Missouri woods—backlog—gorgeous edible mushrooms* I

*This is not a mushroom ID blog! Please use many resources when identifying mushrooms.

After a nice 2012 morel-hunting season (but almost 2 months earlier than normal—!), a severe drought started here in central Missouri. Spring started out fine, but then it stopped raining, in MARCH. I lost my hiking/blogging momentum.

There was a nice rain about 2 months in, and I headed out all hopeful, but 15 minutes into it crashed into not one, but two horrific, enormous clouds of seed ticks—mission aborted.

We’ve had some rain recently, and I’ve been getting out there (still slim pickins), but why did I never post this stuff from last fall? So, here comes everything, in a few separate posts, in roughly chronological order. From last fall.



Above and below, gorgeous young chicken of the woods, mid-September. Saturated with rain, so the color is even brighter.


I swear the color is not tweaked. They really can be so bright it almost hurts your eyes.

Below, more Laetiporus sulphureus, but older specimens, and not wet from recent rain.

The pale grey horizontal stroke in the background is the trail in a very popular park! We harvested a lot of this, and left some, and later were swapping foray stories and found out that a friend of ours got what we left. “Oh, that was you guys? Thanks for leaving me some!”

I like them this young:


Chicken of the woods turns butter bright yellow:


Oh, man, if you’ve ever eaten these I know you’re in a reverie just looking at this! But wait ‘til you see the next one! Vegans, don’t look, you’ll hurt yourself!


Sautéed chicken of the woods on rib eye with gorgonzola and asparagus. That was a great day.

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.

The TRUE Field of Chanterelle Joy

This is what it’s like, in the woods right now. Kind of puts last year’s field to shame. But, I got a late start on all this (Sept. '09), so this spring and summer is all new to me.

This is actually very close to last year’s big patch that I was so excited about, but when I found that one, this area had already faded, so I didn’t know.

I know I keep going ON and ON about the dang chanterelles, but it’s just so fun to walk into the woods, and walk out 2-3 hours later with enough of these beautiful, fragrant mushrooms that I can gives bags of them to friends.

Here’s some other fun chanterelle antics:


I’ve found a bunch of these crazy ruffled ones, and so have some friends. I’m working on finding out what’s up with this; some were even more impossibly cauliflowered.

Walnut Sphinx moth

Whoa! I picked this one and this marvelous bonus Walnut Sphinx moth was on it!  It didn’t seem to care one bit that I was holding up the mushroom and moving it around for 5 minutes as I took pictures; it never moved. It was pretty big—see my fingertips.

Amorpha juglandi

Extra double wonder-bonus—they tell me the caterpillar squeaks when disturbed!!!