Latest Mushrooms in Northern California

We've had a couple hard freezes, followed by warm spells and some good, drenching rains.  This has brought up a new crop of mushrooms.  It's definitely a new phase in mushroom season: gone are most of the amanitas, slippery jacks and chanterelles, and in their place are some smaller and more delicate fruits.

A beautiful shaggy mane.  I ate one once, it was delicious, but then again so are most things fried in butter.

Blewits!  A fragrant and sweet smelling mushroom, often found in rings around here.

 

Here's the last of the amanitas.  This line of death caps (amanita phalloides) was along the side of the trail.  They haven't sprung up again, so it may be the last of "Death Cap Row" until spring.  One of most poisonous mushrooms in the world, death caps are enjoying a territory expansion thanks to modern human activity.  These mushrooms will melt your liver about 3 days after ingestion. 

 

The only amanita that I've seen recently is the prized amanita muscaria or fly agaric.  Hoping we'll see some fresh ones this week!

Doubled Up Mushrooms

Mushroom season 2009 is in full fruit right now in coastal California. Here's some recent finds under the theme "Doubled up."


Above, a beautiful young fly agaric (amanita muscaria) surrounded by some red (rosy?) russulas.



And here a pine spike (chroogomphus rutilus) is pushing up against an old slippery jack (suillus brevipes).


And finally a russula (can Feral Kevin confirm or correct this?) getting fresh with another slippery jack.

I've seen destroying angels leaning into edible agaricus mushrooms too -- that's a deady combo that has probably resulted in some melted livers in the past.

Chantrelles and the Potatoes of the Gods

Long time no DreamCrisp. Sorry about that.

But to make up for lost time, check out this pic of chantrelles we picked that are as big as your head:



I just picked some more today, not so big as these, but firm and meaty. There's a lot of ways to cook chantrelles, but my favorite so far is chantrelle-infused scalloped potatoes. Here's how to make:

Scalloped Potatoes of the Gods

basic ingredients:
chantrelles, cleaned and chopped
a couple cloves of garlic
1 cup of chicken or vegetable broth
potatoes: 5 to 8 medium red or yellow ones.
1 cup of heavy cream (can substitute goats milk or half and half but you may need to add some flour to thicken).
about a tablespoon of salt and pepper.
olive oil.
butter optional for the heart-lover's special

directions:
Dry-saute the mushrooms for a few minutes, so the juices are running. add some olive oil near the end when you add the garlic and saute more.
Meanwhile, in a bowl mix the broth and the cream and the salt and pepper.
Drizzle olive oil into a shallow glass baking dish.
Add the potatoes to the skillet and get em covered with the mushroom goodness.
Transfer potatoes, mushrooms, and all the juices to the baking dish.
Add the cream mixture and stir it up.
You might want to top the mixture with some pats of butter.
Bake in the oven at 350 for about an hour, or until the tops of the potatoes are browning.

Wait at least 10 minutes for the Scalloped Potatoes of the Gods to cool before attempting to eat.

Amanita Muscaria and other Finds

Mushroom season is upon us! I've been on several forays in the last month, so I'm just gonna splash up some of the best pics. Mushroom identification is like dream interpretation sometimes.... only you can decide about what to do next with the information revealed.

Disclaimer for Kids: don't eat wild mushrooms. Bad idea.

So below is a red bolete, poking out of the duff. I like how they hide.


And these are candy caps (lactarius rubidus) - which are amazing in cookies and even homemade ice cream.


And a tiny shrimp russela - considered "choice" but we just took photos.


But the real winner last week was amanita muscaria.

Yes, this is the smurf mushroom, the original Christmas present under the pine tree, the friend of many Siberian shamans. They were all over the place the week before Christmas!

Here's another amazing one:

Little hider. For more background into the psycho-mythic past of amanita muscaria, check out this post by Feral Kevin.

How to Prepare Amanita Muscaria to Eat

We ate them. Yes, they're poisonous/visionary as is, but we didn't want to go that road so here's how we safely ate the amanita muscarias without any ill effects:

1. Brush loose dirt off freshly picked mushrooms
2. cut them into slices like chicken strivulets
3. boil them for 15-20 minutes in a pot. The muscimol and related toxins are water-soluble so this renders the flesh edible.
4. Pour out the water and do what you will with that. Siberian shaman used to drink reindeer piss to get at these psychotropic compounds - just sayin'.
5. Sauté the mushroom flesh like you treat meat or tofu. We used butter.
6. Eat! The taste is amazing - I kept saying "this tastes like delicious chicken strivulets." A little salt helps too. Eat over rice, as a side, or in a salad.

I usually don't recommend the eating of wild mushrooms so glibly, but this is about the one mushroom in the world that is easily recognizable and has no deadly look-a-likes. After all, amanita muscaria is technically poisonous, so you've been warned. Do your homework and have a mushroom expert on hand whenever cooking wild mushrooms.

Salt Point Foray

A couple friends requested more mushroom postings. So here's some pics from a recent fungi foray in Salt Point, CA. Above is a cup fungus known as an "orange peel." Overall, it's been a weird year for mushrooms due to the erratic rainfall, but we found some nice specimens on this trip.

Mostly we encountered Candy Caps. The fruiting was really obscene. They were everywhere. These delicious lactarius species smell like maple syrup. I walked away with bags full of these little guys, with hopes to add them to my pancakes and cookies. People also flavor homemade ice cream with candy caps too. I've got a whole mason jar filled to the brim, just waiting for the butter to hit the skillet.

The other highlight of the trip was the fruiting of coral fungi under the cedar and pine. I'm told they're edible, but they look too much like brains for me to dig in.


We're heading out tomorrow to our local mountain - Diablo - for some good ole car-camping fun. Can't let the rain keep us inside, or it'll be April before I breathe the fresh air again!

Xmas Crime scene

I love mushroom forays because it scratches my itch to look at the ground. Doing archaeology allowed me this privilege for almost a decade, but then one day I realized I liked live people more than dead ones. Before that, looking at the ground was fueled only by gathering poptops to make into necklaces, and occasional bouts of low self-esteem. (For those of you born later than 1982, the lids of soda cans used to pull completely off, creating razor sharp metal debris that proved to be an excellent choking hazard.)

But for the next four months in CA, the crick in my neck is rewarded by finding mushrooms. And on rare instances, I get to investigate a cross between an archaeological site and a mushroom patch: A mushroom novice's crime scene.

We came across this scene on xmas day. A bag filled to the brim with false chanterelles. These would be quite the catch if only they weren't worthless, poisonous mushrooms. It's as if someone spent the better part of an hour gathering these specimens, and then someone walked by and laughed. The novice was ashamed, and quickly fled the scene, also leaving his knife in the hub-bub.

And here's a pic of a deadly gallerina, found the same day on our foray with primitive skills instructor Kevin Feinstein.


It's pretty, but it'll melt your liver in two days time. Humbling beauty!