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 new short episode — Forest Fungi, with Merlin Sheldrake — and a recipe for spaghetti with creamy miso sauce and greens.

Click here to subscribe. For previous stories, go here.

The world of fungi is utterly complex and virtually unknown to us, but biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake is working on the second part. He not only studies the interconnected lives of plants, animals, and fungi, but he even utilizes “domesticated decomposition” to make a fermented hot sauce, which he sells with his brother (musician and fellow fermentation geek Cosmo Sheldrake). The fermentation of sour things like kimchi and yogurt is completely different from the fermentation of stuff like tempeh or miso — do you know how? Read on to find out!

The wizardry of fungi, good and bad seafood news, a year of legal shrooms, Portland’s James Beard Award honors and good things in markets, gardens and kitchens

New video: A walk in the woods with Merlin Sheldrake

Last February, the Superabundant team spent a day strolling at the Oregon coast with biologist and award-winning author Merlin Sheldrake, not just eating copious amounts of Oregon truffles, but also making time to coo at stag-horn clubmoss and prostrate ourselves before the tiny “eggs” in a bird’s nest fungus. You can smell a lot when your nose is that close to the earth, and the is a tribute to the veritable ocean of life coursing beneath our feet as seen through the eyes of one of its greatest fans.

Better seafood education for Oregon teens

Siletz Valley School on the Oregon coast is taking a new approach to culinary education for its high schoolers, reports OPB’s Alejandro Figueroa. The students in the program gain hands-on experience in both processing and cooking seafood products, part of an expanded statewide program to promote seafood jobs in Oregon, which will hopefully translate to more culinary talent staying at the coast.

Oregon bivalves are in a real clam jam

Speaking of seafood, there’s an update to the shellfish toxin story — no longer limited to mussels along the northern stretches of the coast (as reported last week), the closures now include razor and bay clams along the entire Oregon coast as well as three commercial oyster fisheries. Cooking does not remove the toxins, so until further notice, it’s best to leave most local shellfish off the menu to avoid debilitating illness.

Psilocybin, a year later

Of all the challenges faced by the burgeoning psilocybin industry, a lack of customers had perhaps been the least predicted. What’s the problem? Unlike cannabis, which can be distributed relatively freely by dispensaries, psilocybin must be administered by watchful practitioners at state-licensed facilities. Oregon Capital Chronicle’s Grant Stringer has the story.

Two more James Beard Award wins for Portland

Portlanders Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom (LangBaan) and Gregory Gourdet (kann) have taken home a couple more medals, for Best Restaurant and Best Chef Northwest, respectively. This is the first win for both of them after being named semifinalists multiple times. Huge congrats to all the winners and nominees, and stay tuned for a chat with Ninsom, coming to next week’s newsletter.

Good things in markets

It’s shaping up to be a strong season for cherries — while some Washington cherry growers are reporting smaller yields, the warm weather means the fruit will be sweeter. Quality over quantity!

Currants and early-season caneberries like raspberries and loganberries are joining the ranks of local strawberries to top pavlovas and shortcakes. Farmers markets are teeming with edible flowers, eggs and honey as well as the earliest cherry tomatoes and peppers — we can’t wait to roast these for sprucing up pans of macaroni and cheese.

Since fresh bivalves are off the menu for the time being, maybe it’s a good time to peruse the tinned seafood aisle of your grocery store (or go for vegan tinned seafood, also made in the Pacific Northwest)?

In the “Superabundant” garden this week

While our friends are fawning over the fragrance of blooming peonies and roses, we’re huffing handfuls of herbs like chocolate mint, rue, oregano, salad burnet, lovage and root beer-scented hoja santa — not only do they smell like a dream, but they’re all lovely added to cordials.

Berries are coming on nearly strong enough to start a batch of jam, and the garlic chives are as steady as they are heady (we’re still shoving them into crispy-savory pancakes and batches of kimchi). The elderflowers are nearly done, slowly changing into berries. The fig and persimmon trees are laden with baby fruit, giving us high hopes for this year’s preservation projects.

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen

✨ We culled some of the unripe peaches off the tree before they could drop on the driveway and are trying our hand at pickling them into umeboshi. Since peaches and ume (a type of apricot, not plum) are closely related we have high hopes of it working well.

✨ We grilled some skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs and smeared them with homemade fig mole from the freezer; these were a fast and delicious dinner with fresh tortillas, red cabbage slaw and fire-roasted easy elote salad sprinkled with cilantro flowers from the garden.

✨ We browned leftover breakfast sausage with peppers and onions to mix with scrambled eggs and cheese which we piled on buttery toasted brioche buns (also left over from last week’s recipe) for a sort of breakfast sloppy joe. Copious amounts of hot sauce added to the “sloppy” factor.

Recipe: Spaghetti with creamy miso sauce and greens

June is Pride Month, and since the James Beard Awards were just announced, we thought it’d be fun to honor one of the most famous LGBTQ Portlanders with a simple and delicious recipe prompted by his effortless style of cooking. His 1954 cookbook “How to Eat Better for Less Money” strikes a chord with us — a good cook doesn’t need to rely on expensive ingredients and certainly knows better than to waste a single thing. Beard’s pasta cookbook also features a simple brothy bowl of macaroni with beans that, while ideal for winter, we return to throughout the year using seasonal ingredients.

Furthermore, we have a new episode featuring biologist and fungal specialist Merlin Sheldrake, so we wanted to make sure the recipe included something fermented (Sheldrake and his brother Cosmo have a fermented hot sauce company that they started during the pandemic). Many of the pickled foods and cultured dairy products we enjoy rely on the lactic acid fermentation performed by the bacterial genus Lactobacillus, but miso undergoes a different, slower type of fermentation performed by fungi — in this case, koji, which is grown on rice (Aspergillus oryzae and A. sojae; tempeh is similarly made by inoculating with Rhizopus fungus). Miso’s applications go way beyond the little bowl of soup that comes with your sushi; in this case, a flavorful and versatile approach to pasta with beans.

We used a mix of garden greens, but if you don’t have mustard, radish or turnip greens on hand, spinach or kale would be equally good, and feel free to use any miso — we like the mild sweetness of white/shiro miso but aged red/aka miso has a deep richness that works beautifully as well. Serves 6-8.

NOTE: It’s worth mentioning that James Beard was not publicly out as gay; in fact, he was expelled from Reed College for being queer (Reed awarded Beard his honors more than 50 years later, in 1976). To learn more about the life of James Beard, read John Birdsall’s excellent biography “The Man Who Ate Too Much”; to learn more about Pacific Northwest queer history, visit the Oregon Queer History Collective.

Ingredients

16 ounces dry spaghetti

4 cups chopped greens such as kale, radish greens, spinach or arugula

¼ cup white (shiro) miso

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese (about 4 ounces)

1 teaspoon freshly cracked pepper

Finely sliced scallions, nori or green laver (ao nori) for garnish (optional)

Instructions

1. Boil the pasta in salted water according to the package instructions until al dente, adding the greens during the last minute of cooking. Strain, reserving 1 ½ cups of the pasta water.
2. Whisk the miso and butter into the hot pasta water until the miso is dissolved and the butter is melted, then add the miso-butter liquid, the grated Parmesan and the pepper to the pasta. Return to low heat, stirring and tossing until the sauce is creamy and the pasta is evenly coated and tender.
3. Divide into four bowls and garnish with sliced scallions or nori.

Get these recipes sent to your inbox every week. Don’t forget to tell a friend!