Archive for 'mushroom'

Foraging Fungi in the National Forest

Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 at 11:51 am  
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forest products sign 350x270 Foraging Fungi in the National Forest

As of September 2011, the South Park Ranger District does not require a mushroom permit. Fungi foraging in the neighboring White River National Forest, however, requires a free permit for personal use.

Note: I wrote this article at the behest of a Forest Service representative; it is re-posted here, plus subtitles, with permission of the Summit Daily News, which ran it on October 1.  

Just as collecting firewood from the national forest for home use requires a permit, so too does foraging for fungus in the White River National Forest in and around Summit County, Colorado, including areas that were once part of the Arapahoe National Forest. 

Fungi Foraging Permit Free but Required

“Mushroom gathering requires a personal use permit that we have been issuing for free at the Dillon Ranger District Office,” said Cary Green, timber management assistant for the East Zone White River National Forest. The limit is five gallons of mushrooms/day — the equivalent of one 5-gallon bucket or two grocery sacks — with a total season limit of 67 lbs. Other popular Forest Service permits include those for Christmas trees, boughs and transplants. Read the rest of this entry

A Daily Diet of Puffballs and Leftover Bread

Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 9:40 am  
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gem studded puffballs 350x262 A Daily Diet of Puffballs and Leftover Bread

Gem studded puffballs from the backyard.

Looking back to the puffball entry I wrote on August 13 last year, I can’t believe how long it’s taken for my backyard colony of gem-studded puffballs (Lycoperdon perlatum) to emerge this season. Emerge they have, however (in early September, finally!), and with them a host of other puffballs as well.  

First there were the big puffballs I found on September 3 amidst the sagebrush in an open field on a hilltop in a dry aspen forest in Fairplay, Colorado. This after Gregg’s parents took me on a crazy off-roading adventure (which they didn’t think was all that crazy) consisting of a mile-long drive up a hilly mining road strewn alternately with rough talus and nasty ditches from the spring runoff to get to the trailhead. It’s true that I’m a wee bit squeamish about off-roading, but Gregg’s usually cautious parents seem to have a penchant for it ever since they emerged triumphant from an ill-advised tour in their Jeep Grand Cherokee over Mosquito Pass from Leadville to Fairplay a few years ago.   Read the rest of this entry

Lactarius Deliciosus is fine with me

Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 10:12 am  
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delicious milk caps 350x262 Lactarius Deliciosus is fine with me

Newly picked Lactarius deliciosus aka delicious milk caps. Note gills are light orange, not white.

It rained quite a bit a few days ago and now the mushrooms are up again, though we’ve found only one bolete in recent days—a magnificent one, but past its prime so we left it. I wonder if the season for boletes is past?

No biggie. Boletes are good but so are Lactarius deliciosus, a mushroom I had not intended to try because it has gills, but when my friend Butter announced that she was looking for it, I starting looking too—and then found them in abundance. 

Delicious Milky Caps  

Lactarius deliciosus is just as it sounds: milky and delicious. It’s creamy light orange, both on the cap and gills (which should not be white). Deliciosus is what happens when you sauté it in oil for a while—though just how delicious it is seems subject to debate, with Vera Stucky Evenson (1997) saying, “Although a popular edible in other countries, Colorado’s variety of this species are not always delicious.”  Read the rest of this entry

Albatrellus Confluens Conference

Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 9:33 am  
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Albatrellus confluens2 350x262 Albatrellus Confluens Conference

Albatrellus confluens under huckleberries at 11,000 feet.

There’s a funny mushroom growing all over the conifer forest behind our house at 11,000 feet above Fairplay, Colorado. It is light pink/peach in color, similar to a white person’s flesh, but cracked on the surface, like an overworked foot. As this mushroom ages, a green mold takes hold amidst the cracks and on the surface and the mushroom itself gets firm and tough.   

Does this sound appetizing? Because we’ve been really excited about eating this mushroom lately. 

An Albatrellus a Day 

The mushroom is Albatrellus confluens. Vera Stucky Evenson describes it in similar terms to mine but without the human body part analogies in Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains (1997). A former name for the same mushroom is Polyporus confluens, according to Michael Kuo (2007) at mushroomexpert.com. Read the rest of this entry

My Definition of a Good Day: Cow Parsnip for Breakfast, Dinner and Dessert

Sunday, July 31st, 2011 at 6:47 am  
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cow parsnip carpet 262x350 My Definition of a Good Day: Cow Parsnip for Breakfast, Dinner and Dessert

A cow parsnip carpet far as the feet could walk.

I woke up yesterday morning and cooked my very first quiche, in which the principal ingredient was—you guessed it—cow parsnip! We had it for breakfast; we had the leftovers for dinner; and then we had cow parsnip candy sticks for dessert. For me, there is simply no getting tired of cow parsnip.

I tell my friend Butter that I’m learning to cook through wild edible plants, and not the other way around. She uses fancy cooking words like “duxelle” and “frittata,” meanwhile I’m clutching my head and she has the nerve to say that she eschews recipes. OMG if I didn’t have the recipes I’d be lost! Of course I usually can’t be bothered with measuring cups and most of my “principal ingredients” are not in cookbooks anyway, but a little guidance is always good for discovering, for example, that eggs are important to quiches. 

Cow Parsnip Quiche 

The quiche-for-breakfast idea came up as I was trying to think of a way to serve Gregg the king bolete (Boletus edulis) that Butter and I found on our first outing together, by the roadside, after searching for them unsuccessfully on foot for several hours. That was also, incidentally, when I gathered all of the wonderful cow parsnip that now fills my refrigerator.  Read the rest of this entry

A Puffball at 12,000 Feet

Monday, July 25th, 2011 at 1:00 am  
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puffball halved 350x295 A Puffball at 12,000 Feet

Puffball, halved to reveal white gleba but sterile base starting to go yellow-brown. Photo by Gregg Davis.

Not everyone is so enthralled by puffball mushrooms. Well, by the size, maybe—for accounts of huge Calvatia boonianas and their proud finders grace newspapers perhaps more than any other mushroom, says Vera Stucky Evenson in Mushrooms of Colorado (1997), a publication of the Denver Botanic Gardens. But the taste, some opine, is nothing to write home about. 

“I took one to dinner tonight, and one of my friends wasn’t impressed,” Butter wrote to me yesterday at 2:00 a.m. “Puffballs don’t have the strongest taste, but they are nice, and I really enjoy their texture.” Of course, she would—as would I, wild edible plants enthusiasts that we are. But to the distinguished palette? Are they worth the effort? 

Success with puffballs may lie in the preparation method, for while some mushrooms are so flavorful that they constitute a meal or side dish in and of themselves, other might be better suited to, say, a cream sauce—which is how Gregg and I inevitably eat our puffballs.  Read the rest of this entry

Paean for a Mushroom Prophecy Come True

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 at 2:05 pm  
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first mushroom 350x262 Paean for a Mushroom Prophecy Come True

The little muschroom guy who's growing outside our house. Photo by Gregg Davis.

I received a happy email regarding mushrooms this morning from a new friend, who predicted they would be popping up near us in the Colorado High Country within the week. She herself has already found a bolete and some oyster mushrooms and was newly back from foraging giant puffballs in Golden yesterday—all of which of course make me quite envious. 

“You should have great access to Boletus edulis,” she wrote, because “they like it high,” followed by this happy rant: “Omg, I can’t even contain my excitement over mushroom season this year. I want soooo badly to collect enough to dry for the winter, so that I can continue to eat mostly wild then. I’ve been canning and freezing all along the way, but darn it, mushrooms! Yummy savory mushrooms for stew and sauce and gravy! Can you imagine that during January! Holy heck.” 

Mushroom Prediction Inspires Yarn 

I told Gregg about Butterpoweredbike’s prediction while we were in the back yard this morning, though honestly I remained doubtful, thinking the ground was too dry. “No it’s kind of damp,” Gregg said, pressing on the dry dirt to the sponginess below, before re-embarking on his oft-repeated tale of how, last summer while I was away, he found “so many” mushrooms in the forest by the house, including quite possibly a Boletus edulis, and that he has the pictures to prove it. But then—and here’s the exciting finale—“The animals stole them!” Read the rest of this entry

Spring Foraging in the Hudson River Valley

Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 7:26 am  
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morels fiddleheads 336x350 Spring Foraging in the Hudson River Valley

Wild foraged fiddleheads and morels purchased from a health food store.

It’s been a number of years since I made it out east in the spring—and what a spring it is! Apparently it’s been raining more than usual, such that the outdoors is carpeted in lush new green growth the likes of which I seldom see. Coming from the Colorado high country, where snow still covers the forest floor, I have to admit I’m not sure where to begin. 

Gregg and I headed first to Woodstock, New York, to visit my friend Aurora. The Hudson River Valley where Woodstock is located is truly an Eden of wild foods, a fact that she pointed out has been the case for thousands of years—and the reason so many native people relied upon this area for hunting and gathering. Granted, many of the plants that now flourish in these parts were imported by early settlers, but I am overwhelmed by the abundance of wild edibles I have an encountered. 

In the Hudson River Valley we found the following plants ripe for the picking (in addition to many other that are not in season): stinging nettles, garlic mustard, mint, clovers, cleavers, goosefoot, mallow, burdock, several varieties of dock, a few late fern fiddleheads, sorrel, wild carrot, dandelion, plantain, and milkweed shoots. I helped Aurora weed some of these plants out of her garden and ended up with a cooler bag full of wild edibles. Later, on the forested grounds of my Alma Mater, Bard College, we found wild ginger, mayapples not yet fruiting, spicebush, and sweet cicely.  Read the rest of this entry

Mushroom Identification Guides

Sunday, October 10th, 2010 at 9:10 am  
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Certainly there are thousands of mushroom guides from which to choose, but I thought I’d start by giving an overview of my early impressions of the following guides, all of which I received for my birthday from family and friends after my discovery of a big puffball sparked this recent obsession with mushroom hunting. At present, my foraging grounds generally include forested and above-treeline locales in the Rocky Mountains near Fairplay, Colorado.

51NWGFEJAWL. SL160 Mushroom Identification Guides

Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains by Vera Stucky Evenson with the Denver Botanic Gardens (1997, left), an out-of-print guide that Gregg bought me from Boulder Book Store through Amazon. (Incidentally, Amazon was selling the book for $128 to $215 yesterday, but they’re down to $25 now, so get it while the gettin’s good!) The book is tall, skinny, and colorful, with a pretty matte finish and good picture identifications. I’ve used it along with the others for all of my recent identifications, and I find much useful information therein. My only critique is some inconsistency in listing common names (sometimes it does; sometimes it doesn’t), which became important to me after I attended a local mushroom hike and the leader relied heavily on common names.

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The Morel of this Story

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 at 9:43 am  
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stinkhorn phallus 224x350 The Morel of this Story

A stinky stinkhorn, Phallus species.

The morel of this story was cause for much excitement upon our arrival in Fort Collins, Colorado, yesterday afternoon. I came prepared, my mushroom identification guides in my backpack, in the hopes that the recent rains and warmer temperatures down in Fort Collins would result in some fungus growth. Sure enough, when I asked Wendy if she’d seen any mushrooms around, she replied that there were, in fact, mushrooms growing right in the backyard. 

I rushed outside to find one last mushroom amidst the deep grass and dog poops in her tiny, yet lush, backyard. And it was a morel! I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d never found a morel before, but there are several varieties and they all have distinctive, honeycombed caps and are supposed to be “choice” wild edibles. Gregg was a little turned off by the presence of poop but I assured him I’d wash (even though I understand you aren’t supposed to wash wild mushrooms) and paper-towel it clean, scraping off any dirty parts with a knife. 

A couple of days have passed since the last rain, so the honeycombed cap was starting to decay into brownish goo—but no matter, I’d just eat the stem this time. So I plucked the funny mushroom and showed it to Gregg and Wendy, grinning from ear to ear.  Read the rest of this entry

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