Edible wild mushroom heaven!! Mmmmmm............

• White Coral Mushrooms!
  
• Went out walking in our backwoods today plugging trees and rotting downed logs and stumps with mushroom plugs(wooden dowels with mushroom mycelia). This is an experiment Javi came up with to try and get all sorts of edible mushrooms going back there. We sell plugs for 9 different types of edible gourmet mushrooms on our ebay stores(http://stores.ebay.com/Rainbow-Seeds) and our bonanzle store(http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/RainbowSeeds), as well as complete mushroom growing kits(but sticking them into rotting logs is not what we tell our customers to do with them!). Often when we get our bulk plugs in when we separate them for resale we have some uneven amounts leftover, these we are using for backyard experimenting. So we stuck them everywhere, covering our whole 5 acres, we will see what happens!
• Being that this is our first Spring living on this land, I have been going for short walks through our small wooded acreage(behind our house and to the side, about 3.5 wooded acres) and through our front meadow/turning into our garden area(about 1.5 acres) then there is the cleared .5 acre our house and lawn live on, nearly everyday! Takes me about 10-15 minutes to walk briskly through while keeping and eye out for new mushrooms popping up all the time. I have been taking pictures(ideally every day) everytime I see a new one or just a pretty one that I can't pass up! Lots of days it takes much longer than 15 minutes because I keep finding new things to look at and wonder about, and then I'm reluctant to go back in the house, back to work!
  
• Then I scan through pictures online and in my mushroom books trying to figure out if they are edible or not. If I know for sure what kind they are and they are not poisonous we'll venture back out and pick a few to eat! I want to make a record of the one's growing here(when they come out)and also share them with other wild food hunters!!
• Being a fellow mushroom fan I find it especially exciting when I find other people's blog's and websites describing their hunting trips, especially when it is in my region and there is a slight chance that I might come across the same delicious mushrooms! I love to see other hunter's pictures and hear their amazing stories. Just makes me want to go out there again, seems there is always a new one I didn't seem to notice before!
  
• Sometimes I just take pictures of plants, I love to learn about edible wild plants and their medicinal properties and vitamin content. I will be posting some of those as well!
• Today our big find was Coral Mushroom(also called club fungi, antler mushrooms or doghair mushroom...). I took the pictures of it growing(above), found it easily online. Scanned about 10-20 sights with pictures and description. What I thought was strange was that everyone said they don't have much flavor, I almost found them to be as flavorful as MORELS(if that is possible!) and 10 year old Lili(who only likes morels) pronounced them her new favorite mushroom!!
• We picked them, leaving then bottom of stems where we picked them(in hopes of keeping the mycelia going) and washed them in a bowl of water which we will take and sprinkle around our land later to get more of these spores going(hopefully! another experiment), we only had about 1 cups worth but still wanted to try them!
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• Javi also peeled a fresh head of garlic from our garden today, getting big! He sauteed the coral mushrooms in butter, then sauteed the garlic in butter and then a minute combined. We thought it tasted sort of like tamari seasoned ramen noodles, or a stringy meat like pulled pork texture(from what I remember it was like anyways). We just ate them like that, and savored every bite! We left a few small ones when we picked them, I hope they get big enough so we can eat them again! The would make really great vegetarian sandwiches, maybe a mock Reuben? Some sort of BBQ Sloppy Joe?? With a white sauce on pasta???
• Most coral fungi are tan, whitish or yellowish, a few are pink or purple. They grow in clusters up to 8 inches high in Summer and Fall. You can find them in wooded areas growing on the ground or on decaying logs.
• CAUTIONS: Some coral fungi have been reported having a laxative effect on some people(some people are more sensitive and others not effected at all). Avoid bitter tasting corals and ones with gelatinous bases. NO serious poisoning from coral fungi have been reported, (neither Javi, Lili or I felt any laxative effect or any stomach issues), happy eating!!