Tossed some oyster fungi, golden and grey types, into a homemade garlic butter, basically butter melted with powdered dried garlic, a few drops of habanero tabasco sauce, some finely chopped medium-potency red chillies, worcestershire and dark soy sauce,and a little salt and pepper. Tossed and fried the mushrooms, gave in to temptation and threw in a handful of Craterellus spp. golden case chanterelles for extra tempting mycological deliciousness.
Served with 4 rashers of unsmoked, juicy bacon rashers , grilled to perfection, then divested of all the fat and any rind. Finely chopped, a little black pepper and cut into little bite-sized strips to go with my big fat plate of mushrooms, and an ice-cold beer.
Snickers extra-large candy bar for my pudding, plus another, my second and last can of 'kestrel' extra-strength lager and a block of blue lancashire stilton cheese to round it off. And rounded off nicely it was indeed.
I looked into the fridge as I was cooking up this little treat, and seeing the batch of Hedgehog fungi, Hydnum repandum, oh god. You have no IDEA how much my mouth started watering. Hedgehogs are SO gorgeously tasty. I really so wish they could be a little bit more common. For they have over the last twp days, become high up in my top-5 list of favourite fungi to eat
(1-giant puffball if I can get one, failing that, some of the other large, tender and flavorsome puffballs such as Calvatia and Bovista spp.), sliced as cutlets, then dipped in batter to be deep fried with salt and pepper.
2-Fried Parasol mushrooms, Macrolepiota procera, braised simply in salted butter until tender and juicy
Hedgehog fungi (Hydnum spp. possibly Hydnellum and maybe young specimens of Sacodon, although I've never had Sarcodon or Hydnellum...yet)
Morels-nuff said. Gorgeous in stews, chilli con carne, or when I lived at my old place and was lucky enough to import a load of woodchip mulch for the garden, a true glut of Morchella elata, the black morel, simply picked clean of slugs etc and cleaned and braised simply in butter..
Shiitake, although a commercial species not growing wild here, I have been wanting to grow some myself (spawn is inserted into holes drilled in hardwood logs, capped over with wax and left, watering occasionally and not allowing to get too dry or hot.
Okus few never used as a main dish that I am very fond of as kitchen spices-Chalciporus piperatus, the peppery boletus. Think a fungal substitute for black or chilli pepper, but with a flavor and distinctive fire all of its very own.
And Amanita muscaria (yes, that famous red cap and white spotted Amanita, and relative of many of the most potently deadly, nigh-incurably lethal fungi of all, some of the Deadly White Amanitas (and in the case of A.phalloides, often of a septic greenish cast to the cap) A single bite of any of these can prove fatal, over a week or more, in one of the most painful and hideous, drawn out ways to go imaginable...Although there is good eating within the geus Amanita, only a true expert should ever permit any species of Amanita to pass his lips. A single death cap in a basket of mushrooms, even were I to have spent from first light at dawn, to 3am at night, would induce me to throw away my entire harvest with not a picosecond of hesitation longer than it took to identify the offending mushroom fruitbody to species level)
A.muscaria, the fly agaric is one of my favorite mushrooms, for its rich and fascinating ancient history. The latin 'muscaria' species level epithet given to it because of its utility as a fly poison. Boiled in sugared milk, the compound 1,3-diolein acts as a potent fly attractant,'Musca' being the latin for house fly. These land, feed, become intoxicated by the mixture of neurotoxins in there, fall in, and drown. Environmentally friendly way to nuke a house of its flies.
That aside it has for millenia been used as an intoxicant of the human species. The Lapp people observed that reindeer go berserk for the stuff and will seek it out to great lengths, thus did their shamen try them.
Poisonous raw due ibotenic acid, a neurotoxin, that in the body is metabolized to the 10-15x as potent psychoactive drug muscimol. This gets passed out almost entirely whole, poorer people drinking the shaman's piss, to allow them to become intoxicated when they either had none, or could afford none of the precious mushrooms themselves. After first-pass, the toxic ibotenic acid content is broken down to the desirable muscimol, causing less side effects than the original ingesting subject got.
Sometimes a single batch of mushrooms would serve not only a shaman, but 3, even four further tribespeople first in this way. And NO, before anybody even wonders to themselves, let alone asked, I do NOT and have not, will never, do this. I do not need to trade reindeer (sometimes a single mushroom would be the equal in trade to a single reindeer, such as the value of these mushrooms in the siberian Lapp culture). Heat-curing accomplishes the very same change, decarboxylating ibotenic acid to muscimol, that the bodys metabolic processes will accomplish)
Raw mushrooms on the other hand will make a user quite ill. And I do not experience the same scarcity the siberian shamen do, The woods and forest that has been my absolute favourite to hike in. and hunt for mushrooms of all sorts for dinner, ever since early preteens, regularly produces kilograms of fly agarics every season)
They CAN be eaten, if first parboiled, throwing away the water used, boiled again following the same procedure, at least one further time before then cooking and eating, to leach out the toxins/psychoactive substances, although I have never done it.
For me, it has once heat-cured and dried over low heat in an open oven, overnight on baking-foil lined baking trays, taking only the choicest caps for myself, leaving many others behind to ensure good harvests, and not to impact population numbers, so my hunting grounds remain productive year after year, I LOVE it in small amounts in meat dishes as a spice. Or slightly larger ones as a tonic, boosting the ability to withstand adverse environments without discomfort (although It will not protect from the injurious effects of extreme cold, exertion etc. it does make for a fantastic, energizing, strengthening winter tonic medicine). It can also be used as a sedative, or dream inducer, of incredibly vivid lucid dreams, as well as in much larger doses to induce a waking-sleeping hybrid visionary trance state, although I don't have much actual experience of that, just a few times)
Finished my meal off with a block of stilton cheese and another cold can of strong beer
