OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for mushroom rarebit and a new episode — Chanterelles.

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Whether you prefer a Cambozola on toasted baguette or a melted American single on Franz bread, there’s a cheesy toast for everyone. Cheese toast is just as satisfying for dinner as it is an after-school snack, and this is why we love a good rarebit — the highest form of a cheese toastie and an ideal platform for wild mushrooms like chanterelles, morels and porcini. Some people might think that eating a rich, cheese-based dish at night isn’t the most healthful choice, but we say “your mileage may vary; pass the nachos please,” and we know we’re not alone in this sentiment! Before he found fame with the 1905 cartoon Little Nemo, artist Winsor McCay created a bizarre comic strip about one of the purported side effects of eating rarebit too late in the evening — do you know what it was called? Read on to find out!

Join the team from OPB’s digital food series “Superabundant” for a free community screening on June 2 of recent episodes highlighting two well-known Pacific Northwest ingredients: hops and coffee.

At the screening, discover the folks that make Portland one of the premier coffee cities in the world, and learn how Oregon State University paved the way for the region’s flavorful hop varieties. Doors open at 1 p.m., and the screening will be followed by a live Q&A with OPB’s “Superabundant” team, along with some of the folks featured in the episodes.

Newsletter subscribers: we have an EXCLUSIVE opportunity for you to meet the team behind “Superabundant” and enjoy samples of coffee and beer featured in the Coffee and Hops episodes. (Note: Registration for the meet and greet automatically registers you for the free screening.)

A true chanterelle-a story, causes for celebration, distill our beating heart, umma is anything but a plain Jane and good things in markets, gardens and kitchens

A fall fungus among us 🍄

We have truffles in the winter, morels in the spring, porcini in the summer, and every autumn in the Pacific Northwest, the damp forest floor comes alive with the butterscotch gleam of chanterelles. You have to time it right to beat the visual noise of the yellow bigleaf maple leaves burying everything on the ground, but stumbling upon a patch of the tasty trumpets is like finding gold. The latest episode of “Superabundant” explores Oregon’s state mushroom, chanterelles. Watch the Chanterelle episode:

“Superabundant” wins another award! 🏆

Yes, we’re patting ourselves on the back while tooting our own horn — “Superabundant” Season 2 has taken home a Silver Telly Award in the Online Food & Beverage category! Congrats to the team whose massive effort makes this one of the world’s best digital food series. Next stop, the Emmy Awards (wish us luck — the Northwest regional ceremony is on June 1)!

Happy 100th birthday to Michiko Kiyokawa 🍎

The matriarch of Kiyokawa Family Orchards in Parkdale, Oregon, is officially a centenarian this month. Kathy Patten wrote for The Oregonian about how Mrs. Kiyokawa found love while enduring the indignity of wartime incarceration, going on to carry on her husband’s family fruit legacy in the Hood River Valley. The orchard is still one of our favorite places to get apples.

We’ll have a rum and Coquille, please 🥃

Last week KATU reported that the Coquille Tribe will be partnering with the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission to open the state’s first tribally owned distillery. Partnering with the Mill Casino in Coos County, Heritage Distilling Co. will coincide with planned renovations to the casino to include a tasting room.

She’s so hungry! 🍰

The internet’s favorite mom, Jane Kim — better known as The Korean Mama — has been eating her way through Portland to the amusement of her fans, who number over a million followers between Instagram and TikTok. OPB’s Crystal Ligori and Geoff Norcross chatted about it with Kim and her son Ed on “All Things Considered.”

Good things in markets 🛒

This week we’ve been seeing the prettiest produce: various spearlike allium scapes (especially garlic and leek), strawberries and wild mushrooms like morels and porcini. Local rapini, turnips and sprouting crucifers (especially purple sprouting broccoli) are nice and crisp. Asparagus, favas and both sugar snap and shelling peas (and their shoots) are all going strong. The first stone fruits are trickling in from California, but we’d rather wait for the peak season locally. Kumquats should be wrapping up soon, so get them while you can — unlike most other citrus, they don’t stick around all year.

In the “Superabundant” garden this week 🌱

The chive blossoms are so pretty and delicious that we have to fight the urge to pick them all for sprinkling on soup and pasta dishes — we want some to go to seed so we have more next year! We’re also letting some of the chervil, cress, salad burnet and parsley go to seed so it self-sows, but have to take care not to let them spread too much! (To wit, we’ve been pulling black nightshade sprouts from all of the raised beds — though it was intentionally planted, it is absolutely a weed in this region and will enthusiastically take over every nook and cranny if left unchecked. (The fruit makes a great kuchen though!)

The bamboo patch is sending up its first shoots of spring — we have to harvest them before the chickens peck them to bits but soon we’ll have plenty for takenoko gohan (bamboo rice) and processing them into pickles and spicy, oily preserves to enjoy throughout the year. Stay tuned for a bamboo shoot recipe, coming soon.

The owners of two different Portland restaurants paid a visit to Superabundant’s Hedgewitch to the Stars for elderflowers — berlu’s James Beard Award-winning chef Vincent Nguyen will use the blossoms in his version Vietnamese dessert chè, and Sandro Paolini will use his share to make his much-lauded Fioritura, Pinolo’s strawberry-elderflower sorbetto.

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen 🍽️

✨ We baked a pan of brownies with peanut butter chips and crushed peanut butter pretzel nuggets strewn throughout. You know, for the protein.

💫 We made an omelet with diced potatoes and peppers, mushrooms, zucchini and white cheddar for brunch one day, and then ate the leftovers (it was a big omelet!) on tortillas the next day.

⭐ We made a big bowl of spicy jjamppong — a Korean-Chinese noodle soup — with clams, squid and shrimp and ate it with a quick oi sobagi (cucumber kimchi) and pajeon (scallion pancake) made with perilla and garlic chives from the garden.

Recipe: Mushroom rarebit (aka fancy cheese toasties)

Sometimes called Welsh “rabbit” (though it contains no meat; the name is likely originally meant as a some kind of dig at the Welsh), Welsh rarebit is an old-fashioned dish that reached its zenith in the British pubs of the 18th-century, but eating melted cheese sauce on toasted bread is a much older phenomenon. And there are many more variations on the theme than you might realize — dunk the toast in red wine before spooning on the cheese sauce and it’s an English rarebit; add a poached egg and it’s a golden buck; add a slice of roast turkey and a rasher of bacon and it’s a hot brown, made famous by Louisville’s Brown Hotel and served during the Kentucky Derby. Its descendents, creamed chipped beef on toast (or the military version with a less-savory name) and ration-friendly cheese dream can be lowbrow and as budget-friendly as meals come, but rarebit was once considered a delicacy. Like fried chicken is today, the quality of the rarebit reflected that of the tavern serving it.

As anyone who’s hit the Taco Bell drive-thru for midnight quesadillas can attest, there’s something about a late night snack of melted cheese that just hits different. It’s a tale as old as time. In the 1800s, late-night Welsh rarebit was such a normal repast that people started to remark about having weird dreams while sleeping on a belly full of cheesy toast, eventually culminating in the comic strip series, “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend” (1904-1925), wherein each daily strip ends in the dreamer waking in a cold sweat. Created by Winsor McCay, the artist who’d go on to create the animated film “Little Nemo,” the comic series eventually found its way into the burgeoning psychology of Sigmund Freud. It took science a century or so to substantiate the finding, but there is now evidence that cheese indeed alters one’s dreams.

Whether or not you work on your night cheese, we appreciate the rarebit’s utility as a dish for elevating past-their-prime ingredients before they turn to compost — in this case, stale bread and random nubbins of cheese — and for its ability to showcase any other ingredients you happen to have on hand. Sharp cheddar makes an excellent sauce for a celery or broccoli rarebit, or you could use pears and walnuts with a blue or bloomy rind cheese. Throw a thin slice of ham under a Jarslberg mornay. Toss in some sautéed mushrooms with chives and *checks refrigerator* aged Gouda and Monterey jack. Et voila! A sumptuous meal worth braving even the most Lynchian nightmare. Serves 4

Note: You can use whatever fresh mushrooms you like — we used a mix of wild morels and porcini with cremini.

Ingredients

3 tbsp unsalted butter, divided

8 oz mushrooms, sliced (about 2 ½ cups after slicing)

1 tbsp minced shallot

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp fine sea salt

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup light beer or white wine (NA is fine or just use milk instead)

1 ½ cups whole milk

¼ tsp ground black pepper

¼ tsp mustard powder

3 cups shredded cheese (preferably a mix of melting cheeses like Gouda, cheddar, fontina, and/or jack)

Thickly sliced bread, toasted or grilled right before serving

Chopped parsley and/or chives

Instructions

1. Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a medium-sized skillet over medium heat. Sauté the mushrooms, shallot and garlic with the salt until the mushrooms begin to release their liquid, about 2-3 minutes. Increase the heat slightly, stirring until the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms have begun to brown along the edges, another 2-3 minutes. Transfer the cooked mushrooms to a bowl and set aside.
2. Add the remaining butter and the flour to the pan and stir until the butter is melted and the flour begins to smell toasty and delicious. Pour in the beer or wine, scraping up the browned bits in the pan until they’re dissolved. Reduce the heat to low and whisk until smooth. Add the milk, pepper and mustard powder, reduce heat to low and simmer until the sauce is thick and bubbly.
3. Stir in the cheese, whisking until it’s melted and the sauce is smooth. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed, then stir the cooked mushrooms into the sauce until they’re fully coated in the delicious cheese sauce.
4. Spoon the mushroom cheese sauce over the toasted bread and sprinkle on the chopped herbs.

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