Mushrooming!

What do most people do on their first anniversary?  I don't know.  We went on a mushroom foraging expedition!  Five hours with two mushrooms pros in an urban forest here in Vancouver.  Despite the chilly weather, it was fascinating and fun.

Even better, it clued us in to some things we can do without an additional trip to the store, like finding our own mushrooms (we're unlikely to do this until we're really certain of our identification skills) and growing our own in the storage closet (a potential 2014 project).

We saw cool mushrooms.  We saw tasty mushrooms.  We saw mushrooms that looked like bright orange snot.  We saw medicinal mushrooms.  We saw pretty mushrooms (well, most are).  And lots and lots more -- several dozen species.  It was amazing how many different kinds exist on a small patch of land, once you've clued in to their existence.  We learned lots.

Anyway, towards the end we picked a few edibles and took 'em home.  Starting from the upper left in the photo below, we have laccaria laccata, winter oysters, lepista nuda (blewits), and ... I don't know the other two yellowy types, but recall that the one under the winter oysters is some sort of fake chantarelle which isn't poisonous.  The three fan-shaped ones in the far lower left corner are turkey tails, which you don't eat because they're woody and leathery, but you can make them into tea for some nice health benefits (apparently) -- I did so this evening and feel pretty good.

The ones we fried up were all delicious in different ways, save the winter oysters which tasted almost exactly like nothing, except they were sort of a mushy-nothing.  The end.