Dr. Shroomlove: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the rain

I’ve been on mushroom forays with the Asheville (NC) Mushroom Club and even tried – unsuccessfully – to grow Shiitake mushrooms on logs that I inserted plugs into. But I never felt confident to eat a mushroom that I gathered from the wild.

This Spring, I found this large mushroom growing from a stump in my front yard. I didn’t know what kind of mushroom it was and by the time I did identify it with some confidence (oyster mushroom), it had became limp and buggy and inedible. It was the mushroom that got away and I felt a great loss.The problem is that the mushroom that doesn’t get away might either kill you or make you writhe on the ground wishing you were dead. Most mushroom books catalog 100s of mushrooms – some tasty, some not so much, and many deadly. If you want to live to be an old shroomer, it is not enough to know how to recognize those few tasty mushrooms – you need to recognize the poisonous mushrooms that could potentially be confused for the edible ones.

Learning to identify 100s of mushrooms seemed like too much work for a very risky pleasure. Then I came across the book, Start Mushrooming – The Easiest Way To Start Collecting 6 Edible Mushrooms by Stan Tekiela and Karen Shanberg. This small paperback book takes a very different approach from most mushroom books. The book features only 6 common and tasty mushrooms that 1) are not easily confused with deadly look-alikes, and 2) can be confirmed by answering 6 non-technical yes or no questions.  The mushrooms they cover include: morels, oysters, shaggy manes, sulfer shelf aka chicken-of-the-woods, giant puffball, and hen-of-the-woods.

There are many useful websites on identifying mushrooms but the best way to learn to forage for edible mushroom in your area is to learn from local, experienced mushroom club members. Visit your local mushroom club (click here) and accompany them on a foray into the woods.

However, the mushroom that drove my wife and I to purchase a dehydrator this year is the beautiful Chanterelle. Thanks to the rain this year, our woods lit up with egg-yoke-colored trumpet-shaped mushrooms – the same ones enjoyed for hundreds of years by royalty and gourmets. Click here for a Wikipedia article.  We could not eat all the mushrooms I gathered within a few days so we

• ate some in scrambled eggs and with grilled meat
• sautéed some in butter with onions and garlic and then froze them or
• dehydrated and vacuum packed mushrooms into half ounce packages. Each package reconstitutes into the equivalent of roughly 4-5 ounces of fresh mushrooms.

I love mushrooms and now they give one good reason to love the rain. Here are a few pictures of our chanterelles.