Category Archives: wild mushrooms

Finding a Chicken of the Woods Mushroom

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This past Saturday I went with my mushroom club out to New Jersey to look for mushrooms. I mentioned to the people I rode there with that I have been trying to find a Chicken of the Woods Mushroom (chicken mushroom for short). On the walk we found loads of boletes, which look a lot like how kids draw mushrooms. You might know them as cepes or porcini. Most of the mushrooms in the photo below are boletes.

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.

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Still hanging in there

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I thought it might be the heat, but after having a fever last night, I guess I actually am sick. I’ve been so run down lately that I have contemplated going back to sleep right after my first cup of coffee.

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.

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Close Doesn’t Count With Mushrooms

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Ever since I went morel hunting, I have been bitten by the mushroom hunting bug. There are so many things I love about it. I love walking in the woods. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it. I love looking so carefully at nature that you notice things you never would have from a mountain bike. I love photographing the amazing variety of shapes and colors. And of course I love eating mushrooms.

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.
Chicken Mushroom Chicken Mushroom

I was also on the lookout for oyster mushrooms, which look like this.
Oyster mushrooms at the Mushroom Tunnel, Mittagong
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.
Chanterelles

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

baby oyster mushrooms! Gah.

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Endless Morels

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After getting hit hard with morel fever, I started to wonder about something. Perhaps you’ve heard of endless summer, where surfers travel around the globe chasing summer. I started to wonder if you could do that with morels. I figured that the Berkshires were a few weeks behind us here in NYC weather-wise, so the morels would probably be still coming up when ours were done.

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.

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More Morel Hunting

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I admit it. I have morel fever. This past Saturday I went by myself to go morel hunting with the New York Mycological Society. We went to the same place as last week. It was another gorgeous day, and very peaceful not having a bored, hungry kid to appease.

I found 2 morels and many things that had nothing to do with morels. I saw an oriole, which was gorgeous and a deer bounding across the path in front of me. The deer bones I found, I jokingly (sort of) refer to as the bones of the last mushroom hunter who told others about this prime morel picking spot. When I showed the bones to my daughter, she asked me if I was going to put them into the soup I was making. She was not joking.

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