By Angus Phillips
Sunday, May 4, 2008

W here there's one there must be more,

One or two or three or four . . .

That's the little refrain George Houk repeats as he wanders the woods of Rock Creek Park these days, hunting morel mushrooms. He learned it from his grandma, Janey Price, when they used to go mushroom hunting near Petoskie, Mich., half a lifetime ago.

But not since he was 9 years old can Houk remember a year for morels like this one. "This is the best year I've had since then, no doubt," the 51-year-old architect said last week as he scoured the leaf-strewn hills of Northwest Washington for the heads of freshly sprouted morels poking through.

That's saying something. Houk won't forget the spring day 42 years ago when he and a half-dozen family and friends set forth in Michigan in a chilly drizzle. "We were wearing ponchos, but when we came back one kid didn't have his poncho anymore. We found so many morels, we had to take it to carry them.

"My brother and I started counting that day but gave up when we got to 2,002. We took every screen off the house and used them to dry morels. We were still eating them years afterwards."

Houk has been living in the District for 20 years. From the get-go, he eyed Rock Creek Park as a potential place to hunt the tasty wild mushrooms. When his oldest son was 3 years old and big enough to tag along, they went prospecting for the first time. "We found 30 black morels in a spot along a little shelf," he said, "and every year since then, that's the first place I go to gauge where we are in the season."

Morels generally pop up in April and black ones are the first to show, with grays and yellows coming later. Some years are better than others, largely because of weather, and this year has been just about perfect. "About a week ago I went in the woods for about an hour and came out with 150," said Houk, who is now up over 1,000 for the season. "I'm going to all my regular places, there's just lots more morels."

He credits the long, cool spring and generous, timely dollops of rain. "Some years around here, it seems like it just gets right, then suddenly it's 80 degrees and dry summer. You can measure springtime in hours."

Not so this year. Morels are everywhere, and not just where Houk is looking. A brief scan of the Web site Morels.com showed others in the region loading up. "This is really the peak of morels right now," wrote Mike D on the Maryland forum last week. "My wife and I have never seen anything like this year."

"Wow, what a year," writes a 'shroomer called Lew. "In the last two days I found about seven pounds."

"Anyone else sick of frying, draining, vacuum-sealing and freezing batches of morels?" asks someone called Patapsco Mike.

Of course, none of these folks gives away any useful clues about where they're going. Morel hunters are famously secretive, known to hide their little gathering-bags from view if they bump into strangers in the woods. Houk didn't mind taking me along last week because he'd already hunted out his prime spots. We were pioneering new ground.

After all his years on the prowl, Houk just follows his instincts. "You want mature woods," he said. "Poplar trees are good. I like to look where there are fallen logs, and I like to work uphill because you can see them better at eye level. When I go downhill, I always think I'm walking right by them."

We followed a horse trail for a quarter-mile, then Houk abruptly stopped. "This looks pretty good," he said, and plowed uphill into the woods, brushing away a tangle of greenbriers. "There's one!" he said, pointing to a thicket. "Where there's one, there must be more . . ."

And so there were -- one and two and three and four. We found a couple of pounds in the next hour or so, tucked away alongside fallen, rotten tree limbs, in the leaf duff or standing proud in the dappled sunlight. I say we, but that's stretching things. It takes a practiced eye to spot a two-inch-tall fungus in the tangled forest floor. If I found one for Houk's 20, I was doing well.

What to do with these little, wild delicacies? Eat 'em, that's what. The only peril in morel hunting is something called a false morel, which is poisonous if eaten raw but quite rare in these parts and fairly distinctive in appearance. Houk said he'd only seen a few in a lifetime of morel hunting.

Obviously, it's a good idea to do some research before eating any wild mushrooms, but morels seem fairly safe, and delicious.

I brought home a pound and gently sauteed them in butter with a bit of salt, then added some cream to make a sauce to pour over the last of the venison roasts from last year's deer season.

Houk has a number of more complicated recipes, including a spinach and morel souffle, Cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice and morels, and his standard "breakfast of champions," scrambled eggs with sauteed morels and shallots. He dries most of his catch, stores it and reconstitutes the morels later by soaking them in water. "They're almost as good that way as they are fresh," he says.

Houk reckons morel season will continue for another week or so in Rock Creek Park, after which he'll start lobbying for permission to go to the Blue Ridge, where the hatch comes later. "I'll start chasing the season out there if my wife lets me," he said. "But she might just say, 'Enough!' "