Instagram story viewer> @tauney> Posts

Forager Bee

@tauney

2K

followers

1741

following

Forager & instructor🍄🌿
Beekeeper & honey sommelier 🐝🍯
Potter☕️🏺
Budding herbalist🌱🧙‍♀️
Workshops & public speaking📢🗣
Renfrew, Ontario, Canada

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

Spring time is slowly making its way here to the Valley and along with it, a fresh crop of new foragers looking to get started. Mycophobia (the fear of mushrooms) is alive and well in this world, but it doesn't have to be-- foragers just have to be smart and do their due diligence.
1. Always be 100% certain on identification before consuming or feeding your find to anyone else. I usually spend several seasons getting to know new-to-me species before eating them myself, and I certainly don't feed new things to other people! Check multiple reliable sources (not just some dude on the internet), do all the tests, cross reference.
2. Part of rule 1, but absolutely bears repeating: do NOT rely on AI or apps for identification. When IDing mushrooms, it's important to perform multiple tests, which may include cutting the mushroom open to check features and colour changes, smelling, or even taste testing (not to mention considering nearby plant or tree species, location, and more). AI cannot do any of these tests for you.
3. Be respectful of rules regarding foraging on private, park, or conservation lands. There are many legal places to forage, and our provincial and national parks and conservation areas are not it. Granted, I believe that many if the rules are actually a classist assault on the rights of BIPOC and the poor, among other things, and that when carried out properly, foraging can be an act of land stewardship, but giving foragers a bad rap by breaking the rules just simply isn't cool. If we want to see change, we need to approach it through the right channels.
4. Avoid areas that could be contaminated by chemicals or other pollutants. In our county, the sides of the road are regularly sprayed with glyphosate to deal with invasive wild parsnip. Abandoned industrial sites may also have higher levels of heavy metal contamination that can be taken up into mushroom fruiting bodies.
5. Check for lookalike species. This will make you a better forager and keep you safe! Anything can be a lookalike if you're bad enough at looking.
6. Harvest responsibly. This looks different for mushrooms than it does for plants-- read up on best practices for each species! taken in Ottawa Valley by @tauney

24

0

5 months ago

Literally "hunter's pasta", this mushroomy Pasta alla Boscaiola features several tasty wild mushrooms boosted with a bit of smoked bacon, herbs, cream and tomatoes.
I used dried chanterelles, shiitake, and porcini. Start by soaking your dried mushrooms in a cup of hot white wine. Cook off some chopped bacon and remove from the pan. Add a diced onion, half a head of garlic, and a good handful of fresh thyme leaves. Saute until translucent and aromatic. Add fresh mushrooms of your choice (I went for maitake because that's what I had) and cook well, then deglaze with the white wine from soaking the other mushrooms. Chop those now rehydrated mushrooms and throw them in the sauce. Add a tablespoon of tomato paste and one chopped tomato, cooking until thick and the tomato has broken down. Throw in cooked pasta of your choice and half a cup of cream, salt and pepper to taste, and add the bacon back in. Stir until the sauce has thickened and the pasta is welll coated. Top with Parmesan cheese and enjoy! by @tauney

10

0

13 hours ago

A beautiful day for a Grove Rove! Thank you so much Lacey for having me out to take guests on a mushroom appreciation walk. Foraging is strictly forbidden on Nature Conservancy of Canada land. This helps prevent soil compaction and damage to delicate ecosystems, and maintains safe havens for all the critters that call the undergrowth home. We got to watch the wooly aphids do it's joyful dance along the branches of a few young beech trees, helped some stump puffballs make babies, saw tons of fantastic fungi including some epic boletes, and visited the tallest known trees in Ontario. The Grove is a rare and shining example of old growth Ontario forests and should be treasured by generations to come. Help support the Save the Grove Again campaign and learn more about what makes this forest unique and beautiful for yourself. @ncc_cnc taken in Arnprior, Ontario by @tauney

29

3

2 days ago

Honey comb is back in extremely limited quantities. The bees and I had a scheduling conflict. I put the cut comb boxes on after the basswood flow and they filled it with...something else! Seems like a mix of wild raspberry, sumac, bugloss and thistle perhaps. Really, really fantastic: bright and acidic with a citrusy/floral and berry flavour. It took them a long time to collect and it's just an absolute treat.
Cut comb comes in sizes ranging from 125 to 300g, and the chunk honey has around 100g of comb floating in some of the best midsummer honey I have. taken in Renfrew, Ontario by @tauney

29

2

3 days ago

And that’s a wrap on Friday Farmgates. We had an amazing day seeing many familiar faces and strangely enough a whole lot of new ones on our last friday! Nice to see a couple local councillor candidates (Darrell Carson and Shane Kramer) drop in to say hi on our last day too. Over the course of the season we hosted many local producers in our shop, providing seasonal or pop-up space to them at no charge. This included @tauney, @highland.hill.farms, our neighbours @mouimet8 , @fluffybutt.farm @terramorfarm @wool.witch.guild @wathermair @rosehillranch.ca Deerfield Sugar Shack, Fable Farms and yesterday it was so lovely to have our friends @redneckrecipesinc in the shop on our last day. Renfrew Dave also brought a full truck load of fruit for pressing and everyone who stopped in got a cup of fresh pressed juice. It was a fantastic way to toast the end of the season. Year two in the farm shop was one for the books, we love this farmily. taken in Castlegarth Farms by @tauney

72

3

3 days ago

Hen of the woods and steak with black garlic aioli and shiso-cumin pesto. by @tauney

15

6

4 days ago

Maitake, the "dancing mushroom", so called because you dance with joy when you've found one. Scientific name: grifola frondosa, also known as the Hen of the Woods. You can find these delicious, meaty mushrooms as the days get colder and shorter, normally at the base of oak trees or oak stumps, and occasionally on maple. About ten feet below the ground's surface, tucked away with the roots of the oak, a big ball of sterile mushroom tissue known as a sclerotium waits for whatever signal it receives from the mycelia. When conditions are right, it sends a long stalk up toward the surface, which then produces the fruiting body at the base of the tree. These fruiting bodies can be up to 100lbs in size (the biggest I've found was 20lbs). What do you do when you find such a large mushroom?
Luckily, the hen of the woods is a very good candidate for cooking off in large batches in the oven and freezing. Break the mushroom up into manageable sized pieces and evict any critters living among the fronds (in this particular case, 20 isopods and 1 very unhappy millipede). Brush away any insect grass or debris, and coat lightly in olive oil or the cooking oil of your choice. Salt to taste and roast in the oven at 375°F for around half an hour in a single layer, flipping as needed. Allow to cool and pack into containers or bags and put them in the freezer for use later. Their texture is a bit crunchy and rubbery, and does well in a variety of dishes or as a side for steak and wild game.
Its closest lookalike is the black staining polypore, which is also edible but not the same (and gets tough quickly). Be careful when selecting mushrooms for the table and cross-reference with as many books and knowledgeable humans as you can. I've seen misidentified black staining polypore for sale on FB Marketplace as hen of the woods, so be careful about your mushroom vendors as well. by @tauney

24

6

5 days ago

It's been a wild ride this season and I've often been away on adventures that take me out of cell reception for days on end, so less recipe posting than usual!
This past week I visited @sacredgardener to finish up my final session of the Sacred Gardener School, a 20 day program that somewhat defies description (but I will try!). Spread out over two (or in my case, four) years, students learn many of the skills needed to live off the land and in turn how to thank the land for its generosity. It's a combination of herbalism, wildcrafting, gardening, preserving, and spiritual practice that are unlike anything else in this world. Megan, the kitchen gremlin, is a wizard and makes truly drool worthy dishes with what the land provides. Her gomasio, a mixture of foraged and grown herbs, seaweed, and sesame seeds, is an important flavour enhancer I used in this recipe to give it richness and some salt without overwhelming the delicate balance. That being said, if you don't manage to get your hands on some, you can probably get away with salt and pepper 😜
I used leftover grilled potato and sweet potato as a base, but fried is also fine. Saute them up in a pan with some butter, garlic, and red onion. Right at the end, add slices of cooked medium rare steak until warmed through. Top with a fried egg seasoned with gomasio, and spoon a nice bit of warmed chanterelle (or other mushroom) conserve on top (see previous posts for recipe). Serve over arugula or other greens. This hearty brekkie will keep you going all day and can be a great use for leftovers! taken in Ottawa Valley by @tauney

18

1

7 days ago

PSA: know your mushroom vendor and make sure they know what they're talking about.
The internet and AI have made many into instant experts. With a click of a button, you can get an answer about the identity of pretty much anything, and it gives people a false sense of expertise and safety. This past week in Nelson, BC, a mushroom market soured for several attendees when an inexperienced person signed up to sell what they thought were chanterelles.
Apps are terrible for mushroom IDs. You need to collect a large amount of information about:
-The substrate
-the stem
-the gills
-the underside
-the environment, including nearby tree species
-the smell
-any bruising or discolouration reactions, including using chemical testing kits
-microscopy
-sometimes taste
And way more. At least half of these are things a phone simply cannot do for you. If you are just starting out on your foraging journey, you are in no way qualified to teach others or feed what you find to others. There are no shortcuts. You need to know what you're doing. Each mushroom has different features and you have to know them all and how to differentiate them from lookalike species that are potentially dangerous. It takes years of reading, experience, patience.
I know that this case will have outward ripples that affect other people like myself who are trying to get back to the land and share skills that are being lost to time. I truly hope that the main message does not get lost in the mycophobic media frenzy to come: know your shit. This is true of plants and berries and herbs, too, but for whatever reason local health authorities generally believe that what is grown inside of a fenced garden is safer than what is grown in the wild, and that we are all better off eating known and cultivated things. I am here to tell you that food is food, and just because something has been ignored by modern agricultural systems does not make it any less safe or valuable to our health. In a world of diarrhea lettuce and indoor grown listeria mushrooms, that should be clear.
If you buy wild mushrooms from any new source, make sure to ask them the hard questions and look your purchases up for yourself, too. by @tauney

21

3

8 days ago

The Ontario Women's Beekeeping Network's third Women's Bee Camp is over and I'm still buzzin'. It was an intense weekend of workshops, networking, arts and crafts, and entertainment. I taught classes on honey tasting, making medicinal honey gummy bears, foraging, making beeswax salves with infused herbal oils, and making seed bombs and snails to benefits all kinds of bees and other pollinators.
Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, instructors, attendees, and venue staff for another fantastic year!

I made a lot of new friends and cemented some from last year (looking at you, @hiveandgrove and @beecraftsupplyandstudio ) but this furry friend was one of my favourites. You guys just aren't furry enough to compete 💅🏻🤷🏻‍♀️🦊

The food at @severnlodge is to die for. If you ever get the chance to stay there, DO IT. Chef Andreas served us some fabulous meals including surf and turf for lunch, braised beef ribs, pan fried rainbow trout, ratatouille, eggs Benedict and more. 🥲🤤🥹 I made sure he got a jar of Forager Bee linden honey as a thank you, his staff worked so hard and the service was unbelievably attentive. Comfy beds, and the sounds of loons, water lapping the shore, and a chorus of crickets to lull us to sleep both nights.

Just ook at this place 😯

Carolynn (@beecraftsupplyandstudio ) did an encaustic painting workshop and I had a blast. I made sure to buy a set of her handmade encaustic paint sticks featuring Canadian natural mineral pigments. So fun!

I didn't get any pics of the classes I taught but they were all packed with attentive ears! We picked a ton of black chanterelles directly on the trail during our early morning foraging tour, and everyone went home with a little tin of Wild Woman salve, for aches, pains, and bee stings. taken in Severn Lodge by @tauney

39

1

15 days ago

Now, today you can find me at the O’Brien Theatre from 11:30 - 3:30 at the Metaphysical Fair!

I have @tauney ‘s honey, pottery and body care products as well as some of my Bio-Jars! Come drop by and say hello!

#witch #witches #metaphysicalfair #market #markets taken in Renfrew O'Brien Theatre by @tauney

44

0

16 days ago

Come stop by for my LAST DAY :( working for @tauney at the Burnstown Market from 2-6.

We have a fresh batch of some hand picked and foraged herbal teas, come while supplies lasts!

#market #farmersmarket #honey #beekeeper #markets taken in Burnstown, Ontario by @tauney

36

6

18 days ago