Accidentally became a mushroom forager after one wrong hike last fall

I went for a hike in the Cascade foothills near North Bend last October and got totally lost for like 45 minutes. While trying to find the trail again I noticed this GIANT cluster of orange mushrooms growing on a dead tree stump. I took a photo, looked it up later, and it turned out to be chicken of the woods, which is totally edible and safe. I went back the next weekend, harvested a few pounds, and cooked them up in a butter sauce. They tasted exactly like chicken, no joke. Now I've got a field guide and I've been out nine times this spring finding morels and oyster mushrooms. Anybody else pick up foraging by pure accident and now can't stop looking at the ground on every walk?

2 comments

2 Comments

faithb785d ago

Chicken of the woods is what got me hooked too. Found it on a log behind my sister's cabin in the Smokies three years ago and thought I'd stumbled onto some kind of forest treasure. That first taste blew my mind. Now I've got a whole shelf of field guides and my wife jokes that I walk staring at the ground like I lost a contact lens. I say it's just smart living.

the_richard4d ago

Me and my wife have an agreement now - I can pick any mushroom I find as long as I cook her a sample first and wait 4 hours before she eats it. She calls it my "fatal foraging guarantee" and I think she enjoys watching me sweat more than the mushrooms.