Morels from April

Okay, yes, I found morels, it was two months ago, that’s how far behind I am because if I don’t post in a timely manner I just keep hiking and taking more pictures and this is what happens.

Everybody who hunts mushrooms and/or takes nature pics and/or has a blog has probably posted about morels, so I'm under a lot of pressure to think of how to make it interesting, but I did capture a few images that I thought were worthy of taking up space on the internet.

Here is the tiniest morel I’ve ever seen:

I went back a few days later, expecting it to have shot up to “beer can” size (apparently that’s an industry standard for describing how big your morel is), but it had hardly budged. So I got curious, having seen many other mushrooms grow at a furious rate in mere days (like they're known for), and I found some things like a pretty bad YouTube time-lapse video of some morels growing (bad because it was really a slide-show, which is cheating, with clever, spinning “fun” shots sprinkled in, and many shots with nothing to compare the size to, and there was goofy music), but appreciated nonetheless because I hadn't taken the time to do that, and I sure didn't know morels take up to a month to get full-sized…

*Edit*  Soon after I posted this, one of my faithful followers, the wise and lovely Maxine Stone, kindly took the time to email me this:

"Hi Lisa:
I think this is a Morchella deliciosa.  These are small morels and the ridges are more like lines that go up and down as you can see in the pic.  They are usually grayish but this one looks old."

So I thought this was just a very, very young Morchella esculenta, but it is, in fact, a different species. These don't ever get "beer-can sized," they top out at about 3". And besides the ridges having more "verticality," for lack of a better word, I would probably notice the stems, which seem to be generally more slender, and less gnarly than the common M. esculenta.

I sure am glad that people who have been at this a lot longer than me are actually reading this blog! Thanks again, Maxine.

Here is the most beautiful morel I found all season:



These are called “greys” on the street but it’s a “Classic North American Yellow Morel”, Morchella esculenta (near as I can tell, from this site). I loved how the pits were so dense, making it extra-crinkly, and the luminous moon-color around the dark pits. This would eventually turn blonde-yellow.

Even though this morel almost looks black-and-white, which seems like it would show up easily against new green growth and last year's brown leaves, it was very, very hard to see. Because it was a morel. And they just pop into this dimension when they feel like it. Sometimes it seems like they’re made more of shadows than solid matter.

 
The beautiful grey again, and a blonde and grey in hand. Same species.


Above, some morels that have offered themselves to me to eat, waiting patiently.

I hiked many, many times this spring, found enough morels to share, and one night fried a whole bunch of them in seasoned breadcrumbs and couldn’t stop eating them as soon as they were cool enough to put in my mouth so they never filled the plate and then I felt a little sick, but I think it was from eating too much, and not me developing a sensitivity to them (which can happen with any food), which would be fine with me because there’s a lot of anxiety around morels, everybody trying like hell to figure out what triggers their arrival and where’s the best place to find them, and all this protocol and etiquette and stories and legends (and sometimes bad feelings), when chanterelles are so plentiful and easy to find and sweet and delicious and can come up for months. But, it’s usually cool and pretty out when you go morel-hunting, and there’s all the other small waking-up forest citizens around, so all is well.

Oyster mushrooms

Once you see a young Pleurotus ostreatus, I don't see how you could mistake anything else for these. But you can, and I sure have, because I didn't know what I was looking at, until I'd seen lots of them.

I've only been at this for a year, and I find plenty of mushrooms that at first glance look pretty oystery. Then I see something like the gills aren't running down the stem like they're supposed to, or the gills are too close together or too even and regular, or it doesn't have that lovely faint fish odor, and I am disappointed, but I pick myself up by my hiking boots and move on with my life. There will be more.

I know this because mushrooms are everywhere, EVEN WHEN IT HASN'T RAINED FOR A SOLID MONTH and all the leaves are falling so you can't see hardly anything on the forest floor and when you're hiking with someone and they get a little ahead of you you can't hear a word they say because of the leaf crunching so you have to stop walking and keep yelling "What???" all the time.

But the mushrooms that grow on trees and logs keep going because there's plenty of moisture there. That's nice, because most of my favorites grow on wood anyway.

All that wavy, decurrent-gill goodness...with a light ocean fragrance.





Here's a few more from the same tree:

And here's some tiny tiny TINY baby ones, tucked into an old woodpecker-hole--they were less than 1/4" tall (but, can you even be referred to as "tall" if you're only 1/4"?).

When they're this small they're called "pins" in the growing trade! This growth stage is called "pinning."
Here's a link to a whole bunch more pics of oyster mushrooms I've found: "Oysters"

I love oyster mushrooms. They're pretty abundant around here. I like to just saute a whole bunch of them and eat them straight from the bowl, because I am a pig glutton.

Laetiporus cincinnatus, for real this time

Spilling out of a tree

Laetiporus cincinnatus white pore surface

In between things

A friend called me on the Mushroom Hotline to tell me about some mushrooms growing in his yard (not these--some great Omphalotus illudens, coming soon), and I could see this in his neighbor's yard. 

My friend wasn't home yet and the neighbors weren't home either, so I couldn't ask them if I could have it, and it took a LOT of strength of will for me to not just harvest it and run. But it all worked out--I found a perfectly ripe pawpaw on the ground nearby which I DID take without asking anyone because I've had a long-running issue with pawpaws, namely, that I've heard about them and was intrigued by them and I've never seen one fruiting (I see the pretty blue-green trees in the woods all the time, with blooms) and never eaten one and people keep telling me, "Oh, they had them at the Farmers Market last week!" and I had just talked about them again two days earlier so I decided that pawpaw had my name on it, and I took it. I saw it lying there, wondered what it was, the leaves of the tree registered, the decision was made, it was in my bag. Look, know, take. That's how long it took.

When I got home I called my foodie friend down the street, and we shared it, and it was magnificent. Totally made my day.

And since then, my friend did talk to his neighbors who said I could have the Chicken with their blessing, so tomorrow I'm going back over there to take more pics of the Omphalotus and hopefully those little girls a few houses down haven't messed up the chicken too bad (they got curious when I was taking pics, and by the time I was leaving they were poking it with sticks or something).

Note: this is an atypical form of L. cincinnatus, they usually grow near the base of trees or a little distance from the tree, seemingly from the ground, but really on an underground root. And usually in a rosette pattern, not overlapping shelves like this. Several people reported atypical growths of these this year.

The title of this post is referring to the previous post where I was getting all whipped up about some mushrooms I found that I thought were Laetiporus cincinnatus. I found them when they were quite small and I was tracking them, and on the 3rd visit I harvested them, and even showed them to people at work (oh, great! now people with even less familiarity with mushrooms have been given the wrong information by someone they think knows things!), until I finally realized they weren't Chicken mushrooms at all. I was chagrined (also taken aback, also brought up short. Chicken mushrooms are supposed to be one of the easiest ones. I just need to slow down).

Anyway--how 'bout those shapes, eh?

Quick chanterelle beauty

Young chanterelles and grapevine

This lovely composition was nicely arranged for me before I got there, I guess by faeries (photo from June 28th).

What’s so great about chanterelles

That’s a comment, not a question.

This lacy, ruffly, scalloped, swooping Baroque sculpture is the beautiful underside of a chanterelle. When I turned it over and saw this I heard music and faeries appeared.

Then I ate it

Blue Mushroom Sap--Lactarius indigo

The Blue Milk, originally uploaded by Mycologista.

Lactarius indigo. Click on it! View it as big as you can! Do it!

Let the Games Begin! The Chanterelles are HERE!

Let the Games Begin!, originally uploaded by Mycologista.

The chanterelles are out!

I was on my way to checking The Field of Chanterelle Joy and found them just all over the woods, right on the little paths. Nobody home yet in The Field, though.

Curious I am to see what will happen in the field, which last September was covered with hundreds of them for a good few months. Also, it's hardly a "field"--it's covered with some plant I haven't ID'd yet, and lots of damn honeysuckle, and trees.

I cleaned and sauteed the whole lot of them, ate a LOT of them in scrambled eggs, and there's plenty left (until TOMORROW, anyway, when I'm going for another hike), and my house smells like chanterelles, which is great.

Also, I found some morels, but I didn't care

The morels I found on this day were pretty much overshadowed by the emerging Polyphemus moth I found.

Still, my first love is mushrooms.

Dryad's Saddle, in a big way

Polyporus squamosus.
My open pocket knife is 5-3/8" long.
The grey cast on the ground is dropped spores.
These are getting a little older; young, fresh specimens are more yellow (and you can see them from really far away).

These are perfectly edible, but it's one of the weirdest things I've ever tasted. They smell just like watermelon rind, or cucumber. Maybe if I didn't expect them to taste like "mushrooms" I would like them better.

I dunno, some people really like them; I'd try them again.

Laetiporus cincinnatus looks just like cooked chicken

 















NOT chicken, chicken of the woods MUSHROOM!

The hunt and capture of the chicken of the woods

Top two images are first day; bottom is next day.

Found this sitting there under a tree in a park, minding its own business (as far as I could tell). This very choice edible, this Laetiporus cincinnatus ("chicken of the woods"). Ran home to get positive ID (this is kind of funny now, as it is considered one of the easiest for beginners to ID. Now I would know in one second, but this really was in the very first month of my mushroom fascination, and the first one I'd ever seen). Positively identified it, it was quite a young specimen, went back the next day to nab it (after hardly being able to sleep, worrying that someone else would find it) and I was horrified to find the park swarming with hundreds of people for some event, was sure someone would have messed with it. But I could see this sucker from the parking lot, because it was so big, and so luminous. I snuck up on it and cut it. I don't understand why no one else seemed to have seen it, or kicked it, or picked it. I've got a picture of it from about 200' away, looking like a plastic milk bottle or a grocery bag in the distance.

As they get older they start to flare out into more shelf-like fans, and they get dry and woody, so you can really only eat the outer edges. Not my problem.

Although it seemed to be growing from the grass, it was actually attached to an underground root; these always grow on wood (not logs--trees with some life still in them).

Sauteed, not mushroomy at all, a completely new flavor. Great meaty texture.

Risotto w/ mushroom & gorgonzola--I died.

Did I mention it weighed over 2-1/4 pounds? Well, it did. And that's a small one--I've seen pictures of HUGE growths of them, "over 30 lbs," they say.