Chef Erin Miller's eyes lit up when she discovered a massive hen-of-the-wood mushroom while foraging in Lincoln on a crisp September morning.
She knew exactly where the beachball-size mushroom was going -- on the menu of her first-ever mushroom dinner at her Cambridge restaurant, Urban Hearth.
"There's just a natural kind of nexus between foraging and restaurants," Miller said. "There's a narrative that we can share with our guests about where their food comes from."
Miller knows how to bring food full circle.
The chef and longtime forager leaves no stone unturned when it comes to finding locally sourced ingredients from Greater Boston and beyond.
She aims to educate people about food sustainability while they share a carefully curated meal at her 24-seat restaurant.
This is something MassLive experienced first-hand.
MassLive went foraging with Miller in the woods in Lincoln in search of hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, which typically grow from September through November.
We focused our search on the base of trees and on the ground, moistened by recent rain, where mushrooms are usually found.
Miller gave us some other foraging tips such as knowing the different trees, understanding the history of the land and being careful when eating foraged food.
"If you don't want to put it in your mouth, then don't pick it," she joked as we scoured the grounds.
Jokes aside, this is serious business for Miller, who has been foraging practically her entire life.
"It's been part of my culture growing up," said Miller, who describes herself as a self-taught forager. "My grandparents foraged and it was just kind of part of our life."
She recalled picking berries while growing up in Floyd, Virginia -- a small, rural community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her lifelong passion has come in handy, especially since opening Urban Hearth in 2016.
While the restaurant has been open for eight years, Miller has become more serious about foraging in the past 5 to 6 years.
Her go-to foraging spots include wooded areas in Lincoln and Concord where she has found hen of the woods and honey mushrooms on many occasions. She also frequents community farms and other public lands in Greater Boston, where she can pull edible weeds, autumn olives, black walnuts, wild and Concord grapes and leftover crops. Miller has also traveled to Western Massachusetts and foraged in the Berkshires, Vermont and New Hampshire.
At this point in her career, the chef feels more comfortable foraging than shopping at the grocery store. Although she did compare foraging to shopping at TJ Maxx.
"If you're looking for something specific, you'll never find it," she said. "But if you go in with just an open mind to browse, you'll find so much."
Even if you leave the woods with an empty basket, Miller said you'll still get "a lovely walk" and tranquil time in the woods.
"You're going to have some quiet time with your friends if you're out with somebody," she added. "If you find things along the way, it's marvelous."
At first, we thought we were going to walk away empty-handed when, after about 30 minutes, we didn't find any fungi. Then Miller shouted in excitement that she had hit the jackpot.
We walked over to see several massive bunches of hen-of-the-wood and honey mushrooms. We were all amazed.
Realizing the enormity of the fungi, Miller ran back to her car for a bigger basket while we started harvesting.
We ended up with a trunkful of mushrooms that Miller later preserved -- either by pickling or dehydrating -- for an upcoming October dinner.
Fast forward almost a month and the mushrooms made a return. This time, however, they look very different -- but the flavors and scents in the restaurant make it feel as though we never left the forest.
On Oct. 9, guests packed the intimate dining room at Urban Hearth, located at 2263 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. The air smelled of smoke while Miller and her staff slaved over the stove.
Tyler Akabane of THE mushroom shop in Somerville mingled with diners and shared his extensive knowledge of mushrooms as plates of food were brought from the kitchen.
The meal featured several foraged mushrooms that Miller picked in September with MassLive. The first course was a smoky Matsutake salad with silverberry, honeycomb, seared radicchio, roasted koji cream and toasted pumpkin seed oil.
Chanterelle mushrooms were the star of the second dish: a buckwheat soba noodle bowl with wild mushroom consommé, shiitake bacon, smoked egg yolk and onion petals.
The third course featured a herby cavendish quail with chicken of the woods and hen-of-the-wood mushrooms that mirrored the bird's meatiness. The cozy dish was further complemented by a whipped parsnip and apple puree, juniper smoke, fermented cabbage and rose hip Membrillo.
And just when you thought Miller found every possible way to prepare mushrooms, she found another. Dessert was an apricot Semifreddo with candied black trumpet mushrooms, brown butter hazelnut pound cake and chocolate porcini mushroom glass.
The mushroom dinner was just one example of the many dishes on Urban Hearth's menu that feature items Miller has gathered from the surrounding area.
She recalled one dish offered at the restaurant's chef's counter, a four-seat countertop directly in front of the kitchen with a mystery menu.
The dish centered on the heart of an heirloom tomato that was gently warmed and brushed with a vinaigrette made with magnolia vinegar. Miller picked the magnolia flowers in the spring. The tomato was then topped with a salad made with wood sorrel, which is another edible wild plant that grows everywhere from the woods to parks. Miller has also made wood sorrel sorbet.
The chef's table helps Urban Hearth feel like being in a "really cool kitchen" at a friend's dinner party, Miller said.
"That's the kind of ethos that we've created," she added.
Urban Hearth's menu consists of shareable items from small plates, such as oysters on the half shell and cacao milk bread to larger plates, including homemade pasta in a saffron tomato sauce and duck confit leg.
Urban Hearth's menu is also incredibly seasonal -- relying on items available during a specific time of the year. The evolving menu constantly offers new dishes and celebrates 6 to 8 seasons a year.
"It's fleeting and marvelous and kind of a celebration of a very specific time," she said.
Urban Hearth acquires most of its ingredients through local sourcing or foraging. During the summer and fall, 90% of Urban Hearth's produce is from within 100 miles of the restaurant, Miller said. The restaurant's eggs and meat -- including whale meat from Vermont that was on the menu in September -- are also either from New England or the East Coast.
The spring is a bit more challenging, so Miller relies more on greenhouse farming and storage crops to supply her restaurant. But those options are still in New England. Essentially only the ingredients that are not in New England -- such as citrus fruits -- are sourced from outside the region.
Foraging does more than get you outside and at one with nature, it can help restaurants save money.
Online marketplaces like Foraged, Regalis and Pacific Wild Pick sell foraged goods at a range of prices, with higher prices for specialty varieties or items that are harder to find.
For example, a 5.5- to 6-pound bundle of hen-of-the-wood mushrooms retails for $110 on Regalis while Pacific Wild Pick sells the fungi for $21.01 a pound. Foraged is the cheapest option, at $19.95 per pound. When these mushrooms come from places such as Vinton, Iowa, Miller chooses not to sacrifice time, money or quality.
"There's so much right here for us," she said. "There's no reason to bring in sad vegetables from California or wherever that have already been on a truck for two weeks when you can have something really fresh here."
Miller also chooses not to sacrifice food's artistic value. Urban Hearth's rotating menu pushes constant innovation and prevents Miller from making the same dish every day.
"Keeping our creativity primed by forcing ourselves to really adhere to the seasonality of the ingredients and using local foraged ingredients to even amplify that creativity and that sense of play is really critical for me as a creative person," she said. "It's a big part of the identity of the restaurant and our ethos as far as our food is concerned."
Miller hopes other restaurants will do the same, but believes they shouldn't adopt foraging without knowing where their ingredients are coming from.
"I think there's a lot of restaurants and a lot of places that will lean in on foraged items because they're trendy because it sounds good to have that on the menu," she said.
"Most of the chefs that are working with them couldn't tell you where it came from or how it grows or whether it should be on the menu," Miller said. "I've really invested in understanding what these ingredients are and understanding how they are part of our landscape and whether they are threatened and what we can do to help sustain them."
Above all, Miller hopes to continue bringing people together one foraged-focused plate at a time.
"It's the one thing that we all have in common. We need to sit down and eat," she said. "If that food can be inspiring, if it can inspire conversation, if it can create connections -- because there are things that are familiar to each of us in different ways -- then it's a wonderful starting point for building community and building cohesion in a community."