While I was out over the weekend cutting wood into suitable lengths for splitting (we still have piles and piles of logs from last year), I stumbled across a pleasant surprise in some of the logs – oyster mushrooms! At least I thought they were oyster mushrooms. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten any mushrooms that didn’t come from a store or market. Or if I did, they had some kind of amnesia-inducing toxicity.
In any case, I’ve heard too many of those stories (probably urban legends, some of them) about people minding their own business eating some cute little fungi they found, only they turn out to be death angels or something, and two hours later they’re dead. Berries are pretty easy; I’ve stayed away from wild mushrooms… until now. After some careful research (I checked multiple sources- you know you can never trust what you read on the Internet; here is a decent one), I determined that they were, in fact, oyster mushrooms. And there aren’t any deadly oyster look-alikes, which was also a good thing. I’m certainly not comfortable enough to be picking and eating something that has a poisonous twin, except for that one little wart on the stem…
Having done my due diligence, I picked some last night and sautéed them up with some spinach in a light parmesan cream sauce (yum). And I’m still here to talk about it, so I guess they were okay. Not bad for my first foray into fungi foraging.
[…] a beech and a maple, and I’ll compare how they do. Oysters will do okay on most woods, but I found them growing wild on tulip (poplar) here, so that’s what I’m using. Don’t use pine for […]