Mad about mushrooms
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On that stretch of subtropical shore there no industry and few people, so you have some of the cleanest water on the East Coast. Living in Beaufort County, made up of 64 islands, I did a bit of fishing, crabbing and shrimping. But I liked oystering best. Oysters don run away when you go to catch My friends and I spent many winter afternoons in Tshirts, cutoffs and old boots, wading kneedeep in a creek at low tide, filling fivegallon buckets with fat mollusks for that night oyster roast. Whenever I found one as big as my hand, I stop, bust it open, tilt my head back and slurp down that oyster like a caveman.Now that I live in the cheap bailey button ugg boots Piedmont I do miss oystering. But I found a new pastime called foraging. In different seasons I eat the roots, shoots, flowers and fruits of giant Solomon seal or the growing tips of smilax or even redbud flowers. But mostly I look for mushrooms: morels, puffballs, chanterelles and others. For instance, the other day I harvested six pounds of chickenofthewoods mushroom. It was growing on an innercity street tree, so maybe I should call that one chickenofthehood. I served it up in a tomatocream sauce. By God, it tasted like chicken.Through a fluky connection over the uggs uk outlet winter I harvested a woolylooking edible mushroom as big as my torso, growing out of a hollow in an oak tree, fourteen feet up. To reach it I had to stand on the part of my 8foot stepladder that for some reason says, not step here.The mushroom weighed as much as a couple of cases of beer. I saved some to eat and share with friends. But in a couple of hours that afternoon, I carved up and sold the rest of that meaty mushroom to five chefs in downtown Durham for $351. I won name this mushroom, as I don want to start a misguided gold rush. But like I said, it was a fluke. On three forays this spring I struck out, while other foragers have filled grocery bags halffull with morels as big as limes.You really can learn about foraging mushrooms from a book. If you don want to get sick or die, you need to be introduced to mushrooms by someone you trust. I learned from foragers with names like Parker, Tradd, Fox and Gumby and I still alive.When I eat something from the woods I still get that caveman vibe. It a subtle but visceral hum. It like dialing your way through the static on a radio and then picking up the bass notes of some universal song that confirms you a part of nature, not a spectator.But my favorite mushroom isn rare, highdollar or hard to find. I gather them in the woods, on street trees and in friends backyards.I like them best sliced into quarterinch strips and fried in bacon fat until the slender gills are crispy and the cap is succulent. We eat these as a side dish or tossed in a salad. I also seen this mushroom served on pizza or with pasta in local restaurants. Taxonomists call this fungi Pleurotus ostreatus. But foragers simply call it an oyster mushroom. And sometimes they are as big as my hand.
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