Nice! You may want to stir fry the black trumpet (same or similar to your blue chanterelle) hot pepper and rice, add salt and white pepper…very yummy. It’s a recipe from someone in Yunnan province, china.
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nice haul!
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Btw, do we have true saffron milkcap in the US? I have tons of them under my pine trees in late October but I think they could be false saffron milkcaps or more likely, Lactarius semisanguifluus.
We don’t have “true” saffron milkcaps in the sense that it’s a group of very similar edible species and the ones we have aren’t the same as the European original Lactarius deliciosus. (Details: Lactarius deliciosus group (MushroomExpert.Com) )
However, we mainly seem to use the same common name in North America for this group. (Example: Saffron Milk Cap (Lactarius deliciosus) in Ontario)
We also have a bleeding milkcap, Lactarius sanguifluus, that looks extremely similar but has red latex instead of orange.
In my experience they taste similar and both pretty underwhelming, kind of a “generic wild mushroom” flavor. Bleeding milkcap might be slightly better.
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In Mushrooms Demystified, David Arora claims that black trumpets are much better than blue chantrelles, but we don’t have them in my area. The blue chantrelles fruit in massive quantities; it’s easy to get a ton of them so we were going to try preserving a bunch with this recipe: Blue Chanterelle Mushroom Jerky - Forager | Chef
The trick will be finding time to make it…
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Found this nice Chicken of the Woods today.
3 qts. of slices in the freezer snd rnough for supper tonight.
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Another great afternoon in the woods today. Found matsutakes for the first time ever, my last real “bucket list” species. Plus a ton of admirable boletes, some hedgehog mushrooms and winter chantrelles.
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So, things have started to pop up after the rains. For some reason the good agaricus are everywhere around the village, even in the park across the road. But I keep harvesting the yellow staining ones by shoving them into buckets and relocating them to the driest parts of the orchard where they shouldn’t push out other edible mushrooms but could help keep the plants more hydrated. Even if they are slighty poisonous, it feels weird to grab them like a ghoul and and spread them around like garbage.
I appreciate these tiny parasols at the edge of a hugel bed much better. I guess it has to do with the lack of inherent disappointment.
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Cepes season has just started. The mushroom hunters keep their locations very secret, like the truffle groves. the prices are very high, but the taste is excellent. Cepes are the French name for Porcini.
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I went for an evening dog walk in the forest, yesterday… Large parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota procera) are everywhere. I haven’t found a single bolete, but it may have been that I just couldn’t try hard enough. My dog has this idea that deer bucks eat staffies during mating season. I don’t really blame him, because we got surprised from up close a few times when he was a puppy, but it’s not fun being dragged by a scared ball of muscle, when you’re looking for mushrooms.
Anyway, I have meat patties on parasol mushroom cushions baking in the oven right now…
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Do chantrelles have any poisonous look a likes?
Is it possible for old, picked shrooms that dry up on the counter to inoculate a piece of wood?
Sure. Leave an oyster mushroom on an untreated wooden table in the garden and you may get a mushroom version of the fairy tale furniture…
It is not too easy to achieve, but possible with wood-eating mushrooms.
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I came across some remarkably large white mushrooms on a walk this weekend at a local park.
I’ve no idea what they are and I am not one for forging anyway, so I did not pick them, just marveled at their size and took some pictures.
The woods themselves were full of mushrooms, especially after all the rains we’ve had and the unusually wet September. It’s nice to see the diversity. I was honestly kind of surprised by the woods themselves too. It’s a newer park on the edge of the city, most of it is open grassy fields for sports and some playgrounds, but they have a few acres of some pine timber which they added trains to. The woods look to have been clear-cut roughly 25-30 years ago and were not replanted. For loblolly pine in this region, natural regeneration is usually enough after a clear-cut so there’s no need for the expense of planting. The pines themselves look pretty good and are about harvest size now.
But what was interesting to me wasn’t the pines. Sure, the woods are a pretty typical “forestry monoculture” pine timberland, but it’s actually really far removed from being a monoculture, despite being clear-cut and then not replanted fairly recently.
Walking the trails, I saw wax myrtle, sweetspire, and sumac along the edges of the woods, and in the understory there were at least two species of smilax, some red maples, inkberry and American holly, three different blueberries, native bambo, coastal doghobble, sweetleaf, some really nice looking redbay and sourwood trees, water oak, Virginia creeper, muscadines, Carolina jasmine, a few nice sized sassafras trees, sweetbay magnolia, and of course loblolly pine.
The mundane has its own splendor sometimes. Just a little patch of southern yellow pine standing tall.
I’ve harked on this theme before, but I feel like there’s a tendency among naturalists and environmentalists to just “write off” habitats that aren’t pure or pristine enough. But honestly, clear-cut timberlands and even a lot of older suburban areas can be surprisingly rich ecosystems that are more diverse than you’d think just from looking at them.
Anyway, I came here to post about big mushrooms that may or may not be super poisonous. I’ll stop rambling.
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There is a trend here in nature preservation and that is to do nothing. Nothing, other than not alowing heavy machinery and vehicles in. Letting nature do as it pleases, including not tampering with invasives (those not introduced by humans) and not keeping departing species on life-support at the expense of other life forms. I mostly like that approach, if it does not concern the only surving population of said species. The idea, that we are to decide, which specific moment in the everchanging flux is the one that has to stay and be protected against change, is just preposterous. And generally, it is the specific moment in time when said area/state’s nature protection was institutionalised - that is a hillarious criterion in itself.
But back to your mushroom… Does it have a skirt? have you peeked?
I didn’t see any skirts, no. But the pine needles are quit thick, so no way of knowing for sure what’s down there, especially since I didn’t really touch them or poke around looking for skirts.
Man, that sentence doesn’t sound right 
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No peekin’ under skirts now. 
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We got 2 days of nice slow rain from the remnants of Helene; we’d needed it badly.
Kate the Wonder Dog and I drove up into the woods yesterday, looking for mushrooms. There’s a pile of elm logs that I’d cut up enough to push out of the woods’ road after the top broke out of a big old tree. I’d gathered some oysters there earlier in the season, but after the rain, they were really popping! Picked the biggest and left the others to grow… will go back in a day or so to pick more.
‘Summer’ oyster mushroom, Pleurotus pulmonarius
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@Melon… I have taken my neighbor morel hunting a few times in the spring.
He texted me this morning that he had found some nice chanterelle mushrooms in his field.
I went over to check them out… this is what I found.
You asked about chanterelle look alikes… and that is what these are. They are called jack-o-lantern.
Jackolantern grow in tight clusters… they are growing off dead wood. Chants often grow in patches but more spaced out (they do not grow off dead wood).
Chants are white inside once split open… these jackolanterns were orange inside.
Just a couple differences.
TNHunter
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