HALL BIOGRAPHIES

Mushrooms are amazing. They are both food and medicine. I love them. When I see pictures of them I know which is which. But, I wanted to be able to go into the woods and feel confident about which mushroom was in front of me. There were a couple of mushrooms that seems easy and obvious for me to identify. Turkey Tail, Trametes Versicolor was one of them. The other Hemlock Reishi also seemed obvious. Besides those two I was not sure; I could not make a safe decision. I was afraid of getting sick. Or really sick and???

Then I found a book by Alexander Schwab entitled Mushrooming without Fear. It is a wonderful “Beginner’s Guide to Collecting Safe and Delicious Mushrooms”. It has great pictures. And literally is a step by step process of describing and identifying mushrooms.

Essentially mushrooms either have gills, tubes, spines or ridges. These are major identifying factors.

So evolves Schwab’s eight rules for picking mushrooms:

Rule Number 1: Do not pick mushrooms which have gills.

Rule Number 2: The mushrooms to pick have tubes, spines and ridges. Some exceptions are puffballs, horn of plenty and cauliflower mushrooms.

Rule Number 3: Mushrooms which have been clearly identified with all the positive ID marks may be eaten.

Rule Number 4: Only pick mushrooms that are in perfect condition. If they smell rotten, they are rotten. If they feel soggy, they are soggy.

Rule Number 5: Do not eat wild-crafted mushrooms raw. Wash and cook all of the mushrooms that you find.

Rule Number 6: Use a stick to check out a mushroom that you want to identify. It is possible that there are other living things that you do not want to meet. Leave some of the roots, mycelium, when you pick a mushroom; so that amore mushrooms may grow. Put all the same kinds of mushrooms together in your carry-all; so that you can see if there is an odd one.

Rule Number 7: Do not suffocate your mushrooms with plastic. Mushrooms like to breathe.

Rule Number 8: If you cannot make up your mind about what kind of mushroom you are looking at, leave it behind.

The book has different parts with great pictures to easily help you identify mushrooms with tubes, Boletes and Hen of the Woods; mushrooms with ridges, Chanterelles; mushrooms with spines, Hedgehog Fungus; and Puffballs, Horn of Plenty and Cauliflower mushrooms. A great a guide for the woods.

There is other information in the book about different parts of the country where mushrooms grow, the relationship between mushrooms and trees, how to cut your mushrooms, and how to cook them. (The relationship between mushrooms and trees, falling leaves and branches, and similar markings is much interwoven.) There are also a few light pages on the Fly Agaric mushroom.

This book gave me the confidence to go into the woods with my husband and find and later eat a 3 lb. cauliflower mushroom.

Sydney is the owner of an Internet business that sells medicinal mushrooms, named Cordyceps Reishi Extracts, LLC. In addition to the mushrooms that are part of the business name, she also makes available chaga mushroom extract, mesima and many, many more.. Free reprint available from: Mushrooming without Fear, Book Review.