The first question you're going to ask is, I suppose, 'Where do you get chanterelles?' Well, you can buy them when they're in season, but they cost an absolute fortune. You can also gather them yourself which is, to my mind, a much more satisfying way of getting hold of them. They'll also be fresher. Think about it - if you owned a posh delicatessen and you were showing off chanterelles at a tenner a kilo on your wee table covered with imitation grass on the street in front of the window, would you throw out the ones you didn't sell at the end of the day? Would you hell. You wouldn't even throw them out at the end of the week. No way - far too expensive.
Get into the woods then, round about July or August, and have a look for some chanterelles. Buy a book if you don't know what they look like (for UK readers, Richard Maybey's 'Mushrooms and Toadstools' is a cracker) and click here for a few more words on gathering from the wild. I got the chanterelles which inspired this recipe in the pine woods around Lake Baravoye in northern Kazakhstan (that's why I called the recipe 'Baravoye chanterelles'). I was on a hiking holiday with my wife and when we realised there were so many good mushrooms around, we bought a cheap frying pan in one of the lakeside villages and cooked mushrooms in the forest straight after gathering them (click here to see some photos). It was good getting back to basics - just a frying pan and a Swiss army knife. That's the spirit in which I began writing this recipe book and I don't ever want to get too far away from it. There's no need to.
I'll go over a few important points concerning the exact methods I used just in case you fancy doing the same. I recommend that you do. First, when gathering mushrooms, cut them at the base, don't pull them out of the ground. There are three reasons for this, the first being that it causes the least disturbance to the root or mytochondrial system or whatever it's called. The second is that the mushrooms will stay clean and you won't need to wash them before cooking and the third reason is that you can see if there are maggots inside the mushroom (if there are, throw it away) though this generally isn't a problem with chanterelles.
Concerning your fire - when you get it going, bung on a load of wood all at once so that it burns down quickly to embers. It's not a camp fire you're making - it's a cooking fire and embers are best for cooking on but you need a fair bit of wood to make enough. If you cook on a fire with burning wood in it and the wind blows, you'll get black tarry bits in your mushrooms ( = yuk! ). If you cook on a pile of red hot embers and the wind blows, you'll get a little white ash in your mushrooms ( = yum, yum! ). While your fire is taking care of itself (and after the initial lighting and piling on of wood, it should) you can make a wooden spatula from a piece of branch using your Swiss army knife, then use your knife again to roughly cut up the mushrooms.
As far as quantities go, a kilo of mushrooms will feed 2 or 3 very hungry people. Even if you use a small pan, you can add the mushrooms gradually as they shrink. You'll get them all in.
Ingredients
A pile of chanterelles
A small tub of sour cream
2 cloves of garlic
A large blob of butter or margarine
Salt
Put your frying pan on the fire and add a blob of margarine. Lay the garlic cloves on a big rock and smash them with a smaller one (you don't need to take the skin off). Throw them into the pan and stir for a minute or two then start adding handfuls of chopped mushrooms. Depending on how hot your fire is the mushrooms might give off a lot of water. That's okay - simmer them until all the water has evapourated. If the fire is really hot the water will steam off straight away in which case you'll need to keep stirring so the mushrooms don't burn. Add a bit of salt somewhere along the line and when the chanterelles look well cooked, remove the pan from the fire and stir in the sour cream. Serve with bread and sliced tomatoes.