Meet and Eat?

Where the grass is mown, I saw a lone mushroom the size of my palm, perfectly developed with a cap so artistic I left it untouched and came back later. It grew low to the ground and the underside and stem were not visible. Overturning the mushroom showed a smooth white stem and a white lace of pores instead of mushroom gills. This identified it as a bolete. Most are edible -- the prized Italian porcini mushroom (doesn't grow in Missouri) is a bolete. The pores are tubes. Now and then a bolete has six-sided pores. Not this one.

In situ

Bruised from handling

Spore print

Picking it, I removed the cap to make a spore print. This bolete cap bruised at a touch. To make a spore print, set white paper and black paper side by side and set the mushroom cap down the middle. This will then capture a spore print whether the spores are dark or light. The spore print can confirm an identification. This bolete's spores (after three hours) were a doughnut-brown.

What type of bolete? My guess is boletus chrysenteron, but I didn't cook and eat it because I'm not sure. Anyway, that summer day I was into it as an art object, and into the art it created by itself. They say that spore prints can be so lovely that people frame them. I put the cap back where I got it and hoped it had spores to spare, to replicate itself. It made me want not a mushroom but a doughnut.

Pearls in the Grass

We are fancy enough on the Divine Property to pay to have our grass mowed every two weeks, as it was today, but yesterday in the tall overgrown grass along with feasting bunnies I found amanita mushrooms -- amanitas have these "flake salt" skin tags -- and knew they weren't for eating -- never eat a mushroom with a "flake salt" or "skin tag" look: poisonous as heck, especially a white one, known as a "destroying angel." So I admired it for a time and appreciated its pearlescent skin, a feature unnoticed before. A shaggy or "pilly" stem is another warning sign. Cut down before it opened up, so it did not have a chance to assume its classic toadstool shape.

Judas' Ear

Rain brings for one day these delicate and translucent wood ear mushrooms, usually velvety brown, growing on thoroughly dead branches. They pop up at all times of year after a soaking. You'll find these in Chinese cuisine, but they are so light and flavorless -- really, they're jelled water -- they are not worth cooking and eating any other way, except for their 9 grams of protein per 100 grams of mushroom.

You have to, must, are required to cook them or they are not edible at all. They and the water they are cooked in are folk remedies for sore throats.

Latin name Auricularia auricula-judae tells a story: These are often called Judas's Ears, because Judas hanged himself from a tree.

Nature's Spirograph

Maybe you remember the Spirograph -- a set of interlocking gear wheels and pens that allowed youth to create highly engineered Space-Age designs, mostly circles -- or you recall cutting designs into potatoes and inking the cut edges with a roller inked on a sheet of glass, and then printing the result -- did that in Girl Scouts. And while I haven't done those since, I did pluck the cap from a bolete and placed the cap gills down where a sheet of white paper and a sheet of black paper met, and left it undisturbed overnight -- because spores of unidentified 'shrooms could be light or dark, and the spore print, and its color, and the shapes of the spores themselves, are crucial to a solid I.D., especially for summer mushrooms that have many variants: amanitas, russulas, and then boletes. All of you will know a bolete when you see one. They don't have bladelike gills beneath their caps but have spongelike undersides. The print came out beautifully, the best one yet. It is art. Meanwhile, the cap, on the right, dried out a little. A friend saw the photo and said, "Is that a toasted bagel?"

Crazy People

Sylvia and Dennis and young Sonya were among the 10 of us treasure-hunting in the woods one day during this nice rainy May, finding in two hours more than 30 species of fungi where at first we didn't see any at all, because most specimens were tiny and the big flagrant diva mushrooms, such as chickens, or milkies (they "bleed" milklike liquid), are about three weeks away. Among our finds: Sonya has found a Stalked Scarlet Cup (Sarcoscypha occidentalis), and (below) the 1/2-inch "eyelash cup" (Scutellinia scutellata), yellow with unmistakeable "eyelashes," which I have greatly enlarged for detail. For edibles, on this trip we found only wood ears. We think that fungi, the fourth Kingdom of creation, are the coolest, most outrageous stuff our earth produces--in my view, second only to the mineral Kingdom's gemstones. Guess we're easy to please. You'll notice we (as do Sylvia and Dennis) carry woven baskets and within them waxed sandwich bags to hold their specimens. Crazy people and woven baskets traditionally go together. You can always tell shroomers by our baskets and our socks pulled up over our pant legs.

Did You Ever Have a Day with a Theme?

Poland. . .never thought I'd miss it as I do. . .in a supermarket in Wielazija I bought Polish soup packets and have hoarded them since. When the day dawned dull and cloudy I opened the one for instant mushroom soup. Poles are great fans and pickers of forest mushrooms.  I cooked the soup and let it sit while I caught up on a few hours of outdoor chores put off because of heavy rains. Then, bored, unwilling to drive anywhere, I tried entertaining myself looking for fungi in the soaked lawn. All sorts and sizes, 13 varieties in all, but the most glorious and only edible was a fresh chicken mushroom at the base of a tree less than 20 feet from the door. If I hadn't made myself look I wouldn't have found it.

At once I trimmed and collected some, cleaned it, sliced it, sauteed the pieces in butter, added them to the mushroom soup, and now I had genuine Polish wild-mushroom soup. And figured I might as well boil some potatoes and turnips and bring out the sauerkraut and Krakowski sausage (rations kept for homesick-for-Poland days) and eat a Polish lunch, and for dessert had strawberries, and it is June, and I was the happiest person in the whole world.

Making a Mushroom Kit

Growing gourmet oyster mushrooms is easy: Get a plastic bag, the kind from the produce section of the supermarket. Place at least one pound of damp straw in this bag. This is ordinary straw shredded into 2-inch segments and flattened to expose the pith, and specially soaked in alkalinized water. This straw is the mushroom-growing medium. Then:

Brace Smith

"Seed" your straw with a handful of oyster-mushroom mycelium, which is nothing more than white fuzzy fungus deliberately grown in a bag of grain. This fuzz was first cultivated in petri dishes and test tubes from a single spore of a fine mushroom. Add a handful of gypsum to the plastic bag.

Twist the bag shut. What you have now is a kind of terrarium. The mushrooms-to-be, however, need to breathe, so over the twist goes a small collar cut from a tube of PVC [pictured], and it is rubber-banded there. Then fluff open the "collar" of the bag. Now the bag can breathe through the PVC tube. But to keep other spores and things out while mushrooms are developing, stuff the PVC tube with a thumb's length of that synthetic fill that goes into pillows. Now the bag can breathe but nothing can get in.

Mycelium

Place bag in the dark for I don't know how long, because I just made my first mushroom terrarium this morning, wondering: Will this really work? Mushroom production scientist and lecturer Brace Smith said that when the straw in the bag appears covered with white stuff, move the bag to a place getting mild sunlight. Soon proto-mushrooms or "pins" will appear. Slit the bag there, making room for the mushrooms to grow outside of the bag, and in three days, harvest and eat. Smith said to expect two or three crops, or about one pound, of oyster mushrooms.

If you are able to get mycelium (by mail order; it takes a scientist like Smith to grow it correctly), all the rest is very low-tech.

I will keep you posted as to what's happening with my mushroom kit. Nothing is more exciting than something growing.

Mushroom People

A mushroom foray is a trip into the woods -- off the trail -- to find fungi and maybe pick some (by cutting, not uprooting!) for study or for cooking at home. Note the carrying basket, the socks up over the pant legs, and the enthusiasm of two of my foray companions on this gorgeous June morning. Between the twelve of us, ages 6 to 80, we brought back 22 species. The kids were the best mushroom spotters. Our leader, age 80, explained 1) they're closer to the ground and 2) they've got sharper eyes than older folk. I myself took only photographs. Here's some Jellied False Coral (Tremellodendron pallidum). It's edible, but according to an expert, cooking it isn't worth the effort.

Devil's Urn Mushrooms

Looking like a dead man's fingers and toes, crawling up from under -- creepy fungi! There's actually another mushroom called Dead Man's Fingers, but "these ones" (as we say in Missouri) are Devil's Urns (Urnula craterium), the first I've seen on the property. Their rubbery "eyeballs" pop open eventually and they turn into little empty black bowls -- inedible.

Frankly Scarlet

Below the cliffs is -- well, I call it "the secret pond," but it's a swamp. Before greenery and thorns and mosquitoes emerge from its muck I always visit seeking signs of spring. Today I saw neon-red scraps among the downed oak leaves. Thought it was Coca-Cola cans; instead, it was a mushroom I've never seen before. Found mainly on the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest, and "on fallen hardwood branches in wet places" according to the Audubon Field Guide, this is the Scarlet Cup (Sarcoscypha coccinea), "one of the first mushrooms to look for in spring." Check! Now it's spring here for sure.

Happy birthday, Demetrius; you would have turned 65 today. I wish I had seen the baby picture you said was taken at age 1 with your hair in long dark curls and posed with an Easter basket.

How to Stay Alive in the Woods

Rarely do I get lost in strange woods but it was 4 p.m. and the sun was low in the naked trees with darkness scheduled to fall within the hour. A trail I'd followed had petered out, tempting me to bushwhack to my goal: the riverfront. All my tricks to get back (such as retracing my steps, or walking at an angle where I'd surely cut across the trail -- sure I would! -- didn't help me. A book I like called How to Stay Alive in the Woods says that most lost people, at worst, miss a meal, and that's nothing. I walked toward the sun, because on my way in it had been behind me.

Fortunately I had some drinking water, a hiking stick, and a small firearm, and knew that if one is lost at nightfall one stays put, hopes the cellphone is working, and when the searchers are searching, fires three shots into the air to guide them. "Be prepared" is great wisdom; I felt lucky and calm. Too bad I'll miss a meal, I thought. And then I was presented with this cluster of mushrooms growing at eye level on a live tree. I said thanks but no thanks; I'm no expert, won't put wild mushrooms in my mouth without proper I.D. I got back to my car before dark and at home looked these up because they seemed so familiar. They are oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) like you buy in the market, graded  "choice" for eating. So I want you to know, if you're ever lost, look around, and you'll probably see you've been provided for.

Tiny Orange Fungi

To the best of my research ability, the electric-orange embroidery on this fallen branch of dead, wet oak is fresh Phlebia radiata, in its rarely-seen early phase. Usually we see Phlebia after it has all spread and grown together, dried out, and formed a greenish-brownish-white crust or medallion that I always took for lichen. Found this branch lying by the garage while I had my eyes pensively downcast. You can't stay downcast long in the country, where marvels upon marvels are everywhere, including beneath your feet, and death is just a phase in the cycle of life. I heart the mysterious and colorful world of fungi and might have become a mycologist had I known it was an option.