, chanterelle, wood ear, black trumpet, porcini, and chicken of the woods, and store-bought shiitake, portobello, and white button.