Mushrooms

Things were finally beginning to start to come together on today's walk. I have been on perhaps half a dozen mushroom walks or plant walks which included mushrooms and kept an interested eye out in the woods. Mushrooms, though, are an immensely confusing world and perilous if you are interested in eating them, which, helplessly, I am. Plants I have got to grips with more easily but I have done more than three times the number of courses and engaged with them more on my own.

Matthew was particularly knowledgeable and calm; I think that had something to do with it. I wonder, not for the first time, if there is perhaps a right time for understanding, as well as a right person. I am still far from identifying even most families but now feel I am making a start - a dangerous place to be.

This evening I counted out up the mushrooms I might have been able to recognise before the walk. About 30. After the walk I have added maybe another 25 of the 70 we found. Compare that to Matthew's thousands....

I dry fried the bay bolete.  Still a bit slimy but OK. By the time I taken the spores off the red cracked bolete there was effectively nothing left.   

My blushers did not blush when cut - I noticed this is happening a lot this year. So, despite having them checked and double checked before I left by an expert with decades of experience I composted them. I wonder now if they were the (edible) grey spotted amanita 

(Amanita excelsa). The potentially deadly candidate for confusion is the panthercap although I have not met anyone who has found it in Scotland (yet).

This knocked my confidence and put me off the oak milkcap.  I was beginning to wonder if all this fear was worth it. I tasted, raw, a little of my double checked charcoal burner and it did taste nice, like the one I had tried in the wood, but then I got a peppery hit, or imagined I did by which time I had swallowed the tiny piece and it scared me. I then wondered if I should have spat out this brittlegill rather than swallow it raw but was now too scared to look it up but decided to accept my fate.  I am sorry to say that these, the best eaters of the russulas, ended up in the compost too.

I summoned the shreds of my courage and blanched then fried the few honey fungus caps with some spice as directed.  They were delicious.  I had only had a banana all day, it was 4PM and I was starving. But I have not done my homework with honey fungus. They change appearance over their life so again although they too had been triple checked, while I could not bring myself to swallow them, it was also all I could do not to swallow them. 

None of this makes sense because my mushrooms had all been checked twice and I have had mushrooms cooked for me by other foragers at least half a dozen times. What irrational creatures we can be.

There was a packet of exotic mushrooms in the fridge from M&S which I had for lunch but by that time I was such a nervous wreck that the rolled edges of the store-bought giant oyster now appeared to me like a potentially deadly brown roll rim.

That evening, I took a sleeping tablet for my frazzled nerves & fell asleep wondering about undocumented interactions between the chemicals therein and the properties of wild mushrooms...