Summer Mushroom Season Starting – Chanterelles Coming Soon

Just by chance, our first summer foray was yesterday, when Bill went scouting and I tagged along, even though I was pretty sure we wouldn’t find much. (No rain for a while now and it’s up around 90 every day.)

Bill didn’t expect much either, but he doesn’t need much; one obscure little poisonous tidbit he hasn’t photographed yet is enough to make his day.

We were right, there wasn’t much – if you don’t count the mosquitoes and one huge honking Boletus bicolor.

“One swallow doth not a summer make,” as my mother was fond of remarking. But that  swallow reminded me to remind you  to be careful what you swallow. Although bicolors are good edibles, they’re easy to confuse with not good not edibles (B. sensibilis complex).

So. Now that the season’s about to start bigtime, here are two suggestions for happy wild mushroom hunting: check out Bill’s Long Lived Wild Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules – without letting his detailed explanation scare you to death – and start out with the gold standard: Chanterelles.

They’re delicious. In a good year they’re abundant. And they’re right up there with morels for being easy to recognize and safe for amateurs to collect.

Note: My husband, Bill, is an expert mycologist, a consultant to New England Poison Control (there’s a reason he wrote those rules), and a frequent blog contributor whose posts amount to a short course on wild mushroom hunting. They’re gathered – along with some recipes – in the category Wild Mushrooms, under the dropdown menu for In the Wild that appears at the top of each page. Individual species can usually be found through the search and/or the alphabetical index.