You Grow Girl™

Today I fed my mushroom habit more by attending a rare workshop with the master of mushrooms himself, David Arora. As the author of Mushrooms Demystified and All That The Rain Promises field guides, Arora knows his stuff.

I found a flyer for the workshop at the Fungus Fair last week and knew I better attend if I wanted to learn anything about mushrooms. I was right.

First we all met at his house in Santa Cruz. If I wasn't conserving photo space on my digital camera for the actual mushroom hunt, I could have easily taken photo after photo of Arora's collections. Since he's been all over the world, he's amassed quite the collection of folk art, tin toys, insects in glass, tire furniture, outsider artifacts and more.

Out of the 16 of us who signed up for the shroom hunt there were chefs, botanists, moms, nature freaks, fungophiles, real estate agents, Brits, students and me. I was just happy to be around other people as obsessed with mushrooms as I was.

I learned all about the three types of mushrooms: parasitic (not very common), saprophytic (cultivated mushrooms like shitake and oyster mushrooms) and mycorrhizic (mushrooms like chantrelles that have mutal beneficial relationships with the trees they grow under).

I frantically jotted down notes as Arora explained everything from the Yellow-Veiled Amanita (shown above) to the very tasty Candy Caps. I was in heaven.

I also found out that if you break a Blewit stem or cap it smells a lot like frozen orange juice concentrate! How cool is that?

Another way to ID mushrooms besides smell is by breaking the stem in half. Some of the mushrooms, such as Russula brevipes (shown above), break in half clean like chalk. Others looks a lot like string cheese.

And of course one of the classic way to ID mushrooms, especially for beginners, is by doing a spore print of a mushroom to determine spore color. This is useful because environment affects the stem and cap color whereas the spore color underneath the cap remain constant.

To make a spore print, put the mushroom cap on a white, plain sheet of paper (use a colored sheet too if you suspect the spores will be white or yellow). Put the glass upside down ontop on the cap to keep humidity consistent. Let it sit for about five hours to make the print.

You can also moisten your finger and put it under the cap to see the color of the spores.

Keep in mind the heavier the spore deposit, the darker the color will be. Also there are exceptions to the rule. For example, Western Jack 'O Lantern mushrooms (Omphalotus olivascens) have white spores but can give a yellow print due to the pigment on the caps.

Arora also kept us well-informed on various poisonous mushrooms. This is a pretty important part of mushroom hunting. Knowing what NOT to eat is crucial. If any of you reading this want to start hunting for your own mushrooms, don't eat anything without an expert or mushroom teacher telling you if it's okay. It's difficult to tell by photos in books at times, and you never want to assume a certain mushroom is safe if you aren't familiar with it. Obviously know the Death Cap and Destroying Angel mushrooms on sight. But keep in mind many edible mushrooms have lookalikes that aren't so good for your tummy.

As soon as Arora gave us basic info about a lot of the mushrooms we'd be seeing, we headed out on our hunt in an underdeveloped area full of large Coast Live Oaks, pine trees and Poison Oak. Almost immediately we came across the mushrooms you see in the photo above, Candy Caps (Lactarius rubidus). If you're not familar with this mushroom, you should be. They give off an amazing maple syrup smell that only gets even more intense once they're dried. In fact, Arora told us about a friend of his who collected a couple of candy caps and put them in his pocket. He soon forgot about it and the caps stayed in his jacket pocket for only two days. Two years later the friend then took the jacket to a dry cleaners. When he went to pick it up the entire laundrette smelled like maple syrup!

Also if you eat candy caps, the next day your sweat smells of maple syrup. Just think how nice you'll smell after being at the gym for a few hours!

Candy caps are often used in desserts (anyone for mushroom cheesecake?) and in Arora's book All That the Rain Promises he has quite a tasty candy cap cookie recipe.

I couldn't believe how many different kinds of mushrooms we found. I've only gone hunting for mushrooms in back of my house a couple of times and found many different kinds of mushrooms like Russulas, Grisettes, Honey Mushrooms and various polypores. On this walk we found a ton of Candy Caps, Russulas, Poison Pies, Death Caps, Cloudy Clitocybe and some of the hugest Fly Agarics I've ever seen. Yeah you heard right, Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria) -- the same in Alice in Wonderland with the caterpillar smoking a hooka. I was shocked at how many Agarics there were just growing secretly in a nondescript woodland area. I was amazed I didn't see a few gnomes roaming around as well.