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Saturday Morning Garden Blogging Vol. 21.06: #Shroomscrolling (and foraging and photography and...) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-08
Good morning, Saturday Morning Garden Blog-Friends old and new! This cheerful long-running tradition appears every Saturday morning at 9am Eastern, and lasts well into the week as conversations percolate. A core crew of us reads every comment, as far into the week as it goes.
Anyone who likes to garden or talk about gardening or gardening-adjacent topics and whatever they devolve into… WELCOME!
So, I’m going to start off today’s contribution with a disclaimer. All mushrooms can be eaten… AT LEAST ONCE.
(If you survive the first try, then maybe you’ve landed on one that can be eaten a second time)!
Now, on to a festival of fungus fun! You’ve been doing wayyy too much doom-scrolling — oh, don’t deny it, so have I — so now it’s time for a foray into #Shroomscrolling!!
My foraging and photography journey started in 2020, as pandemic cabin-fever set in and few entertainments outside the home were available. I started taking a daily lunch-walk, just half an hour loop on the park paths by the neighborhood drainage ditch. I challenged myself to NOTICE something new every single walk, and there always was… and some of them were not just beautiful, but… edible.
Edible art!
The cover shroom and the one just above caught me by surprise. What were these beautiful things, and why had I never known such a glory existed? Well, it was because I hadn’t been looking. These are pheasant-back mushrooms, also known as dryad’s saddle, Latin name Cerioporus squamosus. Once I knew to look, I found more and more of them:
These grow BIG!
And, in a variety of shapes.
Unfortunately, I have not had much success with making these particularly tender or tasty. There is a nice page at Forager | Chef that makes them sound quite delightful and maybe I’ll make another attempt one day. From my own experience, I’m going to rate these lovely but a definite “meh” in the kitchen chez AnnieJo.
Let’s take this #Shroomscrolling from least successful to most… the next entry is the yellow oyster mushroom, aka golden oyster, Pleurotus citrinopileatus. These grow at several places along my lunch-walk trail as well:
Yellow oyster mushrooms in the light!
Such a bright color...
Here’s how they look all cleaned and just put into the pan with a few chives…
Can hardly wait!
I think I scrambled them into some eggs and found them quite tasty! Here’s the Forager | Chef roundup on how to prepare and preserve yellow/golden oysters. Unfortunately, these beauties don’t come into my home very often because Mr. AnnieJo finds their odor absolutely nauseating and not only doesn’t want to eat them, he can’t even tolerate being around them at all. So if I want these, I need to plan very carefully to be able to forage in the morning and consume at lunch, all while he’s at work. Once he retires, these may drop from the repertoire altogether!
Various colors of grow-yer-own oyster mushrooms from “North Spore” at our grocery.
On to the next! Here’s a fascinating one that can swell up huge… the giant puffball!
Tennis ball size here, not too impressive but fun for showing off nail wraps...
Giant puffball can grow to basketball size (not joking, I’ve seen that size but it was on private property so I couldn’t harvest/dissect)! I think of them kind of like tofu, in that they have a very mild flavor of their own and will take on the flavor of the oil or sauces you prepare them with. Here’s frying up some puffball cubes:
See how tofu-ish?
And here was the Pad Thai that these wound up in:
Super-psyched with how well these turned out!
Just to mix things up a bit, I’ll link to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for this one: “Foraging for Football-sized Fungi.”
Next up is the Hen of the Woods, aka Maitake, Grifola frondosa — which Forager | Chef describes in delicate terms:
At a glance the mushrooms look like a roosting bird, which is where the name comes from. They're a parasitic polypore mushroom that infects living trees and injured trees, causing a butt-rot in the host.
Yum, right?!
The only one I’ve ever found, looking a bit like a gray hydrangea flower
Alas, I didn’t try anything more adventuresome with this one than frying it up and doing my standard scrambled egg thing. Beautiful shroom and tasty, but I’ll have to find another tree with butt-rot (as it were) to expand my horizons with the hen of the woods.
Are you ready to get to the REALLY good stuff now?
Because in second-place, we come to the prized delicacy of the morel mushroom, the mighty Morchella.
Do NOT attempt to consume the one on the left, or you will need more than morel support!
This was actually the first forage mushroom to which I was introduced after moving to Wisconsin. A friend gave us a precious cache of foraged morels. I still have the recipe we used on that amazing occasion:
Soooo good!
We see morels for sale at the farmer’s market every spring, and the prices are prohibitive. It would be fun to actually go searching one of these times, but so far I’ve only landed on one just by being the fungus-noticer that I have become:
Well hello there, you big beautiful morel-morsel!
Just enough to enhance an egg dish, yum! Forager | Chef has all sorts of good ideas for morels in greater quantity.
And finally, my favorite foraged fungus of the finder’s festival: Chicken of the Woods, Laetiporus sulphureus. Forager | Chef describes it like so:
With their bright orange color and meaty texture, chicken of the woods mushrooms are one of the most exciting edible mushrooms out there, and if you catch them at the right time they can be some of the best mushrooms you'll ever eat. They're a perfect wild mushroom for beginners, and something to look forward to every year.
The first time I photographed one, it almost seemed clown-like:
I mean, what’s up with this thing?
Second one looked like a beautiful flower, and when I posted it to Facebook, one of my friends said (and I quote):
Get in my belly!!
Which was my first indication that this garishly-colored growth was a great delicacy indeed.
Alas, it didn’t look like this any more when I went back to check it out.
Since then, I have found-and-foraged twice. I’ve yet to find a big one since, but this little guy:
aww, wookit da widdle baby
was enough to flavor (you know it) my scrambled eggs!
It gets even brighter orange when you fry it up. Garden beans!!
The taste is meaty and rich. You can bet I will be on the lookout for chicken-of-the-woods foraging this coming season!
Thus endeth the edible #Shroomscrolling. But wait, there’s more… I can’t leave this diary without posting just a few of the other amazing fungi and slime molds that have caught my eye these past 4.5 years.
The violet-toothed polypore. Only purple for a short while, then fades.
Crown-tipped coral, looking like a terrarium or aquarium denizen
I don’t know what this one is, but it starts out red and then turns black
Here’s another one that does a dramatic color change:
Here’s the pink phase of the slime mold called “wolf’s milk”
And here’s one that has turned from pink to silver-gray
Hey CWalter, here’s some ASMR for you… Wolf’s Milk pimple popping!! (Ewww! and, not my video, but you can see why I *had* to include it here)
x YouTube Video
Here’s another fun-to-pop fungus, the common puffball:
I call this photo “Inhale, Exhale”
No idea what this one is, but isn’t it dramatic?
Dramatic fungi-photos even happen in wintertime!
See if you can spot this kind of shroom in the next photo...
My dried fungus artwork! This is built on an 8-inch grapevine wreath, attached to an 11.5-inch square, all in a 20-inch frame.
Well, I hope you have enjoyed this little Shroomscroll. Let me know if you liked it, or you think it really stinks…
Stinkhorn, of the family Phallaecae (I am not making this up — let’s discuss after 5)
So, what’s up with you? 😁😆😀
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