Edible Mushrooms in the Capital Area, Part 2

The flip side of "mushrooming is dangerous" is "the right mushrooms are delicious and healthy." They can occupy a variety of culinary niches, and are low-calorie options. Some have been shown to be quite good for your heart. Even if you're not a vegetarian, eating less meat can be a wise choice, and many mushrooms are wonderful as meat alternatives. Mushrooming is a risk-reward activity, but as with anything else the practiced application of knowledge and patience mitigates the risk. Done properly (which means heeding all those warnings), mushroom hunting gives the reward of an improved diet with the risk of occasional digestive upset.  This sounds better than the risk of dying, right?

There is one more mushroom-related practice I should touch on if I'm interested in the responsible distribution of information. "Shrooming," "doing 'shrooms," or whatever one chooses to call, ahem, 'recreational' mushrooming can also be dangerous. I'm not preaching here, because I'm not talking about the psilocybin itself (harmless in the quantities found in mushrooms, unless you count the hallucinations). This pastime has the same issues as eating wild mushrooms for food - many that will get you high are hard to distinguish from other species that will kill you or make you sick. Amanita muscaria (fly agaric or the fly mushroom - that mushroom with the white spots in all the cartoons) will get one high in Europe but just make one miserable in the States. So, if you're going to get high on mushrooms, learn to ID them yourself. Trusting someone else to find the right ones for you is like trusting a stranger on a street corner to retrieve your correct medicine from a bucket of mixed and unlabeled pills. Also keep in mind that mushrooms which will kill you in tiny doses are legal while those which will only get you high if you eat them like potato chips are illegal. Laws do very by state; some make more sense than others.

And now, on to the photos! Again, all specimens pictured below were collected within a couple of hours driving distance of Washington DC. All are edible for those who have adventurous pallets.

Entoloma abortivum - this is actually two mushrooms, one of which is a parasite on the other.  The honey mushroom (Armillaria mellea) and a species of Entoloma meet. Biologists are still studying which is the host and which is the parasite.  Either way, if you find the brainy-looking part you know you can eat the whole mess - if you dare.

A second photo of E. abortivum, this time featuring the honey mushroom instead of the entoloma. Again, note the distinctive brain-looking globs.

Speaking of the honey mushroom (Armillaria mellea), here it is on its own. That white rot on the wood is pretty distinctive. If you're a sucker for technicalities, you should check out this article.

If you want raw volume in your mushroom meal, not much can match Grifola frondosa (the hen of the woods). That's not a camera trick - my finger is just about touching this monster and the camera is in my other hand. Unfortunately every specimen I've found has been too rotten to bring home.

Polyporus squamosus (dryad's saddle) can also be huge, but by the time it attains this size it isn't quite as tender and delicious. Fantasy artists like to depict sprites and gnomes and such hanging out on these. Oddly enough, when you cut them they have a distinct watermelon smell.

Pleurotus ostreatus (the oyster mushroom) is a mycophagist's dream. It's delicious, gregarious, common, and can be found almost year round. Its lookalikes (assuming you get a spore print, that is) are all related and also edible. This is the second most common commercial mushroom behind the white buttons (Agaricus bisporus, if you care to know).

This hairy-looking oddball is the old man of the woods (Strobilomyces floccopus). Fitting that the species name looks something like the equally funny-looking 'octopus.' Well, I thought so, anyway. Despite appearances, this is actually a very tasty mushroom.

They say everything tastes like chicken. Well, the chicken mushroom, Laetiporus cincinnatus et al, really does. Well, it can be made to. This beautiful mushroom can be prepared in the kitchen in much the same way poultry can, and with less worry of food poisoning.

I have by no means exhausted the range of edible mushrooms in this region of the US. Among those not pictured are fungi with such colorful names as the train wrecker and angel wings. Dozens more have not even crossed my radar yet. I've only been at it a couple of years, but mycology has opened my eyes to the variety of forms life cane take.