Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Mushroom season!


The rains have begin again and I'm celebrating, as usual, by posting pictures of putrescence. That's really how I roll. Above is a fruiting of shaggy manes - they're delicious fried in butter and garlic (what isn't?) but you better do it before they explode into a black inky mess. They change from plump firm flesh to drippy goo in less than 24 hours. Sort of like time-lapse bubonic plague victims.

Watch out - make sure you don't have a related mushroom that's known as the "alcohol inky." It disables your body's ability to digest alcohol for several days (enyzyme actions) - so even a beer could cause terrible pain and digestive troubles.

Don't worry mom, I'm a mycophob by nature, so I'm really careful. In general successful mushroom hunting is all about caution and research and more caution and then more research. But then: yumminess!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like the tribes our anthropologists study, we cling to our taboos and seek to justify them by rationalizing them.

As though the risk of painful beer were not reason enough.

Anonymous said...

If McKenna was right, those could be DEEP FRIED ALIENS YOU'RE EATING, MAN!

Ryan said...

mmm - what about deep fried beer? oh yeah - new yorkers already did that when they invented onion rings.