Look what I found at the dog park this afternoon! I’ve always wanted to find a Giant Western Puffball, and I found two! They were a pound or so each, and the size of a grapefruit — growing right there in the long grass in the woods — so I snatched them up and brought them home.
Where I cleaned off the edges where the dirt and the bugs were (a few maggot holes, but nothing like the boletes later in the summer). then I sliced them up, brushed them with olive oil infused with the parsley/basil I put up last summer, sprinkled them with salt and cooked them on the grill.
They were delicious. Very mushroomy. Imagine an enormous white button mushroom — that taste. Not the earthy morel-kind of mushroom taste, but that clean, slightly spongy, white mushroom flavor. They grilled up nicely. I have a lot of them … not sure what I’ll do next … mushroom parmigiana perhaps?
I could send a recipe for puffballs filled with pigeon breasts?
It’s from the River Cottage programmes on BBC TV
Lovely series where Hugh goes to live ‘off the land’ in a cottage in Dorest
That would be great — the MH has a freezer full of grouse and doves and other such game birds — I never thought of stuffing something inside the puffball, but it makes lots of sense …