To eat, or not to eat

This wet summer has soaked the ground and brought the mushrooms up, as many shrooms as we can remember in the half-dozen years we’ve been hunting and gathering them. We eat some 15 varieties that we’ve become familiar with, brands we know with certainty are tasty and benign. Black trumpet, hedgehog, painted sullius, blewit, oyster, bear’s head tooth, ash bolete, chanterelle, hen-of-the-woods, cauliflower, giant puffball, berkeley polypore, morel, and a few others. A few weeks ago we discovered a new prospect, American Caesar’s, an orange mushroom with a red nipple on its head that blooms up first as a bright red ball. It’s of the Amanita family, that bunch of mushrooms that brings you such scary characters as Fly Agaric and Destroying Angel. Interesting company for an edible mushroom to keep. Particularly because Caesar’s has a look-alike which will make you very very sick. But if you know what to look for, identifying the American Caesar’s mushroom with certainty is no problem. So why have I resisted doing that first taste test? (No matter that you are certain of a mushroom’s identity…you MUST always do a trial tasting test, eating just a half of the cap and waiting 24 hours…). The beautiful American Caesar’s, the promise of a tasty new mushroom, and, uh, the very, very low risk of mistaken identity. I’ve been stalling for weeks. Then I read about a world class expert on mushrooms who says, “I never eat Amanitas, period. Never.” To live is to manage risk, to balance the probable against the improbable. I like risk, and can accept more than most people, I think. However, just two days ago I decided to defer to the wisdom of somebody who thinks about the risks of having some mushroom toxin dissolve his liver…it ain’t worth the chance. The taste, that is. So I have adopted that rule. I don’t…do not…eat Amanitas.

Getting just a bit away

Morning at Pillsbury

One of the first of many minor pleasures that Joan and I began practicing some 25 years ago when the kids were still small was state parking. As in quick camping trips to a couple of choice local parks. Joan discovered our favorites early on, and Pillsbury State Park in E. Washington is probably at the top of the list. It’s about 45 minutes from Warner, and you drive down through the back end of Bradford, along a road through a wetlands that for some reason used to give me the creeps…a little too low, a little too dark…a little too, uh, creepy. But it doesn’t anymore. Give me the creeps, that is. Probably because in the intervening 25 years I’ve found quite a bit more in the real world that is sufficient to give me the creeps for real reasons, and I’ve let the imaginary ones fade. Pillsbury is on the state Greenway, a hiking trail from Sunappee on down to, I dunno, but I’m sure it stops short of the Mass border. For what it’s worth (and it’s worth a lot…because the state of NH in its wisdom has decided to charge a premium for the privilege of camping in its campgrounds), there is nothing finer, if you’re in the mood, than a couple of nights on the little lake, listening to the pair of loons, watching the rays of the rising sun come through ropes of mist rising from the water, sipping coffee and wondering why the heck you don’t do this more often when it’s so close and easy.