Perennial Plate's Recipes from the Road

Every week, chef/activist Daniel Klein and cameragirl Mirra Fine of The Perennial Plate are sharing the videos and recipes from their cross-country real food road trip with us.

Their latest dispatch from the road: mushroom harvesting and banjo playing at Sweden Creek Farm in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas.

Get their recipe for Watercress Soup with Grilled Shiitakes (and save and print it) -- plus watch the video and read Daniel's take on the adventure below.

Mushroom Music

- Daniel

I found Curly and Carole Anne the same way I find a lot of the stories for The Perennial Plate, searching the internet. When I stumbled upon banjo-playing mushroom farmers, I immediately fell in love.  Then I learned that their operation is all organic, and the farm is way out in the Ozarks -- even more of a reason to make the drive.

And oh what a drive! It took us on all types of dirt roads, over several streams and to the land where GPS and cell phones cease to exist. Even though we had only spoken on the phone briefly, we were greeted like old friends, and what followed was three days of shiitake talking, cooking and eating. But what really struck me was less about their innovative style of growing mushrooms on logs in quantity all year round, and more about their discussions about what "local" means and how that can affect sustainable family farms. Watch the video to enter into Carole Anne and Curly's banjo-plucking and mushroom-picking lives.