Tag Archives: mushrooms

Nary a Morel to be Found

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This Saturday Neil and I went on a morel foray. Although the spring has been extremely dry, it rained recently and we were hopeful that that would lead to some good morel hunting. Nope. Between about 60 people, only 4 morels were found. I wasn’t one of the ones who found one. Bummer. And it doesn’t help that a good friend from Seattle is practically tripping over morels in her garden. And doesn’t believe me when I tell her they are real morels. So she doesn’t eat them. Wah.

But, it was a beautiful sunny day out of the city. I can’t disclose the location, although with such poor results, I doubt anyone will be banging my door down to tell them. And I saw a turtle. You have to get excited about something, right?

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School Fundraiser

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I’ve been organizing a fundraiser at my daughter’s school in conjunction with Earth Day. We are selling oyster mushroom growing kits through Back To The Roots. If you order one, Back To The Roots shares a portion of the profits with my daughter’s school in Brooklyn.

My husband gave me one of their kits for Christmas and they are really fun. C’mon, you know you want to try this! Just make sure to enter “PS58” in the coupon code for the school to get credit. The offer expires on 4/20, which is our school’s Earth Day celebration.

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Mushroom Walk

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This past Sunday we went for a walk with my mushroom group up in Van Cortland park in the Bronx. The temperatures were in the mid-40s and we found over 40 different species of mushrooms. We even found a killer tree!

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Birthday Weekend

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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.

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Mushrooms at the Zoo

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Yesterday we went to the Bronx Zoo. If you haven’t been there, you really need to go. They work really hard to make realistic and livable habitats for the animals. It is a far cry from the concrete jail cells that used to be common in zoos. All the money goes to support wildlife recovery efforts, education, etc. You can spend the better part of the day there and still not see everything.

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.

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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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Hunting Morels

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Yesterday we joined up with some members of the NY Mycological Society in Rockland County for some morel hunting. Before we started, 2 members hosted a breakfast at their nearby home. It was a lovely spread and it was nice to put some faces to names.

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.

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