Chicken of the Woods!

OK, so it's been a while. Let's (re)start off with a bang. Or at least with an extremely orange mushroom that tastes like chicken. What! Yeah. We finally found the supposedly plentiful "chicken of the woods" mushroom (a.k.a. Laetiporus sulphureus blah blah whatever look it up). It looks like this:

Some cool things about this mushroom: 

• dude, would you just look at it?

• if you find some, you probably find about 20 pounds of it
• it is impossible to mistake for something inedible
• it is delicious, keeps for a few days before cooking if necessary (and for a while in the freezer once cooked)
• it tastes like chicken!
• you can serve it with shrimp and make some "chicken of the woods/chicken of the sea" joke, probably

Let's get to it, then. First, the prep: it's pretty easy. If the inner part (the part closer to the stalk) is kind of corky/woody, you may want to cut it out and just get rid of it. Don't wash it, since it'll get super soggy (or so they say on the internet). Scrubbing off the dirt is good enough, though. Now, the recipe.

Ingredients

• 3-4 Tbsp butter
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 5 cups CHICKEN OF THE WOODS, WOOOO!, chopped into bite-sized pieces
• salt, to taste
• 2-4 Tbsp sour cream
• 1-3 Tbsp chicken stock

Procedure

In a large (non-stick? I dunno, worked well for me) pan, heat up the butter. Throw in the garlic and mushrooms and saute until the mushrooms get a bit reddish/brown -- about 10-15 minutes. When it's ready it'll have the consistency of a tender but not particularly juicy chicken breast; add salt to taste.

The sauteeing may take longer or shorter depending on how old/thick the specimen is, how water-logged it is, whether you actually got L. sulphureus or L. cincinnatus (closely related but a little different), etc. Just use your judgment. I've also heard that if you cook it for 15 minutes and the consistency is far from where you want it to be, just give up. Specimens vary greatly and you've probably got a crappy one. 

At this point, I found the mushrooms to be a little dry, so I mixed in a couple of tablespoons of sour cream with a little bit of chicken stock. You can skip this step if you like the juiciness level as is. 

Can be served as is or if you're looking for a bit more flavor, add in some shrimps (I cooked them the same way as the mushrooms and mixed them all in together).

Definitely going back tomorrow to pick the rest of the mushrooms we found. Will report back eventually on whether our guests get poisoned.

Edit: It's been a day and everyone's still alive. Success! We went back and picked everything off that log: