Foraging For Fungi

I have been crawling around in the underbrush, following deer and rabbit trails since I was a little girl in search of, among other things, the elusive Chanterelle mushroom.

Chanterelles are among the easiest mushroom for beginners to ID and that is why my family trusted me, as a small child, to bring them home for dinner every Fall.

Since everyone has heard horror stories about eating the "wrong" mushrooms,  I don't really think I need to stress how careful you need to be when gathering mushrooms. We all know that you need to be very careful when identifying mushrooms in the wild.

With that said, I spend a lot of time convincing people to eat wild mushrooms. I have found that friends and family tend to be a little nervous about the mushrooms on the table, and they must be assured beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were wild crafted by someone who knew what they were doing.

It's a shame that wild mushrooms are so hard for people to enjoy. Their taste is beyond compare! No farmed mushroom can even come close to the flavor of a wild mushroom. So, it is really worth learning to ID a few kinds of mushrooms if you like to hike or ramble in the woods and eat good food.

These are Common Puffballs which are delicious and just as their name indicates - common. They are everywhere this Fall.

Just because I have been picking a few types of mushroom since I was little, it does not make me an expert. I have been slowly learning to identify more and more kinds of fungi over the years from books and other more senior mushroom hunters.

My favorite book on the subject is one that June got me for Christmas a few years ago. It is the simplest reference book for wild mushrooms I have ever found. And it is because of this book that I have happily discovered the Red Cracked Bolete.

 

When I was little, I was convinced this mushroom was poisonous and no adult told me otherwise. It is a crazy looking mushroom with "tubes" instead of gills and if that isn't weird enough it "bruises" blue!

It is delicious and it turns out to be one of the few edible mushrooms that is safer for a beginner to ID. No look-a-likes (except other edible mushrooms in the Bolete family, some don't taste good and a few will make you sick, but none of them will kill you) and it seems to grow everywhere. It is not elusive like other wild mushrooms. It is literally growing in our front yard here on the homestead.

What  am doing for this mushroom season, other than eating and eating mushrooms, is drying them to use in stews, sauces and soups for the rest of the year. The flavor is indescribable, it's effect is almost like MSG, the soup tastes delicious but you can't really tell what makes it so amazing. The secret? Just a couple of diced up, dried wild mushrooms.

Chanterelles do not dry well, so I sauté them in lots of olive oil and put them in the freezer to spoon into my scrambled eggs this winter. YUM!