Cepes season is in full swing here. The territories are being marked by the mushroom hunters. This Saturday i have been invited to the home of a mushroom hunter. I will take pictures.
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Itâs been a tough mushroom season here with all the drought, but I managed to find a few wood blewits and some shrimp of the woods today.
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Some of the Chicken of the woods, fresh from the oven as a flatbread âchickenâ pizza. Includes crushed tomatoes, olive oil, vegan mozzarella, garlic and roasted poblano peppers. A little fresh thyme on top after cooking. Chicken of the woods was braised in white wine before going on the flatbread. Yum!
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Wood blewitsâŚlearned a new name again. These are delicious and my favourite autumn mushrooms. We call them ciruvka fialova and they are plentiful at this time of the year.
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Yes, theyâre one of my favorites! I was very happy to find them, even if there were only a few.
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We had our first frost yesterday. The good mushrooms have been done for a bit now 
My life is extremely seasonal, It is the constant trepidation and longing for the different parts of the year. I think it is turning me into a neo pagan, i really like the way they divide the year into eight parts with each having a significance attached to the flow of the seasons.
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I got the book Mushrooming without Fear yesterday, and we had a nice rain today. Tomorrow Iâll take a walk in the woods and see what I can find!
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Very good idea. Many years ago a family member picked mushrooms and wound up with some poisonous doubles. They made a big meal for a lot of family members and killed them all.
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Yeah, I have always wanted to try mushrooming but didnât want to get a bad one. This book has the concept to avoid any with gills to essentially eliminate the chance of bad mushrooms.
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Thatâs a good start. All the truly dangerous ones have gills. Itâs not a bad idea to learn what the dangerous ones look like, so you wonât even think of picking something that looks like them. There are less than 10 types that you really need to look out for, so itâs really not a big lift.
It is actually very hard to do yourself in with wild mushrooms. You can certainly come to regret it but most of what people target are the safer varieties with no deadly lookalikes.
I think 90%+ of deaths come from the amanita family?
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there are several particularly nasty ones that actually taste sweet when eaten and you feel fine for several days until your liver and kidneys are shut down and your body poisons itself to death. why many people avoid picking them all together.
There are a tonne of chanterelles in my area this year, I could probably pick 40 pounds within a kilometre of my house. I have no idea why this particular year is so good for them, but it is.
Anybody picking mushrooms by taste deserves whatâs coming to them. Taste and poison are unrelated qualities, people used to sweeten wine with lead oxide.
But there are some truly stupid people out there, i have known a few. They would eat a mushroom and smile, confusing stupidity for bravery. Then they get sick or god forbid die, and people become more scare of mushrooms. The reality is that we have more poisonous berries here than poisonous mushrooms but you donât see people over reacting about those. You donât know it, leave it alone.
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Itâs good to train your neighbors that you like mushrooms. My neighbor called me over to look at some âbig mushrooms,â and led me straight to a beautiful flush of maitake. A little older than I prefer to pick, but still in great shape.
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great haul!
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Thatâs way more than I thought they got. What does the taste resemble? Never tried one.
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Anyone more experienced have a good guess what this brown puffball is? My understanding of (edible) puffballs is that they are white outside and in.
Edit to add: has a funky smell, too.
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There are no poisonous puffballs. That doesnât mean that they all taste good⌠I would do the salt/butter/garlic test on it. They also work great as a pizza topping.
Basically if you slice it and it is white, and consistently marshmallow textured throughout, you are safe. The only caveat is amanita eggs that when small may resemble a puffball but all it takes is to slice them to see that there is the outline of a mushroom there.
With supermarket mushrooms being as expensive as they are, and their average button mushrooms as bland as they are, these actually compare quite well against them. When you start finding king boletes and my favorite of them all, hedgehogs, nothing on the average supermarket can compare and you donât even want to look up how much those go for at the specialty stores.
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They can be quite massive! They have a nice âwhite meatâ kind of flavor. Not really like pork or chicken, but evocative of both. I particularly like them roasted with soy sauce.
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