Mushroom hunting photos

Mushroom hunting at the coast with the Guidry boys, aka Corey and his father, whom he affectionately refers to as "Pops," among other things.


This shrew died shortly after this photograph. It was pretty traumatizing. It just lay down in the middle of the road and stopped breathing. Corey and I were like, "...did that just DIE?" We witnessed (and perhaps were the cause of) the passage of its soul into the Shrew Netherworld.


There are crazy trees in Oregon too.


Amanita phalloides, aka the death cap. DON'T EAT THIS MUSHROOM! IT WILL KILL YOU IF YOU EAT IT. This is one of the three deadly poisonous mushrooms in Oregon.


Foxgloves contain atropine, a tropane alkoloid. It has a similar chemical in it that's similar to the deadly amanita. It's a stimulant... when people die of drug overdoses, they inject a chemical similar to this into their hearts, and it gets their hearts beating again. Think Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction."


Amanita mascaria! The eponymous mushroom from popular culture and likely the most familiar mushroom in the world. It is thought of as being the soma of the Rigveda (an ancient Indian collection of Sanskrit hymns). There's a substance that people use call the "soma," which brings dreams. That's this mushroom right here. They were EVERYWHERE on the coast this week... never seen anything like it. They're mycorhizal, so they grow with the roots of trees. People would dry them and use them as Christmas tree decorations because they grow with pine trees. Let's hope Little Billy in the suburbs never got his fat Game Boy playing lips around any. Then again, let's hope he did.


The oyster, our hero from Ecuador, dwells here in Oregon as well.


Reishi (ganaderma lucidum)... I remember the first time I went mushroom hunting with the Brian and the Jess they found oodles of these... you can make a disgusting tasting but very healthy tea out of them... Corey taught the recipe to Don Delio (our shaman friend... god, that sounds weird! I can definitely say I never thought I would have a "shaman friend"). It's used for cancer treatment, immune disorders and for cleaning the blood and has been used in Asian medicine since ancient times. I love that phrase, "ancient times." It makes me think of the phase he is not nearly so old as the ancient ones.


A pristine chanterelle. God, we found so many this year! It was a bumper crop, as they say. Corey and Jay were gathering 40-50 pounds in ONE TRIP and selling them all on Sundays at the market. On Friday and Saturday nights our refrigerator would be full of giant paper bags, with stray pieces of dirty and grass all over the floor and kitchen counters.


A cauliflower mushroom. I'd never seen one of these before. Damn, they look weird. But they're also really good. Corey's friend and fellow mushroom partner in crime Matt gave us this one after finding four or five.


He fried some up for us and it was delicious, sweet and wonderful. Corey said that some people cook them in the style of pasta too... peeling them off and then boiling them in a big old pot.




Corey and Jay at the Milwaukie farmer's market. See that ghetto ass sign? Yeah, I made that, with tape from the Dollar Store.


Our latest bounty. Corey picked so many of them he was carrying them in his shirt and they were falling out. We had porcini burger for dinner last night. It made it all worth it, even the falling down the mountain 40 feet and landing in a blackberry patch.

if it's one thing I know, said El Bo, it's where the chanterelles do grow

Selling last Sunday at the Milwaukie Farmer's Market was really fun. Unfortunately it was absolutely freezing cold and raining. We made about a $90 profit, but everyone else who was working there said that it was by far the worst and slowest day the market had ever had. I could definitely understand that: there's no way I would have been there if I hadn't been selling.

Nevertheless, it was a great way to meet interesting people, despite the icy cold rain and my dazed slow chuchaki head from the dinner-wine-and-hottub party last night (such parties are seemingly slowly but surely becoming a Saturday-night tradition at the Duck Pond house, a good way of hanging out with friends and eating delicious fresh mushrooms collected that same day). I love being part of a new community. The farmer in the stall next to ours gave us a little tin of pesto, which was amazingly delicious and consumed by me that evening in 0.9 seconds. Another guy gave us an ... I can't remember the name of the fruit, you peel it and eat the tips of the leaves, and then the flower in the middle is the best part? I'm not on the top of my game today, apparently. But whatever it's called, we ate it last night with olive oil and butter and DA-HAYM it was good. It's a pretty sweet deal: whatever we don't sell, we trade with others and get amazing farmers' market food. I love sharing with other people and giving them the chance to try amazing new mushrooms, to see the nervous or heisitant expressions on their faces fade away when we tell them all the different things you can do with a chanterelle, a lobster, a matsutake. As I've said before, we always find more mushrooms we can possibly eat ourselves, anyway.

Corey and his mushroom-hunting partner-in-crime Jay went to the coast yesterday and only found a couple of porcini. It's still just a little too early, but it's good to see that a few are popping up! We had porcini on toast with red peppers for dinner last night. Corey also found some meadow mushrooms, which he's saving to cook for my mum tonight, because she once said that she and my grandad used to find and eat them when she was a little girl in England.

Porcini is Corey's favorite mushroom. It is pretty good. I have wonderful memories of my first time eating a porcini, in an omelette in Corey's apartment. Mmm. It was a porcini I had walked right by but that Matt had scooped up immediately afterwards, recognizing it's true, treasured identity. Then because Matt is a great guy he ended up giving it to me and Corey anyway. Anyway, believe it or not, I still haven't decided what my favorite mushroom is yet... I sure like that fried lobster Corey cooked that one time (MMM! better than potato chips!), and the grilled matsutake (so thick and indescribably cinnamony and faintly spicy). And, of course, you can never go wrong with the infallible chanterelle.

Corey an Jay went mushroom hunting today too, in one of their best spots, and found over 40 pounds of chanterelles, and 10-20 pounds of lobsters. Hopefully tomorrow we'll go get some more matsutake, and maybe even take my little brother along, to baptize him in the ways of the Hardcore Mushroom Hunting (wear boots, rain pants, and be ready to get soaking wet and freezing cold anyway). Crazy! Get ready, Milwaukie! I sure hope it's sunny on Sunday!

Some relevant updates, here from the PDX mycorenewal front:

- Went mushroom hunting with Corey and his dad on the coast. We experienced a moment of horror when we thought the porcini were infected with this terrifying white-powdery mold, but then much to our relief Corey deduced that they were another species, Old Man something, which is good because first of all it is far too early for the porcini to be out and second of all they are so delicious, a mold that killed them all would be tragic beyond words.

- We went to the Milwaukie Farmer's market last Sunday. Surprisingly, there was no culinary mushroom stand in sight! So we talked to the market managers, and it turned out they had a space they were more than eager enough to rent for us. The idea of going into the mushroom-selling business still feels a little hard for my brain to wrap around: very self-made man, little-house-on-the-prairie. But very appealing for my increasingly hippie-like brain. We found about 20 pounds of chanterelles and lobsters last Friday alone, so we have more than enough booty to share. We’re thinking of selling five-dollar units in little baskets. Most prices we’ve seen (at other markets and in Whole Foods and the like) seem outrageously expensive, like ten dollars for a pound of chanterelles (!). I guess that price can be considered a reflection of the labor that goes into retrieving those “golden treasures,” what with all the gas price drama. But such a price can really turn off people from ever trying wild-grown mushrooms.

- Don Delio (our shaman friend from Cuyabeno) called us at 1:30AM this morning, after we'd nodding off in the middle of an episode of "The Wire" (rented from the local public library). This would make it about 4:30AM Ecuadorean time. From what I could understand in my blurry, fuzzy head sleep-state, he was in Lago Agrio just calling to say hello. I hope everything's all right with him and his family, regardless... I can definitely say that I never thought I'd be awakened in the night from a phone call from a shaman. The experience was unhappily reminiscent of all those terrible "who will take the 3AM call???" advertisements airing on the idiot box.

Some more links-happy-go-clicky fun:
- In this current political climate, Chevron doesn’t want to be left out of the fun!

- The case continues to move forward (this article has an especially good summary of the extent of the contamination in the community, as well as of Chevron’s tricky-dicky dealings with the trial up to this point)

- This is interesting too, although I have to admit I had to look up “indict” just to be sure that I understood what the article was about (hey, don’t I seem refreshingly open and candid compared to most other “blog” “writers” with such an admission?). I like the plaintiff’s summary of Chevron’s supposed clean-up attempt as “merely dumping dirt on pits of oil and water rather than removing the pollutants.”