With all the rain we have had in the past couple of weeks, the time is ripe for mushroom hunting. Coinciding with this annual fruiting season is the smattering of fungal swapmeets, and today was the second day of one such fair; this time in Santa Cruz. Jerry, who we have known since dotcom daze, drove down from Berkeley to escort us to the fair; were it not for him, we may have never left the house this weekend, as overcome as I am with molten wax bliss and the sound of Damon and his jazz guitar scales in the living room. Chas, for his part, would have never remembered how badly he wanted psychotropics.
From the get go we recognized his discriminating faculties, glancing around the rooms for a little something beyond cuisine grade mushrooms
Finally, he began anxiously inquiring of strangers, like a foreign traveller looking for his stolen wallet, “Where are the poisonous mushrooms? Do you have any poisonous mushrooms?”
To distract him, we ushered Chas to the kiddie room, where we were greeted by a happy pack of breeding hippies and their rosy-cheeked hobbit spawn, merrily dancing around the craft tables and painting colorful paper fruiting bodies.
We were lured like flies back into the common area, where a group of chefs had inadvertently contaminated the breathing air with the most rank, malodorous brew of rotten mushroom stew or something of that nature (there’s no way my mind could positively translate the smell into words, my limbic system was so busy grappling with the extraordinary shock of it). On the surface, everything looked so gourmet, but inside, they were cooking Satan’s athelete’s foot.
We had to split; Damon took the boys outside to the playground while Jerry taught me some basic taxonomy. The room was buzzing with woodsy nerds, all shuffling around the exhibits, crouching down, clicking their camerafones. I learned that I could probably eat one half of a cap from a Fly Agaric and still be okay.
And how to differentiate between a tasty chanterelle and a toxic false chanterelle (the real one has ridges and folds–not gills).
Jerry told me I passed up a perfectly good Bolete, after I described to him what I jogged by on Thursday. They are, apparently, quite tasty. Have you ever tried one? Have you ever eaten wild mushrooms? Would you try? Would you eat this man’s wild mushroom lasagna if he brought it to your potluck?
