Make sure you are identifying mushrooms for the area you are harvesting in. Just an example of one, but.....
Back in the '60 a good friend's mother put her whole family in the hospital for the weekend.
The (somewhat) poisonous ones in Ariz looked exactly (to her anyway) like the ones she had grown up picking wild all the time for meals back in upper Midwest.
No lingering long term damage, but it certainly ruined the weekend and ran up a big bill.
All I'm saying is, don't just THINK you know the mushroom is ok. KNOW IT IS OK. Be vigilant.
One of the best dishes I have ever eaten was made by a Blue Mountain OR lifetime logger, old timer, picking 'shrooms on the job site.
I wouldn't have eaten them, but his family said this was one of his specialty mushroom dishes, and he had been picking locally since he was young, and had learned identification and dish prep from an old time logger decades before. Talked me into it, and I was amazed how good it was.
Myself, I have only been brave enough to pick and use morels. I'm going to expand knowledge and my pickings thanks to this thread.
Back in the '60 a good friend's mother put her whole family in the hospital for the weekend.
The (somewhat) poisonous ones in Ariz looked exactly (to her anyway) like the ones she had grown up picking wild all the time for meals back in upper Midwest.
No lingering long term damage, but it certainly ruined the weekend and ran up a big bill.
All I'm saying is, don't just THINK you know the mushroom is ok. KNOW IT IS OK. Be vigilant.
One of the best dishes I have ever eaten was made by a Blue Mountain OR lifetime logger, old timer, picking 'shrooms on the job site.
I wouldn't have eaten them, but his family said this was one of his specialty mushroom dishes, and he had been picking locally since he was young, and had learned identification and dish prep from an old time logger decades before. Talked me into it, and I was amazed how good it was.
Myself, I have only been brave enough to pick and use morels. I'm going to expand knowledge and my pickings thanks to this thread.