Mushrooms in the Fall

Perusing the various recipes of the book to make sure we weren’t missing anything that’s seasonal right now, we found several recipes involving mushrooms. Like the typical amateur Missouri outdoors people, we have both hunted, found, cooked and consumed various Missouri morels, but our mushroom experience stopped there. These other “mushrooms” growing in the woods were ignored, if we saw them at all.

But morels grow in the spring, perhaps to give unsuccessful turkey hunters a means of survival. But this is October, and apparently some of these other so called mushrooms grow in the summer and fall. However, mushrooms rank right up there with skunks as the most feared living thing in the Missouri wild. We have Mushrooms Demystified, the mushroom hunter’s Bible, but we could use some more personal expertise. Then Ann was told of a program on wild Missouri mushrooms taking place at Rockbridge State Park, just a few miles from our home. Serendipity.

The program started at 10 a.m. on Saturday, so we had plenty of time to follow our morning routine of going to the Columbia Farmer’s Market. The market’s is an easy place to stay for awhile, though, and we were a little tardy to the mushroom program. And we met Ann’s cousin and kids at the market, and they joined us. The four kids, ages six to  10, love Rockbridge Park, and didn’t have a lot of patience for a two-hour talk on mushrooms. Frankly, the adults didn’t either, so after listening in a few minutes we took to the woods, baskets in hand and knives in pockets. It didn’t take us too long to find some small white mushrooms, the kind that look like a story-book drawing of a mushroom. This caused us to slow down, and once we started looking closely, at times pulling back the dried leaves, we found a lot more.

My parents would call these toad stools, and wouldn’t consider eating them, assuming that they are poisonous. But we knew we had mycological experts close at hand, so we harvested away and then returned to the program area to get a positive identification.

Three out of four of the experts told us that the mushrooms were probably safe to eat. The fourth withheld his opinion. No one would state their reputation on it, or seemed anxious to pop a handful into his mouth.

“Probably fine” wasn’t quite the seal of approval I was looking for from the experts, but we had gone to the trouble to harvest them, and they looked harmless enough, so we went ahead and gave them a try. Because they were not the type of mushrooms called for in any of the Cooking Wild in Missouri recipes, Ann just made them as a side dish to the rest of our dinner. She selected the freshest ones, but during the initial phase of cooking they looked like they might be a little slimy or rubbery. But when finished, they turned out quite good, and were enjoyed by children and adults alike. We didn’t get a recipe checked off the list with this one, but did have a good Woods To Food experience.