You should, of course, consult with a professional if you are looking to forage in your own area and not take any of my accounts or descriptions as canon.
What I found;
1) Mulberries. A friend mentioned these were fruiting a few days ago, and it was my first stop on my tour of the woods.
What's coming soon: I saw a few wild grape vines with green fruit on them, hopefully it will ripen in the next week or two.
The sumac horns aren't quite red enough to harvest for drinks yet, hopefully next week they will. I also spotted a blackberry bush, it looked a few weeks away from being ready.
The Meal:
For the past few memorial day parties I have been making a Slovak dish called 'Rabbit with Mushrooms.' I thought I would try to recreate it with whatever I found. The biggest problem being I don't have any good stores of fat. Small game animals tend to be lean.
To sum up, I took the back half of a rabbit (I don't want to use a whole rabbit on one meal, especially since I'm eating it alone. Hopefully I'll have friends along with me in the future.) and some blanched and frozen dryad's saddle mushrooms from the freezer and added them to my day's forage.
The process ended up being a bit convoluted, I would have done it differently in hindsight (and may very well do that next time.) The broth ended up being very good, though I hadn't added any salt to it which it needs. Everything in the rabbit dish tasted ok, but there is a lot of chewing and eating it became a bit arduous. I was worried that the garlic would be overpowering but it was pretty good, especially since there wasn't any salt in it. I ate about a third of this plate, the rest I will probably dissect and turn into a soup.
The berries (both strawberries and mulberries) were added to some maple sugar, a dash of cattail flour, and some black walnuts. Though not as photogenic these were awesome. I literally licked the bowl clean.
As for the Dryad's saddle, which is now out of season, Here is a photo and my notes from foraging a month or so ago;
Not really knowing what I was doing at the start, I carried 29lbs of mushrooms home. Many of these weren't suitable for eating, which I found out later (but did not waste.)
They are distinctive as they look like the feathers of a pheasant, and the big ones grow to look like bicycle seats. They grow on dead wood in spring (the same time as morels, a mushroom I have never actually seen.) They smell like watermelon rind. It is distinctive.
So what to look for? I found pretty much everything larger than 6" diameter weren't any good, when they get older they get really tough. If you like chewing on tires you can ignore this part and just take them all. Some of the smaller ones are tough as well, so don't just think the 'baby' ones are the onese to take. The easiest way to tell if you have a good one or not is to scrape the pores off the bottom. If they come off easily you'll probably have a good mushroom. If they don't you can leave it behind. The flesh should also cut easily, think about the difficulty of chopping up a mushroom you buy from the store (maybe a little more, but if you have to saw through it you've definitely got one that is too tough.) You want to scrape the pores off before eating.
Out of my 29lbs i had about 4.5lbs that were still tender enough. I cut them into slices and blanched them for 2 minutes, then froze them. I have since unthawed about half and used them, they are just fine.
The big ones that were too tough got cut into chunks and left in the crock pot overnight (over a series of several nights, there was a lot.) No water was added. The mushrooms can then be wrung out and the remaining broth has a very good flavor.
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