Go ask Alice

After the monsoon du jour, which involved high winds that knocked down a nearby oak branch big enough to kill a person, I went for a stroll.

Mushrooms have popped up everywhere. I mean, it's like Alice in freaking Wonderland out there. I'm considering joining a wild-mushrooming society that's based in Atlanta, or at the very least buying a couple of really good field guides and talking to the bio department, because I want to learn more about them and don't necessarily trust my own identification skills (even though I have a Master's degree in paleontology that involved quite a bit of animal and plant identification, as you can well imagine). I've seen 15, 20, maybe even 30 species out there, and surely some of them have to be gourmet-quality. There's one that looks suspiciously like an oyster mushroom and even grows in the right kind of environment, e.g., on downed tree branches. There's another that starts out like an elf-cap and then explodes into a big white starburst. There are puffballs, clusters of delicate little umbrellas, minature trumpets, big brown bread loaves, and amorphous twisty things. I'm fascinated by them all.

Linguistics is a funny thing. Even though it's been shown that people poisoned by mushrooms are almost always folks who just matched their quarry with a photo (if that) and didn't bother to read the accompanying text, I'm still duly petrified by wild mushrooms. The mere mention of something called a "Death Cap" or, even more horrifyingly, a "Destroying Angel," is enough to send me scrambling in the opposite direction and give me nightmares for a week. Yet you can bet if I found a single morel, I'd spend the entire rest of the day in the woods looking for its compadres. So caution is the watchword, but I am definitely interested in broadening my knowledge.

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Update:
We spent an hour today hiking through the woods and collecting mushrooms for spore prints. We also spent a lot of time reading on the internet and found a couple of articles on the most easy-to-identify edible mushrooms in the U.S. It turns out that there are a few select species that, as long as you RTFM, are almost impossible to mistake. We have puffballs and chanterelles (and maybe-probably the aforementioned oysters)! Next time I have a chance, I'm going to grab a couple of each and take them to the university to make sure I'm right. Then it's cookin' time...

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Meanwhile, Jonny B., in commenting on my last post, inadvertently reminded me that I ought to do something about the condition of my herb garden. So I went out and took the tops off my gigantic oregano plant. I'm air-drying the cuttings in my kitchen, and I don't think I'll want for dried oregano for a long while. This is especially true since I don't use dried oregano unless the weather outside is so incredibly unpleasant that I don't want to step out the back door and clip some fresh oregano. It even winters over here, so I have access to fresh oregano in January. Maybe I'll give the dried stuff to my friends.