Picking and eating wild mushrooms
Posted by DavidM in Reduce, re-use, recycle | 18 November 2006
Being a bit of a towny I've always been nervous about picking and eating wild mushrooms. The hallucenegenic ones would just give me flashbacks of my student years, but some of the seriously poisonous varieties aren't dissimilar to common varieties.
But we had an ash tree in our garden that died and now we're getting regular growth of several vareties of fungi and I decided it was time to see if I could use them rather than just chop them up with the lawn mower.
So I bought the Easy edible mushroom guide by Prof. David Pegler and yesterday when the crop had grown back again I went out and did some fungal identification. The book has photos and diagrams as well as reasonably good descriptions. Importantly it also shows similar unhealthy varieties next to the edible ones.
We have four varieties out there. The most prolific looks a bit like the Chanterelle which is a common and tasty fungi. However, on closer inspection it had deep gills on the underside so is more likely to be a False Chanterelle. Not poisonous but not pleasant either so I won't be eating them.
Two varieties I couldn't positively identify so took the lower risk decision to leave well alone.
That left a tall, white, cylindrical fungi. The good news is that not only did it look exactly like the edible Shaggy Ink Cap, but the description also said it was 'unlikely to be confused with any poisonous species'. Excellent.
Six stalks later I was back in the kitchen. Three went into a Shaggy Ink Cap curry and three saved. Before I ate my dinner I showed my wife exactly what I'd eaten in case she found me collapsed later.
But no need. Apart from overdoing the curry flavour, it was fine. Unfrotunately I also found the shaggies don't store well and have liquefied this morning into a black ink.
Taking the book's advice I'll pick them early in the day next time and have them for breakfast. So they may not replace all my shop bought mushrooms but they'll add some variety.
