Mushrooms!

DISCLAIMER! If you use anything I post here as a guideline to go find mushrooms, you're not thinking it through. Go buy books, talk to someone who knows something about mushrooms, and be really freaking careful. If in doubt, chuck it out. I don't want to hear about you eating some awesome looking mushroom after briefly seeing it here and getting sick. You are responsible for your own actions. I'm still learning and in no way am I any kind of authority on this stuff.

As they say in Mall Rats:
"You're going to listen to me? To something I said? Jesus, man, haven't I made it abundantly clear during the tenure of our friendship that I don't know sh**? I mean, half the time I'm just talking out of my ass . . ."

Anyway, on to the fun stuff...

We've become interested in the world of wild mushrooms this year after attending a presentation at Greenwood Furnace SP in July. We knew about chicken mushrooms, which are quite tasty, and shaggy manes that my dad introduced us to, but the rest, not so much. That is changing ever since we started getting rain again. The woods are rife with a riot of mushrooms and we've been searching out some edible ones.

The first success was in our own driveway when we found and identified meadow mushrooms--quite tasty!

Of course, we needed to know the bad ones, too, and I'm pretty confident I can pick out the destroying angel with no problems now. This is good because it'll dissolve your liver and kill you within a week.

We've been pretty cautious about identifying what we find and if there's doubt, we throw them out. False chanterelles and uncertain puffballs have gone this route.

But this week? Jackpot! Been looking for these for a bit now and stumbled upon them quite by accident.

Horn of Plenty/Black Trumpets/Trumpets/Black Chanterelles!





We tried a couple last night, felt fine all night and so they went in the eggs this morning!



These have a great smoky flavor--very good. And we've read that they can be put in dry white wine to flavor it. We intend to try this. Great mushroom--hard to see against the forest floor, though.

And even better, on the way to pick the trumpets, nearly tripped over some true Chanterelles! Spore print matches, description matches...might have to try a bit tonight...



Once again, don't use anything here to identify a mushroom with no other checks!