Mushroom hunting in Istria, Part II: A meager success story, a happy success story

I awoke again, as I did during my last outing with Luka and my cousin, early in the morning. As I had done, I donned a windbreaker, over a hoodie, over an undershirt, olive-green skinny pants, and a pair of Timberland chukkas, the latter which served me well during the last trek.

Here, I learned that Timberlands will not cut it. Only galoshes of the toughest variety will suffice. Because, if you venture into deep wood during rainy season, those Timberland soles might provide you with a great, stable base to combat an uneven forest floor, but they will not prevent you from being drenched to the marrow. Inevitably, you will look like this:

And it's gonna take one heavy-duty beach towel to dry that mess off. Oh, and nothing else you wear will keep you from soaking in the godforsaken Croatian forest. The drenched trees will drench your windbreaker, which will drench your "waterproof" hoodie, and the drenched branches will yank your hoods off your hair only to drench it and your headscarf in under five seconds. You wanna find mushrooms at the right time? Pay the price. Maybe it's pneumonia, but most likely it's just the discomfort of being dropped into a dunk tank -- clothed in San Francisco-esque layers -- at the State Fair.

But it's so, so worth it.

Again, Luka drove us to another one of my cousin's spots. My cousin provided the same vague, zig-zagging direction, guiding me with her walking stick. Throughout our journey, she would urge me to keep my eyes open. "Natalie, you must LOOK. They are bright orange, so easy to find, but they are under leaves, trees. Just LOOK. LOOK."

And so we found. These beauties:

Chantrelles on the forest floor of Tinjan, Croatia. What to look  for when you search for Chantrelles. CAREFUL: There's a mushroom that's the exact same color, with the subtle difference that it possesses a "cap." Those are not good for eat.

"PICK THEM! GO!" My cousin urged me excitedly. I shared the excitement, but reacted by stopping dead in my tracks. When you finally get there, even if it is for this meager a score, you'll feel only like you've completed a job well-done.

Except you want more. Sort of like a monster of an addictive drug, without the gnarly come down. I do, however, experience foraging withdrawals.

And so we went out again, when my cousin was to stumble upon this, the "red egg."

Cue the chorus of angels.

Apparently, this is a mushroom so special, so delicate and prized that Italians eat it thinly-sliced, as a sort of carpaccio. My aunt, intrigued by her daughter's discovery, wanted to know where she'd found the king of kings in the Croatian forest. Surely, there would be more later, in that very spot. I didn't get the chance to follow up to see if that was the case.

Our haul of Chantrelles was actually quite meager. "Sometimes, I've brought back ten kilos. A whole trunk-full," my aunt reminisced about the times when she was healthy enough to make a trek into the woods. "The whole car?! It would smell like peaches." Sounds strange, but it's actually spot-on. I have encountered no farmed mushroom that approaches the aroma of those bright orange Croatian stunners, straight from the forest floor.

Teeny haul, but still a happy haul.

Don't get it twisted: ninjas have to be delicate with their catch.

On this trek, again, we came across more foragers who revealed their preferences and methods. I was stoked to find a patch of black trumpets, only to have my cousin and another older lady poo-poo them. "Ne me volim," said the tired forager with that ever-so-slight tinge of disapproval so suited to the Croatian language (that, I understood. "I don't like." Well, they're pretty. And tasty. And trendy in San Francisco, so there). We used that "lesser" mushroom as a sort of pepper in the preparation for our other fungi. My aunt and cousin simply cooked them all in cream, with beef and noodles. The uniqueness of each type of mushroom still stood out among so much rich food.

Oh, and hey, SF Instagramers: it would have been unbelievably rude to take pictures of such a simple, exquisite meal in my Croatian aunt's modest Croatian house, not to mention incredibly perplexing for her. Just create your own visual of that meal. In your minds. I've given you enough inspiration.

Foraging, Mycology. It's fascinating, nuanced, fulfilling, especially when you end up with fantastic meals at the end of it. And to have taken part in mushroom-hunting expeditions in a region where this is standard practice, revered not just by the culinary elite, was a privilege of the highest sort for a little ol' cook.

I'll pursue this in California. But without family, without that widespread enthusiasm of non-foodie, unpretentious Croats for the best of the best food the forest has to offer, I doubt my experiences will be the same. But maybe I'm just romanticizing an ideal. Perhaps seeing what the woods have to offer, no matter where I am, will be just another exciting journey.

Mushroom hunting for the first time -- in friggin' Istria! Part I

It's 7 am on a dreary morning in the little village of Rudichi. I'm up. I haven't showered. I won't need to, because I'll be trudging off of forest paths and into the abyss of trees.

And I will have enjoyed every minute of it.

I meet my 55-year-old cousin in front of my great aunt's house, five minutes after I've hopped out of bed. She hands me a wicker basket and my walking stick. She asks me if my dad went into town, for her pack of Ronhill cigarettes and chocolate. These provisions won't merely sustain her, for all of that nicotine, sugar and caffeine act as jet fuel for my cousin. She can launch into the wood deftly, like a chain-smoking, chocolate-chewing Istrian ninja in a baby blue windbreaker. An excited, Istrian, windbreaker-cloaked ninja, on the hunt for the fungal darlings of the Bay Area food scene -- Chantrelles and Porcinis.

The kindly man who helps my aunt with household chores (let's call him Luka), drives us to one of my cousin's "spots." He leaves us to slosh through the wood. Oh, and the wood? It looks a little like Blair Witch, and it's impossible not to get your ponytail stuck in a branch, or on a leaf, or, if you're as graceful as I am, on the very ground littered with twigs and the occasional jagged rock. I was bending down to pick up my walking stick, and next thing I knew, I was glued to the forest floor. My cousin had the height advantage of being about five inches shorter than me -- truly a plus when you're weaving your way through fallen branches, brambles, molehills, or maybe around a hornets' nest (maybe).

If you forage for mushrooms in Tinjan, Croatia, the "path" ahead of you might look like this.

"Okay, now, you go this way, and I go that way." My cousin makes vague zig-zagging gestures with her walking stick while explaining this to me. It would have confused any non-Croat, but I got it. And we seemed to do okay -- we found some purple-capped mushrooms my aunt loves, and other mushrooms that were pretty but, as my cousin explained, "not good for eat."

Mushrooms like these are wonderful to come across on the Croatian forest floor. Just stunning little toadstools. But definitely "not good for eat," because you will die if you do.

Coral mushrooms. Look, don't eat.

I lose my cousin about a dozen times. If she can't hear me scream her name, or the occasional "GDJE SI TI?!" (Where are you?! [I'm admittedly ashamed of my accent, so I avoid the phrase as much as possible]), I look for the faint smoke signals of her Ronhills, which might lead me to her zig-zagging path.

Having found very little that morning, we make our way back to our chauffeur. I have no idea how my cousin foraged without a mobile phone, her sense of direction being so poor, but Luka seemed to know those forests like the back of his hand. Note to self, I thought: invest in compass when pursuing this hobby seriously back in the Bay. Sprint won't cut it on the Sonoma Coast.

"Okay. So from where you are, you should head northwest. So that the sun is on your left shoulder," he told her. Details like that revealed how keen a forager has to be -- where the sun comes up, when, during what times of the year, where exactly those mushrooms grow, etc. In fact, each mushroom hunter extraordinaire I came across seemed to have their "spot" they were reticent about, their closely-guarded knowledge of why Chantrelles grew where, why Porcinis in another spot. In one outing, with my aunt, we pulled over at the side of the highway, climbing over garbage to search for Chantrelles in a hidden clearing. "Eh?" was my only verbal reaction when the car stopped (and we found nothing).

* * * * *

We did find little that September morning; my cousin went back out with the farm dog later that afternoon, only to find yet more of very little. Instead of accompanying her, I slept, exhausted from the five hours of stomping, tangling and searching.

We resolved to go again, not to be daunted by the crapshoot that is foraging. It would rain in the next few weeks, so there would be Chantrelles, and Porcinis, and other lovely little morsels, and we'd go again, damnit.

That's what coursed through my veins in my afternoon nap, as I dreamed of venturing back into the woody abyss once more.

Istria, to whet your appetite

That's where I was for most of September last year. It's the northernmost part of the Croatian coast, and it looks like this:

So. Yeah. That? Oh, that's Draguch, some dinky little hilltown. There's a small chapel with a fresco in there. Not really worth it (Worth it. The road past Draguch makes the Sierras look like a toxic waste dump).

The streets of such towns look like this:

Motovun, Istria, Croatia.

And everything is really pleasant. For the most part. When the curator of a local museum hisses at you, hoping you don't "learn too much" about Istria, then maybe that suspicious Slavic character rears its ugly head, the mark of a people under someone else's thumb(s) for too long. But let's not wash history in brushstrokes too broad. This is a lovely region, known for truffles and mushrooms that look like this:

Chantrelles foraged in the forests surround Tinjan, Istria, Croatia.

But yes, Istrians have been under everyone's thumbs. And by "everyone" I mean the Venetians, the French, the Italians, the Austro-Hungarians... So mushrooms like this might make an amazing sauce for your gnocchi, which you will follow up with strudel and Turkish coffee.

It's a cook's dream. A place where many people have their own gardens and produce the best that nature has to offer; where you'll trip over foragers combing the woods around small towns; where you'll trip over truffles; where you'll find some of the best seafood in the Adriatic, because, apparently, the currents wash all of Croatia's garbage to Italy.

I'll get to all of these nuances in separate entries. I just wanted to show my audience what's it's like, generally. And only generally.

Let's recap the last year in a few sentences

I started at a new restaurant in January of last year, as a paid, PAID, line cook. I worked my way through a monster pantry station, then made "pizzer," (that's "pizza" to those of you who aren't silly), then made my way to our fancy sister restaurant, where I can work two other stations with relative ease.

What a year. I'm tired. But also so, so happy that I've found myself crying tears of joy in inappropriate places, like on a 2 am bus ride home after a nine-day stretch of work. This trade saved me, dammit, I'm allowed a little emotionally-inappropriate leeway.

I thoroughly explored Istria last autumn, a region of Croatia that will only leave you with a dropped jaw or two. I foraged for Chantrelles and Porcinis and ate a ton of food, which ranged from "FUCKING HELL!" to "Let's never do that again, kay?" I can't even... I'll get to Istrian food in a more than a few entries.

Let's address all of this  in the next few weeks. I'll get my notes on Croatia together, my musings about line-cooking, and share the idiotic things my lovely co-workers have to share with the rest of the world.

God I love my little life. This is it, and it is wonderful.