Searching (featuring Chocolate Pirouette Cookies)

My left sneaker unintentionally snapped sticks into twigs as my right one sunk gently into the loamy earth.

My eyes diligently scanned every surface of the forest floor, but nothing.

I suck at this. I am the absolute worst.

I searched and searched.

Just that morning, I had skimmed an article on my phone about how the posture of a person’s head and neck while they aimlessly stare at their phone is directly linked to depression.

It struck me suddenly as ironic that I would beg my husband to drive us to the woods of Washington State for a mushroom foraging adventure and wind up in that same depression-making chin to chest neck position. I doubted my depression was posture-related though. There have been work issues, a relative in the hospital, the news of the world, sick friends, the election, and the loss of our beloved feline, Grace.

Francis and I needed this change of scenery. We needed a break from bad news. We needed some mushrooms.

I searched and searched. High and low.

I suck at this. Suck. At. It. No one has ever been worse at this in the history of mushroom hunting. Ever. 

I’m very competitive about failing make-believe competitions with people who only exist in my head. I am the absolute best at that.

Wait, is that one? My throat released a tiny victorious trill. Nope. Too orange. Smooth underside, no gills. I don’t know if those mushrooms will kill a person, but I’m not here to find out. I folded my mushroom stump cutting shiv in half and tossed it into my empty bag.

I have been married for 9 years. We’ve gone mushroom hunting about once a year for as long as we’ve been together and you could hold the complete collection of mushrooms I’ve found in the breast pocket of your plaid flannel shirt.

I sighed loudly, indulging my failure indulgence.

I refocused my eyes and attention on something other than my shortcomings. The woods are like an ASMR wet dream. Damp, hollow tree stumps covered in moss sound full and deep when stubbed with my rubber soles. They’re the Paul Robeson of this woody symphony. Then, like dwarves: crasckle, spwish, plickle, smoof, splousse, and fleeee sounds rounded out the choir. I could listen to these sounds for hours. As my feet threaded their way through the dappled leaves, my eyes adjusted to the light and I saw one! A chanterelle! I unhinged my trusty pocket knife and cut the fungi free.

Francis appeared a second later.

“Find anything?”

Francis has a shopping bag that’s made of recycled plastic shopping bags crocheted together by what I fantasize was a gaggle of hippies in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show, but was probably underprivileged children working for peanuts and sold by the Gap. On this day, his bag had the distinctive bulge of discovered mushrooms.

“Sure, I found a few,” I replied, tapping my bag without revealing the tiny lone mushroom inside.

And then, quite suddenly, I looked down and saw three chanterelles jutting out of the turf right in front of me.

“Oh my god! Look!”

Francis nodded and exhaled a little laugh like an all-knowing master of mushrooms as he walked away.

“Have fun! See you in a bit.”

Scanning the ground intently now, I discovered more mushrooms a little way from there. Another patch over there! Frenziedly, my eyes were glued to the ground. There’s some! And then still more that way!

I am the best at this. The absolute BEST.

My bag, which was a gift from a close friend who is also one of my servers, is red vinyl with a picture of a gorgeous blonde woman in a cowboy hat masterfully riding a bull. “Boss Lady” is stamped across the top. To see this bag swollen with my collection of chanterelles was a point of pride I won’t soon forget.

Boss lady, that’s me.

And then I looked up and the woods were much thicker than I remembered from when I had started this hike. I found myself in the center of a triangulation of fallen trees that I had no recollection of walking into. I rolled over one of the downed trunks, catching my sleeve on a broken branch. Did I come from that direction? Or that one? It all seemed so much darker than it had the last time I looked up. It was like I had accidentally walked into the deepest part of the ocean, where there’s almost no light, where the giant squid lives in the Natural History Museum. Dark mossy silence now, too. I walked one way and then stopped to listen for anything. Nothing. I changed my mind and walked the other way.

“Hey, Francis!!!” I yelled, laughing at the “hey”. “Hey” means I’m not scared, “Hey” means I’m just saying hi, just checking in. “HEY! Francis!!!” No reply.

I walked for a bit more and then looked at my phone. My signal was very weak, but it showed my current location on a map that had no streets at all. We had parked on a paved logging road, not a grassy lane or a pebbly path. It should be on a map, for crying out loud. But no. I could see two creeks on the map that I was between. I knew I needed to be close to one of them, but I wasn’t sure which one. I walked a bit more, and with each step, my legs felt heavier. My shoe became untied. My shoulders rose. It was harder to get over stumps and I skidded into wet patches. The woods untied my shoes again and then again and had the distinct phobia of being violated Evil Dead style (there is a tree vs woman rape scene in that movie that’s hard to forget). 

I texted Francis, “I got turned around and can’t find you. Help!” I wasn’t sure if he even had his phone on him.

I walked farther, my panic growing. I felt as if the lid of the terrarium I had been magically transported into had shut and there was no escape.

I looked at my phone again. It was noon on a beautiful clear day. I hadn’t even walked a full mile and I was completely lost. Every direction looked the same. No difference in pattern or light or brush. Left? Or right? That way? No, that? Oh god.

“Hey, Francis! HEY FRANCIS!!!”

When I was a little girl, I invented a secret game where I would walk around New York behind my parents and follow their shoes. My rules were I couldn’t look at them, only their shoes. One day I remember getting to a corner on the Upper West Side and realizing that I wasn’t sure which shoes in the crowd of shoes were theirs. I looked up to find the shoes I was following were not attached to the feet of my parents. I felt the big dry lump of crying rise in my throat then I turned to the right and my dad was halfway down the block, arms raised, staring at me saying, “What are you doing?” And I ran to him more appreciative than I’d ever been to have a father who didn’t just keep walking.

I felt that same big dry lump of crying rising in those woods. And then…

“Hooooooooooooooooo!”

It was Francis!

“HEYYYYYYYY!!!!”

“HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

I walked toward it – actually I walked the wrong way first because I have a terrible sense of sound direction – but I got it sorted.

“HEEEEYYYYYY!!!”

“HOOOOOOOOO!!!”

His blue jacket, my red coat, our colors penetrating the greens.

Together. Again.

I didn’t think about Trump in those moments. I didn’t think about Grace either. Or my uncle who is sick in the hospital, or the trip I can’t go on, or the dinner party I recently catered with the crackly wafer cookies that were not crackly.

I was in the moment of the woods.

And though I was legitimately terrified for a few minutes, it was the distraction I needed to appreciate what I had. What I have.

We came home and hugged Amelia. Francis is the pasta man of our household and he got to work caramelizing onions while I washed our chanterelle haul.

It was one of those meals that you feel you’ve earned so you have another bowl… and then another. I didn’t take a picture because I was in a moment of pleasure and fulfillment. Here is a link to a similar mushroom pasta I made years ago after mushroom hunting (we didn’t find anything that day and wound up buying our mushrooms at a local store!) https://awonderlandofwords.com/mushroom-gnomes-featuring-wild-mushroom-fresh-ricotta-pasta/

What I did the next day was right the wrong of my cookie foible.  These are crispy!

Chocolate Pirouette Cookies

Ingredients

• 3 egg whites

• ¾ cup sugar

• ½ cup butter, melted and cooled

• ½ cup flour

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder

• 1 tablespoon water

• Pinch of salt

1. Whisk egg whites with sugar in a medium bowl until well combined.

2. Add the melted and cooled butter and whisk again.

3. Add the flour, the vanilla, the cocoa powder, the water, and the pinch of salt and whisk until combined into a thick batter.

4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

5. Place a sheet of parchment paper on a sheet pan and drop 6 spoonfuls of batter onto the sheet pan. Using the back of your spoon, spread the 6 rounds of batter out evenly to create flat and thin unbaked cookies.

6. Bake for 9-10 minutes.

7. Carefully remove the pan from the oven and slide an offset spatula under the cookie to release it from the pan. Roll the edge over onto itself to create a long thin cookie cylinder. This will be scary and a little painful at first because you are dealing with piping-hot cookies right out of the oven, but it will get easier quickly.

8. One by one, release and roll each cookie into pirouettes.

These can be filled with melted chocolate, Nutella, or plain. I love to serve them with ice cream or sorbet.

And here I am baking these on KATU's Afternoon Live (https://katu.com/afternoon-live/cooking-recipes/chocolate-pirouette-cookies#)

Edited to add that my wonderful uncle Edward Tucker passed away on October 16th. He was one of a kind and will be missed by everyone he knew. I love you, Uncle Ed.