Wild Mushrooms

Mountains. I was dropped off in a Roma village with this family, the first family we came to in the village. I wanted to collect mushrooms, and this village had a mushroom collecting connection. I entered the Roma community with Bulgarian friends and the mushroom book by my friend, David Arora, All the Rain Promises…

Lithuania, 1989.

Shtetl house. Oh! How my heart aches!

Yunnan, 1998.

I traveled to Yunnan, China three times to join my mycologist friend, David Arora. Some of you may know his books: Mushrooms Demystified, and All the Rain Promises and More. The latter volume includes my first published pieces! Two small paragraphs on mushroom collecting. Here, you see David photographing one of the women we had…

Amanita Muscaria Toxicity and Vinegar Preserved Mushrooms

A look at an historic mushroom text. “In 1879 mushrooms were exported from Japan to the value of 243,440 yens. The yen is equal to 99.7 cents. Among the northeastern tribes of Asia fungi are largely used as food. One species, when pounded, forms their snuff, while another, the Fly Agaric, which is utilized in…

How much amanita muscaria is safe to eat?

Detoxified Fly Agaric How much Amanita muscaria to is safe to eat? When you detoxify the “Fly Amanita” by leaching out the water soluble toxins by parboiling thinly sliced mushrooms in plentiful water for at least ten, and preferably fifteen minutes, you transform Amanita muscaria into a prime edible mushroom. Short of lab testing which…

Amanita muscaria, edibile if parboiled

Amanita muscraria being par boiled to remove toxins prior to pickling in Ueda, Japan, October 2019. Salted par boiled Amanita muscaria is the most common traditional way the mushrooms were eaten in Ueda, although over the last thirty years consumption of muscaria has become uncommon. Amanita muscaria is psychoactive unless it is par boiled prior…

MUSHROOMS ARE THE GIFT of the forest. They are the summer fruit and the winter meet. On the luckiest of days they spread out between the trees like meadow flowers—yellow, red, russet, white, blue, gray. Whether you are out on one of these days, or on a day in which the mushrooms are hiding, every…