This past weekend was jam-packed with birthday fun. It was also a very mushroom-filled weekend. My in-laws gave me a pocket knife, and Neil gave me a collecting basket for mushroom hunting. On saturday morning, we christened both, by going to Stony Brook in  Harriman State Park for a walk with my mushroom group. The weather was spectacular and the leaves were just starting to turn golden.

We walked along a stream and found lots of mushrooms, including delicious black trumpets. With all the rain we’ve had, this summer has been one of the best for mushroom hunting many people can remember. This is my first year, so I don’t have anything to compare it to. Here are some photos from the walk.

That night we went to see Zarkana by Cirque du Soleil. The production was spectacular. I would love to go back several more times to absorb all of the layers of  scenery, costumes, performances, etc. If you can possibly go to see it, you should run now and get tickets. It was amazing. We got heavily discounted tickets, so were able to bring Lindsay. I think it blew her 7-year old mind.

Then Sunday, which was my actual birthday, I slept in. For those of you with young kids, you know how rare and wonderful this is. Neil cooked up the black trumpets with eggs and we had a nice breakfast. The day was beautiful, so we went for a walk in Prospect Park. Later that night, we met friends for dinner and came back to our place for drinks afterwards. It was a great weekend with family and friends and I felt very celebrated.

So while I love the zoo and the animals, I have been bitten by the mushroom bug. Seriously, I can’t walk down the sidewalk in Brooklyn without peering into people’s planters to see if there are mushrooms growing. This season has been quite rainy, so there are mushrooms popping up everywhere. Even in the cracks of the pavement you will see mushrooms forming.

I saw loads of interesting mushrooms at the zoo. Well over 20 different varieties. Sometimes it was hard to tell if a shelf mushroom was real or a realistic fake in an exhibit. I have been on the look out for hen of the woods mushrooms as they are being spotted in this area now. We were on a monorail ride and I thought I saw some down below. In the rhinoceros pen. It was a dilemma…for a second.

And yes, those are mushrooms in the photo above.

We were also looking for chanterelles, which are a bright orange color. We found a few, although many were past their prime. We also found some Jack O Lantern mushrooms, which besides being poisonous, also glow in the dark. So when one of my car mates spotted something orange from the trail, we thought it was probably a group of Jack ‘O Lanterns. I was absolutely thrilled to discover chicken mushrooms. These tasty little mushrooms cook up to taste like chicken. What’s really nice about them is that when you find them, you really have a meal on your hands. There are also really no other mushrooms that look like these, so they are a very safe mushroom for beginner hunters like myself.

Although I haven’t been posting I have actually been doing things.

Mushroom Hunting (and eating)
Although we’ve recently gotten rain, it has been so stinking hot that there weren’t many of the expected mushrooms in the woods last weekend. This plant is called Indian Pipes and isn’t a mushroom. It is a plant that lost its chloroform through some weird evolutionary decision. It needs other plants (and that’s generally a mushroom called a russula) to bring it the nutrition it needs. There were no russulas to be found nearby. I did find some bright orange boletes that sautéed up nicely.

Knitting

I made this blue shawl for Lindsay. She’s going to be a flower girl this month and the bridesmaids colors are royal blue. You can find the pattern here.

We have friends who are expecting a baby girl in September. I made this sweet little cardigan for her. You can find the pattern here.

The last one is a bit problematic because I am still soaking wet behind the ears. The only mushroom I am able to identify with certainty is a morel. I have a great book which concentrates on a few easily identifiable delicious mushrooms (See my reading list). Every time I go out into the woods I hope to find some of them.

This weekend I was so determined to find some of these choice edibles that I was practically willing the mushrooms I found to be the ones I wanted them to be. That is not a very smart thing to do with mushrooms. Here are some examples:

Chicken mushrooms. They are bright orange mushrooms that grow up the sides of trees like shelves. They are so bright that you wouldn’t be able to miss them. I was so excited when I found this one! You can see the top and the bottom of the same mushroom.

Turns out this is a Ling Chih (Ganoderma lucidum). Here is what a chicken mushroom looks like for comparison.

I was also on the lookout for oyster mushrooms, which look like this.

What I thought were oysters at first turned out not to be. These have hexagonal shapes under the caps, not the straight gills that true oysters have.

My heart almost stopped when I saw these guys. Chanterelles!!!

Holy cow. We were having friends over for dinner the next night and I was already dreaming of the possible recipes I could make with them. Neil asked me to double check with my mushroom group (New York Mycological Society). I posted photos on their facebook page and within 30 minutes got an answer. Yes, they were chanterelles. No, they weren’t good to eat. In fact 1/4 of the people who eat them get upset stomachs. I was so disappointed. This is what the tasty kind look like.

And now looking at my photos I think I’ve come to a sickening realization. I think these guys are……..

baby oyster mushrooms! Gah.

I couldn’t go the weekend I thought they would be best, but we all went up Memorial Day weekend. I joined the Berkshire Mycological Society’s hike that Sunday and sure enough there were morels! Most of them were past their prime, but we still managed to find enough to make a delicious morel scrambled egg breakfast the next morning.

This group is much smaller than the one here, and in fact only one member went that day. My mother-in-law and I felt as though we had a personal guided tour. I am definitely going to join them again when I’m up visiting.

I’ll post photos of the mushrooms I found up there on that hike. I’m just trying to identify some of them, which I’m not great at.

After breakfast, we drove in a caravan to nearby woods. At one point in time it was an apple orchard, but now it was overgrown with trees, brambles and a fair amount of poison ivy. We gave a ride to Dorota, who had gone the year before and had come home without any morels. I was trying to brace myself for similar disappointment and just enjoy the glorious, sunny day. It seemed as though conditions were good for mushrooms. Insane amount of rain followed by sun, right?

After a while, I found my first morel. It was really exciting. Neil found another one almost immediately thereafter. It’s very hard to mistake a morel with any other mushroom. There are mushrooms called false morels, which Neil also found. The false morels (seen below) don’t have hollow stems like true morels have. I found one more morel right along the path where the group had all passed. That made me really proud, because there are some real experts in the group.

False Morels

Hollow Stems of True Morels

We searched around for a while longer to no avail, so we decided to eat our picnic lunch. My friend Victoria came with her son Theo, who is Lindsay’s age. He wandered away from our picnic to play nearby. We looked up to his shriek of “MUSHROOMS!”, although we didn’t give it a whole lot of thought because he and Lindsay had shrieked with the same amount of glee at finding dandelions on our walk. However as he came running over to us, we joked that he found morels. Then when he came closer, we saw he had something largish in both hands. And, yes indeed, Theo had found a patch of morels. They must have gotten about 8. I got a couple more and Dorota got a couple.

The 2 new ones (on the right in the photo) look slightly different from the esculenta variety I found in the woods. I’ll need the help of my new mushroom friends to see what kind of morel it is. Update: they are esculentas as well.

Now I have to decide how to cook them! I think I might just stick to sautéing them in a very good butter and putting them on toast. I really want to taste their mushroom flavor without it competing with other flavors.

We found a few other types of mushrooms. Here are some photos.

So I know that this blog is supposed to be all about all things urban, and it hasn’t been lately. I went to France with my sister to visit my father. He’s not well, so he spent a lot of time sleeping. During his afternoon naps, my sister and I went out on photo safaris. And just for the record…although I live in one of the biggest cities, I am a nature lover. We go up to the Berkshires to visit my husband’s family and I soak in as much nature as I can while I’m there. 

So while my father was resting and the relentless French hunters were in the woods shooting, my sister and I walked in the woods (wearing bright colors thank you very much) and took photos. We were absolutely amazed at the diversity of mushrooms. 

We ran into a man who was mushroom hunting. He was an elegant older gentleman with a white handlebar mustache. I couldn’t have made up a more perfect French mushroom hunter if I tried. Okay, I guess I would have given him a basket instead of a plastic shopping bag, but I doubt I would have thought of the mustache. I spoke with him in my halting French and asked him what he was looking for. He had two different types of mushrooms that we never did see ourselves. One was a charcoal gray mushroom and one was called sanguine, or something like that with blood (sang) at the beginning of the word. That was very descriptive, because where the mushroom was broken, red liquid seeped out of it. It left very believable blood drops on the sides of his bag.

Below are a few of the mushrooms we saw. The tiny yellow ones that look like the ends of a pencil eraser are called bird’s nests. When the spores are ready the tops come off and you see tiny little puff balls inside the nest that resemble eggs. Absolutely tiny and amazing!