Chanterelle Tomato Lentil Stew

A comforting, hearty, tasty plant-based stew to warm your bones and soothe your soul. Peppery chanterelle mushrooms are the star of this stew, but their flavor is married with fresh garden tomatoes, garlic, onion, lentils and kale. I threw in a salsa pepper to give it a little zip, which did add a little tingle, but not too much heat. The stew had a lovely, well-balanced flavor that I promptly fell in love with.

Last week the weather was scorching hot and it felt more like mid-July than the end of August, but I was feeling a little under the weather with a bit of a scratchy throat and ALL I wanted was soup and tea. I think I’ve been pushing myself too hard lately and my body just wants me to slow down.

Last weekend my sister convinced me to go on the annual birthday mushroom hunting trek. My dad and my brother in law share a birthday and every August, my sister, her husband and my parents all go chanterelle mushroom hunting together. Some years they find a lot, other years they come home empty handed, but they always have fun romping around in the woods searching for mushroom treasure. Usually I don’t go because it’s such a long drive for me, but this year, with the pandemic going on, we’ve had a harder time connecting with family, so I felt like yes, I should go. We thought it should be a good year because there had been a lot of rain up at their normal chanterelle hunting spot. My dad did a little pre-trip to check it out on Wednesday and texted us pics of the beautiful orange, curly chanterelles that he found with a note: “get ready!”

If you’ve never seen a chanterelle, it’s a vibrant orange mushroom with gills and a somewhat curly top. You’d think with that burst of color they would be easy to find, but they hide under the forest moss, just barely popping out. Here’s a closeup of one of the younger ones we found:

Friday night I drove up to my mom and dad’s house so Dad and I could get up early and go pick up my sister and head to the woods! Mom didn’t come along, nor did my brother in law, so there were just three of us. It was a hot, humid day with no breeze to speak of, a rough day for mushroom hunting, but we would not be deterred from our plan. We packed a cooler full of sandwiches, ice water, and melon. That plus a bag of snacks were our sustenance for the day.

On our first foray out, we went to the right. The forest was full of mushrooms, but we walked for quite a while before spotting any chanterelles (or anything recognizable as edible), but then my sister found one, and where there’s one, there are more. We found several and each of us had about 1/3 of our bag filled, but we were hot and tired, so we headed back to the car, turned on the A/C and had lunch and ice water.

Once we had cooled off and felt ready to go again, we grabbed new, empty bags and decided to go straight ahead this time. We hadn’t gone but a few steps before I looked down and saw one. Suddenly, my sister was spotting them left and right, huge patches of them. She kept pointing me to them and beckoning to me to come help her, but I would find more on the way to her patch and by the time I got there, she had moved on. Her bag was stuffed to the top before long and she started helping me fill my bag. My dad got tired and wanted to go home, but my sister and I didn’t want to stop. Still, we agreed to start heading back towards the car.

It took us a while to get back to the car because we just couldn’t resist stopping to pick every chanterelle we chanced upon and that meant we definitely weren’t walking in a straight line. Dad started getting more selective, only leaning down to get the fresh, meaty beauties and leaving behind any that weren’t in their prime. We returned to the car exhausted, but happy, our bags stuffed with brilliant orange mushrooms. We drove back to my sister’s house and weighed our bounty: we had 40 lb. of chanterelles! We didn’t get back to my mom and dad’s house until mid-evening, almost 12 hours after we’d left that morning.

Chanterelles are prized by chefs and culinary experts for their peppery, fruity, earthy flavor. The bright golden orange mushrooms are meaty and chewy and have a slight apricot or peach scent to them. They are always cooked before eating, typically sauteed in butter with garlic and/or onions. Chanterelles can be frozen (after cooking), but they will keep for a week (or longer) in the fridge if left to “breathe”. We’d used reusable shopping bags which really are perfect for storing these beauties, so we left them right in the bags they were picked in and stuck them in the fridge.

If you want to purchase chanterelles, be aware that they might be quite pricey, as these golden mushrooms are sort of worth their weight in gold. But do not dismay: if you don’t have chanterelle mushrooms available, you can substitute other fresh mushrooms in this earthy stew.

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