Wild Treasure Hunt

A few weekends ago, they were indeed out -- they being Lyle, the Wingfields and unknown quantities of morels. The day's plan was to hunt for the mushrooms in the morning, then spend the afternoon scouring for greens, which would be paired with the main dish. Once the foraging was complete, Lyle would whip up a meal based on the bounty.

Locating morel territory is pretty textbook, and many foragers return to their lucky spots throughout the season, if not the years. (Many fungus hunters treat their specific locales as if they were classified secrets.)

The mushroom, which comes in four varieties, is known to grow near tulip poplars and dying elms and in abandoned apple orchards and burn areas. However, actually finding the elusive morel -- nickname "miracle" -- is no cinch. With its dimpled earth-tone cap and rigatoni-shape stem, it easily can be dismissed as a clump of dirt or nubby pebble.

"It's a big mystery whether you are going to find them," says Lyle, who has come home from past excursions fully loaded and nearly empty-handed. "You can look at them in one direction, find one, turn and find two you didn't see before."

For this Sunday outing, the group's chosen spot is a rugged slope reached by a winding path strewn with rocks and branches. As they amble along, Wingfield occasionally yanks a plant for show and tell: wild ginger ("add a pinch to a roast for extra zip"), chicory ("use the early leaves in a salad") and an orange jelly fungus ("almost every bowl of Chinese sweet-and-sour soup has this") that quickly disappears into his mouth.

About 30 minutes into the hike, eagle-eyed Lyle scores her first morel: "Ooh, a black one. Hooray!" Scrambling up a steep incline as if she were part longhorn sheep, she pulls up three more. "Aha, I found another one," she says. "Damn, I just walked over that one." Make that six.

Meanwhile, Wingfield has discovered a flush, or large congregation, of mushrooms in a space no larger than a child's sandbox. He pockets 16 morels, an enviable take.

Back at the road, Lyle sets up a picnic of shortbread cookies and Godiva chocolate on the hood of her car while the crew counts its spoils. Team Wingfield has 66, four shy of Lyle. That is, until she wanders a little way off and finds her dreamscape. Her final count: 105.

On the drive back, Lyle suddenly pulls to the side of the road, grabs a pair of scissors and a plastic bag (she's always prepared) and dashes over to a bouquet of green stalks. "This will make a nice seasoning for the morels," she says, gripping a handful of pungent wild onions.

Earlier, Lyle had jotted down a wish list of greens, including garlic mustard, watercress, catnip, wild asparagus, milkweed and lamb's quarters. But before heading out, she had crossed out a couple of the items: She suspects that the wild asparagus on a back road to Goshen has been mowed clean and that she has weeded out all the poke in her garden.

In contrast, watercress is plentiful and pervasive, and Lyle knows exactly where to find it. She drives straight for a creek burbling along a country road, near a barn stooped over from age. Armed with a kitchen knife and rain boots, she shimmies down the short bank and starts whacking away, filling three plastic sacks. Nearby, at a retirement community, she bags some upland cress and a few sprigs of spearmint for mint juleps.

Near the VMI baseball stadium she walks along the overgrown fringes of a recreational trail, pointing out milkweed and some blackberry bushes weeks away from picking. She lingers at some chickweed -- "makes you thin" -- and then makes a beeline for the garlic mustard. She crushes a palm-size leaf that smells like an Italian kitchen.

On the final stop, she races over to a parcel of land abutting the college campus. "Oh, tell me they haven't cut it all down?" she asks. Nope, the mustard greens are still there; ditto the catnip, which she takes as a gift to her cats.

"I just love wild foraging," she muses on the drive back to her Lexington home, the back seat piled high with greenery.

In her kitchen, a charmingly cluttered space, Lyle scoops up some morels (a mix of white and black), slices them lengthwise and soaks them in saltwater to flush out any stowaway bugs. She heats up peanut oil (neutral, to avoid competing flavors) and butter, then tosses in the mushrooms with a bit of wild onion. She steams the garlic mustard in a separate pan, toasts a few slices of white bread and sets the table in mismatched dinnerware.

The morels form a precarious tower atop the toast, nearly toppling over and onto the steaming heap of garlic mustard. The meal is simple, yet it has quite a story, which makes it all the more delicious.