Fungus among us

No matter how much you "know" about edible wild mushrooms, it would still take a bold person to throw something like that in a frying pan. I have no idea if this is poisonous, but it was beautiful enough in a grotesque way to stop me in my tracks.

It was happily growing under a tree along the parking strip down the street. Yes, we are back to typical Northwest damp weather and all sorts of things are coming out of the ground. 

Farm kids were taught from an early age to be terrified of wild mushrooms.  You didn't even have to taste it-- just a touch could kill you!  Somehow, that sticks with a person. And the poisonous mushrooms have wonderful, scary names.

Farmed edible mushrooms were once cultivated on manure in unsanitary caves, which turned people off.  Now they're grown on "clean, pasteurized compost" according to Ostrum's Mushrooms,  a Northwest Company and the biggest American grower.  If you are interested in mushroom cultivation, click HERE for their entertaining promotional video. (Warning: it shows a lady in a cave eating mushrooms like apples.)

This white, bland, supermarket variety is as safe as any produce we buy.   I like mushrooms, but John doesn't.  Actually, he always claims he could eat a raw mushroom if he had to, but I've never seem him do it, so I don't use them in anything.  If I want a quick mushroom hit, sometimes I'll put the salty canned ones in scrambled eggs for lunch. A poor substitute for the real thing.

A mushroom fairy ring

The ancient Romans loved eating fungi, as did the rest of old Europe.  But in Great Britain, they were largely shunned in the cookbooks, herbals and medical texts.  Later on in the Victorian lore, mushrooms became part of the rural enchantment of fairies, pixies and elves, which gave mushrooms an image makeover.

One mushroom became the classic symbol for the Victorian fairyland cult: the red-and-white fly agaric (Amanita muscaria). The Fly agaric is a spectacular stand-out, even in a lurid family that includes deadly stunners like the tawny Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina) and the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides).

If the Fly agaric doesn't kill you first (or perhaps while it's killing you) it causes psychoactive effects from an unpredictable mixture of alkaloids (muscarine, muscimol, ibotenic acid) which produce a cocktail of not-so-attractive LSD effects: disorientation, drooling, sweats, numbness in the extremities, nausea, etc.

 

Fly ageric for Christmas dinner?