Ether Maiden is foraging for her own mushrooms (these babies are called Dryad's Saddle Mushrooms), and cooking them up. Check out her other photos here and more tales of mushroom hunting, here. 
Week Six is almost done. Two weeks to go! This week's assignment was to stock the pantry and plan a whole meal.
To help you with the pantry part, we published two lists of suggested pantry items. The idea here was to help you on your way to cooking without recipes. This is generally easier in the savory department.
With desserts, since so many involve baking, a little more science and a little less experimentation is required, but nonetheless, our lists, we hope, will get your cupboards prepared to support spur-of-the-moment cooking. Here are the two pantry guides:
• What Every Pantry Needs: Savory
• What Every Pantry Needs: Sweet
Here's Ether Maiden's finished dish: Pan-Fried Fish with Mushrooms and Lemon Sauce (check the fancy garnish!)How is the meal-planning going? In the Week Six assignment, several of us gave suggestions for meals based on what's fresh and in-season in our parts of the country. East, west and something in between are represented, so you should have ample material to inspire your own meal plan. Post it here.
Remember to keep posting your work in the Kitchn's Flickr Pool and keep the comments, questions, tips and encouragement flowing through the comments on each Cure post.
See you on Thursday, when we un-hatch the Week Seven assignments. Do you have a date on the calendar for your graduation dinner? Aim for the end of May.
All The Info
• Week Six! Stocking the Pantry and Planning a Whole Meal
• Kitchn Cure Monday Check-In: How Did the Weekend Bread (or Matzah) Baking Go?
• Kitchn Cure: Week Five! Bread Baking Assignment
• Kitchn Cure: Week Five! Taking Stock and Reporting Back
• Kitchn Cure: Week Four! Fire Up the Stove
• Kitchn Cure: Week Three! Use What Your Mama Gave You
• Kitchn Cure: Week Two! Going Deeper - Goodbye Processed Foods!
• Kitchn Cure: Week One! Getting Started and De-Cluttering Your Food
• All Kitchn Spring Cure 2008 Posts
• The Kitchn Cure Flickr Pool Page
Holy cow! Those are giant mushrooms!
view Michelle of Montreal's profile
@Michelle
Heh, these were still pretty young so they were about hand-sized. Not nearly the largest of this, or really any, variety that I forage and DEFINITELY not the largest when compared to those I grow. In comparison to those you'll find in the market though, yeah- they are big.
Foraging your own food is excellent, and I have grown up doing this. I will say- don't try doing this yourself unless you have an expert in whatever you're foraging for with you in the field. Even having done this for years, I still check everything I forage against my field guides, my local experts, and when in doubt I throw it out.
Thanks TheKitchn for picking my images and linking to my blog- much appreciated! Glad you enjoyed them!
view Ether Maiden's profile
I've fallen really far behind, I'm still enjoying the posts and I loved the pantry posts, but I really need to get my act together and try to catch up!
view mango's profile
Checking in!
I was pleasantly surprised to find that I already had almost everything on both pantry lists. No anchovies, but I can't stand them--I'll use Thai fish sauce or Worcestershire sauce.
I did finally make some bread--I started with the no-knead recipe, and took half of it, kneaded some extra flour in til it was handle-able, and made turnovers with some extra stir-fried greens. Excellent, but they disappeared too fast for me to take a picture! The other half of the dough made a flat loaf in fairly standard no-knead style. Since I knew it would flatten, I brushed the top with olive oil. It's a little focacia-like.
For my "menu" meal, I made a frittata with mixed greens (turnip, radish, and mustard), bread, and roasted radishes. We had it with a CT farm wine made from pears--a dry white wine. Lots of local ingredients, it tasted great! Pictures
view RebeccaCT's profile
Menu planning has slowly become the bane of my existence, so I'm using this week not to plan a menu for the first time, but to attempt planning a few WEEKS of menus so I can freaking get a break from it. Some of those menu entries will say things like "pasta w/whatever we found at the Farmers Market" but I need to sketch something in.
Best tip gleaned this week: dry vermouth instead of white wine for cooking. Duh! Thank you! I love wine, but drink very little, and even the half-bottles don't get used quick enough. Next time I swing by the liquor store I'll be nabbing a bottle of vermouth to stand in.
view cmcinnyc's profile
@cmcinnyc - I hear you! I hate the planning but love the freedom. Now I'm feeling like I can take the training wheels off a bit.
My check-in:
We actually have a lot of those ingredients, but I hadn't really consciously thought of them as pantry items. For me, this is the biggest progress I'm seeing from the Cure - consciously making editorial decisions. It feels really similar to my art education. Putting the technical skills together with the more nebulous qualities is the last and maybe hardest step.
New stuff for us are the dried mushrooms, hazelnut oil (sounds DELICIOUS), Maldon's salt (still haven't found it yet), and keeping lemons or limes on hand at all times. I am a citrus freak and really should look into some lemon and lime trees. I hear you can get trees that have been grafted together from multiple fruit trees... must research.
Speaking of growing, we planted some herbs, lettuce and flowers about a month ago and the cilantro and lettuce are almost big enough to think about eating. Even under the extreme drought conditions here in Atlanta, we're allowed to water food plants. The nearby poppies and lavender will get a little extra bonus, too!
view d1g1t1ze's profile