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Pheasant with Wild Mushrooms Jeff Broadbent made this dish for the holiday potluck. It was delicious! If you are unsuccessful in buddying up to Jeff or another pheasant hunter (Richard Stipes comes to mind), chicken might serve as a substitute. by Jeff Broadbent Cantharellus californicus. © Christian Schwarz (from mushroomobserver.org) Method Mushrooms Heat 2 Tbl. butter in a heavy 12-inch skillet over high heat until foam subsides, then sauté mushrooms, stirring often, until liquid evaporates and mushrooms begin to brown, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and parsley and sauté, stirring for 1 minute. Transfer to a bowl and wipe skillet clean. Pheasant Dredge the pheasant in seasoned flour (I use a plastic bag and shake the pieces around in it), shaking off excess. Heat the oil (and butter if desired) in a large pan. Add pheasant and sauté for about two minutes (or until each side is brown). Remove and place on a plate. Repeat this process in batches until all pieces are browned. Add Marsala wine to skillet and deglaze by boiling, stirring and scraping up brown bits, until reduced by half. Stir in carrots, onions and celery and simmer/sauté until all vegetables are soft, about 10 minutes. Add garlic, fresh parsley, wine and broth and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat slightly, maintaining a slow boil, until alcohol cooks off. Stir in mushroom mixture, pheasant, and any juices accumulated on platter. Season with salt and pepper if necessary. Simmer 2–5 minutes more to allow sauce to thicken. Serve over polenta, wild rice or noodles. Sprinkle with fresh parsley. Recipe contributed: February 2009 Objective: Main course Total Time: 60 - 90 mins Yield: 4 servings Suggested Mushrooms: Chanterelle (Cantharellus californicus, Cantharellus formosus, Cantharellus subalbidus) Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) Join FFSC or renew your membership to access the rest of this content. Join FFSC Login as an FFSC member to access the rest of this content. Login Ingredients 3 Tbl. unsalted butter 1 pound wild mushrooms, quartered and or sliced (e.g., chanterelles and shiitake) 1 large garlic clove, minced 2 Tbl. chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley Approx. 1 lb. pheasant (2 wild birds – deboned, cut into small pieces and pounded to 1⁄4 inch thick) 4 Tbl. olive oil (you may also add butter for even more flavor – but be careful not to burn) 1⁄2 C Marsala wine 1⁄2 C chopped carrots 1⁄2 C chopped onion 1⁄2 C chopped celery 2 cloves garlic (chopped) 3 Tbl. fresh parsley (chopped) 1 C chardonnay wine 1⁄2–1 C chicken broth Seasoned flour (see below) Seasoned Flour 1 C flour 1/2 tsp. salt 1/4 tsp. black pepper 1 tsp. dried parsley, crumbled 1/4 tsp. dried thyme, crumbled 1/4 tsp. dried sage, crumbled Previous Recipe All Recipes Next Recipe

News & Stories / Echo Summit 2012 Foray Report Conditions were on the dry side, but we found mushrooms nonetheless! And, of course, had a great time. Bill White • October 1, 2012 Photo by Hugh Smith Thanks to Dawn Engel, Marje Young and the kitchen wizards for planning and cooking such delicious meals, all the volunteers who helped with food prep and lodge cleanup, Phyllis Cole for handling registration, Cassandra Fuentes for tracking species for the foray, and to Hugh Smith for documenting all the fun! Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts 2013 Echo Summit Foray Recap Echo Summit 2015 Foray Report Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

Candy Cap Cheesecake It seems like you can find someone's candy cap cheesecake on the dessert table at nearly every FFSC event. Each approach is unique, and we're happy to try them all! by Deb Lactarius rubidus. © Diane Rose (CC-BY-NC) (from inaturalist.org, obs. 332649328) Method Cover dried candy caps in brandy or Cognac to reconstitute until soft. Drain* and chop. Preheat oven to 500°F. Crush graham crackers and combine with butter. Press into bottom and halfway up the sides of a 10" spring form pan. Place in refrigerator to chill. In a large mixing bowl, beat cream cheese, add sugar, flour, salt, and vanilla and beat well. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Blend in sour cream and chopped candy caps, and pour into the graham cracker crust. Bake at 500°F for 10 minutes, and then at 225°F for an additional 70 to 80 minutes. Filling will be almost set, moving slightly when pan is jiggled. Cool at room temperature. Refrigerate for 8 hours or overnight before serving. * You can either discard the alcohol from reconstituting the candy caps; or you can reserve the liquid, and then strain any remaining raw bits of mushroom out by using a coffee filter or fine cloth. Then drink the candy-cap infused brandy, use it in a cocktail, pour it over ice cream or cake, or add a splash to coffee or hot chocolate. Recipe contributed: May 1995 Objective: Dessert Total Time: 2 hours, plus chill overnight Yield: 10 to 12 slices Suggested Mushrooms: Candy cap (Lactarius fragilis, Lactarius rubidus, Lactarius rufulus) Join FFSC or renew your membership to access the rest of this content. Join FFSC Login as an FFSC member to access the rest of this content. Login Ingredients 2 pkg Graham Crackers 1 1/4 (1.25) sticks butter, melted 2 1/2 (2.5) Lbs. cream cheese, room temperature 1 3/4 (1.75) Cups sugar 3 Tbsp. flour 1/4 tsp salt 3/4 Cups sour cream 1 tsp. Vanilla 6 eggs, room temperature 1 loose Cup dried* candy caps Cognac or brandy 10" spring form pan * The iconic sweet mable syrup aroma and flavor only develops after candy caps are fully dehydrated first. Drying them also kills any bugs and bacterial contamination from the forest. Previous Recipe All Recipes Next Recipe

News & Stories / Field Reports Field Report - 2021 NAMA Foray Grandby CO I was fortunate to be able to attend the annual North American Mycological Association (NAMA) foray that was held at a beautiful YMCA camp just outside of Granby, Colorado from August 12th through the 15th. This camp is located in the traditional summer residential valley of several native American tribes, the Utes, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne among others. Phil Carpenter • October 28, 2021 NAMA Logo For those unfamiliar with this NAMA event, it is held at a different location every year, always selected for a time and place where mushrooms are, or at least should be, coming up. This year, contrary to several past years, the selected location had extensive mushrooms, that is if you were over 10,000’ in elevation. The seasonal monsoon conditions favored several southwestern states this year, including Colorado, at least over 10,000’. Every afternoon we were treated to those showy cumulonimbus clouds rolling in accompanied by thunder and lightning. Our last night there we even had a prolonged shower at the camp. It was good to see rain again! This annual foray is a great experience to visit other parts of North America to meet like-minded people and see the mushrooms of that area. Many forays are always held, a full team of sorters and identification experts is on-hand to put names on things and each year, examples of all the mushrooms found are described and vouchered. This year the foray was attended by over 250 people, many that were friends that I’ve made over several past forays. It was great to reacquaint with old friends and make some new ones. Just like our local forays, attendees to the NAMA forays are friendly, easy to talk to and pleasant to be around. For me, the draw for these forays is always the mushrooms. I thoroughly enjoy seeing the wide variety of different mushrooms in different parts of the world. As such, I went out on every opportunity there was to sign up. There were daily all day and four to six half day trips each day so there was ample opportunity to visit different habitats. It is always pleasing and somewhat surprising how many things I recognize. I typically recognize most things I see at least to genus. Even things that appear to be a species I recognize, I am unwilling to try to put a species name on them. I’ve been wrong too many times. Many familiar genera were found: Amanita, Russula, Lactarius, Hebaloma, Suillus, Hygrophorus, Albatrellus, Leccinum, many Cortinarius, etc. A total of just over 150 species were identified and vouchered. While the tables holding the finds from each foray were sagging under the numbers found, many were repeats. The most collected species for the trip was the familiar Amanita muscaria (variety flavivolvata). I had heard reports that a species I was looking forward to finding was abundant this year: the famed red-capped porcini of the Rockies, Boletus rubriceps . And yes it was. They were big, beautiful, bountiful and bug-free (for the most part). I estimate that I picked over 20 pounds. After the foray, I met my cousin who lives fairly close so I was able to donate them to his dwindling stash of dried boletes. I've been told that that species is the best tasting of all the different porcini species. After having them several different ways, I can report that I found them no better or no worse than our local king boletes. In other words, delicious! As the NAMA Trustee for the Central Pacific Region, liaison to NAMA for 12 local clubs, I attended the board meeting where the business of running a national organization was conducted. In many ways it is quite the same as what I've been part of for the FFSC for the past 35+ years. One decision made at that meeting is that the location for next year's foray will be in the Missouri hills. In addition to the numerous collecting trips at the foray, there is always a variety of excellent presentations available to attend every day. Every evening there are several talks given to the entire assembly of attendees. One of the more interesting ones I heard was a talk on burn morels. As someone who makes several trips every year to our burn sites in CA, I was curious to see what he had to say. Instead of just driving up to a burn area to scope it out, he presented ways of using current technology to do scouting from a distance. He used burn maps, topo maps to judge steepness and orientation (north-facing slopes versus south, etc.), aerial photography to judge canopy cover, rainfall maps to judge moisture content and timing, and other maps to judge access roads. This guy had it down to a science! He showed the anticipated pictures of mountains of morels and even one that he took of someone's haul that had been confiscated by the authorities for some reason. He ended the talk with the statement that he can't eat morels. That brought down the house. As I have had in the past, I had a great time, learned a few new species and renewed some friendships. I'm looking forward to Missouri. You should consider joining me!! If you're an FFSC member, you can get a club discount on your NAMA membership. Visit Other Mycological Clubs for details. Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts My Adventures in Telluride Colorado Phil Carpenter receives Knighton Award at Appalachia NAMA 2023 Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

Snow Peas, Leeks, and Shiitake Mushrooms A quick and delicious Asian inspired vegetable dish. by Chef Zachary Mazi Shiitake on a log. (wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiitake) Method Heat sauté pan on medium heat and melt coconut oil When oil is hot, add leeks and shiitakes and cook until shiitakes are fully cooked and have released their juices. Add salt and pepper. Add snow peas, and sauté quickly. Add coconut aminos and cover to steam finish the dish. Simply exchange the peas for sliced baby bok choy for a crunchy and delicious alternative. Recipe contributed: March 2013 Objective: Side or first course Total Time: 30 mins Yield: About 4 servings Suggested Mushrooms: Shiitake (Lentinula edodes) Join FFSC or renew your membership to access the rest of this content. Join FFSC Login as an FFSC member to access the rest of this content. Login Ingredients 1 T coconut oil 1 leek, white part only, washed, quartered and sliced thin against the grain 1 lb. shiitake mushrooms, de-stemmed, and sliced thin 1 lb. snow peas, strings removed 1 t salt 1/2 t pepper 1 to 2 T Coconut Aminos Previous Recipe All Recipes Next Recipe

News & Stories / Species List — Albion II Foray 2009 The Albion II foray January 23–25 was a good time. It was well attended with a good mix of people. There seemed to be mostly recreational hunters, and not that many beginners. Douglas Smith • February 1, 2009 From Albion II, 2009. Photo by Hugh Smith Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts Albion I 2008 Recap 2009 Alaska Foray Travelogue Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

Leccinum Burgundy in Snail Shells Transform your bountiful Leccinum harvest with this escargot-style preparation. by Shea Moss Leccinum manzanitae. © Jasmine S. (CC-BY-NC) (from inaturalist.org, obs. 139595975) (cropped) Method Clean the Shells Clean the shells in a pan of hot water. Set aside and allow to cool. Sauté the Leccinum Cut the Leccinum into 2" x 1" rectangles. Sauté in 2 Tbsp. butter until the mushrooms give off their water (about 8 minutes). Remove mushrooms from the pan with a slotted spoon. To the skillet add the white wine and the sliced shallots. Cook until the liquid is reduced by 1/2. Add back the Leccinum and sauté 2 minutes more, then remove from heat and allow to cool. Prepare the Dish Preheat oven to 425°F. In a bowl, mix the garlic with the chopped shallots, parsley, salt, pepper and butter. Mix well. In each shell, place a small amount of the butter mixture, then insert a piece of the cooked Leccinum , and seal with more of the butter mixture. Arrange the shells with the open side up on an ovenproof serving dish. Sprinkle each shell with water and a pinch of bread crumbs. Bake for 8 minutes. Serve piping hot from the oven. For the table, escargot holders and forks would be a nice touch, plus fresh baguettes on hand to soak up the garlic butter. Recipe contributed: November 1988 This escargot-style recipe uses real snail shells, with Leccinum in place of the snail meat. (Perhaps this should be called "Leccargot"?) If you decide to try to harvest shells from your own garden snails instead of purchasing clean empty shells, be sure to educate yourself on how to raise and harvest live snails for cooking first. Bringing live snails to food-grade standard is more complicated than you might think. Snails often feed on vegetation and dead animal matter that are dangerous for human consumption. Some toxins can reside in their bodies for several days. Thus, you would need to raise your snails in a carefully controlled environment, performing certain tests along the way to ensure their edibility. Keeping them alive throughout the entire process is another matter, requiring care in handling the little critters. Finally, before cooking, it is necessary to put the snails and their shells through a careful cleansing process. (If you eat the snails themselves, a specific tenderizing process is also necessary.) Find a very good French cookbook or reliable online resource to understand what this ensnails entails. But herein lays the greatest danger: It is important to examine the livestock in your escargatoire (snail herd) one by one each day to evaluate their health, speed, size, snail color, etc. If one is not careful, one begins to ascribe personalities to them, encourage races, perhaps even name them. Over time, you may notice a difference in the way your family and close friends are behaving towards you... By then, popping the little rascals into boiling salted water takes nerves of steel! Whatever you do, don't put "Jumbo" and "Slicker" back in the garden. And don't put them in my garden either. I've had enough problems with "Spit" and "Chip" as it is. Objective: Side or first course Total Time: 1 hour Yield: 8+ servings Suggested Mushrooms: Leccinum (aspen, birch, and manzanita boletes) (Leccinum insigne, Leccinum manzanitae, Leccinum scabrum) Join FFSC or renew your membership to access the rest of this content. Join FFSC Login as an FFSC member to access the rest of this content. Login Ingredients Warm water 50 snail shells, cleaned* 2 Lbs. Leccinum caps, cleaned 2 Tbsp. sweet butter or margarine (and) 1/2 Lb. sweet butter or margarine 1/2 cup white Burgundy (a dry Chardonnay) 2 shallots, thinly sliced 3/4 tsp. garlic, finely chopped 1 1/2 (1.5) Tbsp. flat leaf parsley, finely chopped 3/4 Tbsp. salt Pinch of fresh ground pepper 1/2 cup fine white breadcrumbs Fresh baguette for the table Plus: Ovenproof serving dish Escargot holders and forks, if available * Editors note: As of the 2020s, you can purchase pre-cleaned, food-grade empty snail shells online and at specialty gourmet shops. Burgundy snail shells from Helix pomatia snails are the gold standard. Previous Recipe All Recipes Next Recipe

News & Stories / Field Reports Albion I 2002: Species List Our members collected over 200 species at our first Albion foray of the season. Henry Young • March 1, 2002 Hypholoma fasciculare. © Damon Tighe (CC-BY-NC) (from inaturalist.org, ID 67267989) Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts Albion I Foray, December 2003 Albion I Foray 2005 Species List Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

News & Stories / Will Mushrooms Make Styrofoam Obsolete? The May 2013 issue of New Yorker magazine had an article by Ian Frazier about a mycelium-based packaging material destined to make styrofoam packaging obsolete. Here's a shorter recap of the story, focusing on some interesting mycological details. Shea Moss • September 29, 2013 Mycelium Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, two students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, grow all-natural substitutes for plastic from chitin molecules found in polypores. McIntyre and Bayer were taking a class from Professor Burt Swersey called Inventor’s Studio. When McIntyre and Bayer took the class in the fall term of their senior year, neither came up with anything very workable at first. Gavin’s idea for a car-exhaust attachment that would burn off emissions with charged plasma was ingenious but probably unsafe. “Like driving around with a lightning bolt in your tailpipe.” Eben’s idea for a no-moving parts turbine that could generate electricity in high winds by means of sound did not impress Swersey at all. Toward the end of their first semester, Eben thought of a previous R.P.I. class, in which he had been given the problem of making insulation panels out of a mineral called perlite. The difficulty with perlite is that it’s loose, like handfuls of popped popcorn, and tends to settle. Eben, who is the product of a one room schoolhouse in rural Vermont, grew up helping his Dad, a maple sugar farmer, on a one hundred forty acre sugarbush farm. Ranks of maple trees rise on the rocky hillsides above the farm. In the spring they would tap thousands of the best trees and connect them to a vat in the sugarhouse by PVC tubes along the steep ground. Father and son built a complicated wood chip burner to process the syrup in the sugar shack, without burning the roof down. One of Eben’s chores was to move the wood chips to the burner from on open bunker made of telephone poles and chicken wire. Though covered with a tarp, the pile of chips sometimes got wet and sprouted mushrooms. Eben noticed how the fine white fabric of their mycelium sometimes grew through the pile so tenaciously that big bunches of chips stuck together in a single clump. Eben ordered a grow-it-yourself mushroom kit while he was home during a break. He took the mushroom spores the kit contained, combined them with water and nutrients in a glass jar, added some perlite, and put the jar in the basement. When he checked a few days later, the jar held a solid white disk of perlite knit together by mycelium strands. With not much else to show for the semester of Inventor’s Studio, Eben brought the perlite disk to class. “He takes this thing out of his pocket,” Swersey recalled, “and it’s white, this amazing piece of insulation that had been grown, without hydrocarbons, with almost no energy used. The stuff could be made with almost any waste materials — rice husks, cotton wastes, stuff farmers throw away, stuff they have no market for — and it wouldn’t take away from anybody’s food supply, and it could be made anywhere from local materials, so you could cut down on transportation costs. And it would be completely biodegradable! What more could you want?” Gavin and Eben worked together for the next year trying all kinds of substrates and heating methods. Twice, they almost burned the lab at school down. They tried lint from clothes dryers, Jell-o, lobster shells, even hair. (“If it worked we were going to call the product Hairsulate.”) Instead of hunting for venture capital, Eben and Gavin financed their company by winning grants and competitions. They were still proceeding in the Edisonian hit or miss style, when Sue Van Hook, a senior teaching associate in biology and natural sciences at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, read an article in the local Albany Times Union. When studying for her degree in botany at Humboldt State University in California, she took a course in mycology and was smitten. She wrote her graduate thesis on macrofungi and has been studying mushrooms in the field and under microscopes ever since. After eighteen years of teaching at Skidmore, she saw something that changed her life. She called Eben and talked with him for two hours. She asked Gavin if he knew anything about mushrooms. Neither knew much. She asked, “Can we get married?” (In the fungal sense, I presume). Van Hook went on wide-ranging mushroom hunts collecting new species for the company’s archives. At Skidmore’s bio labs, she and her students spent hours cataloguing the finds and recording their characteristics. The most useful mycelium came from a group of polypores. The mycelium of polypores has very strong hyphae. These hyphae can knit a molded piece of substrate solidly together. A single cubic inch of substrate can contain as much as eight miles of mycelium. Bayer and McIntyre’s invention creates natural substances that imitate plastics. The packaging material made by their factory takes a substrate of agricultural waste, steam pasturizes it, adds trace nutrients and a small amount of water, injects the mixture with pellets of mycelium, puts it in a mold shaped like a piece of packing that protects a product during shipping, and sets the mold on a rack in the dark. Four days later the mycelium has grown throughout the substrate into the shape of the mold, producing a material almost indistinguishable from Styrofoam in form, function, and cost. An application of heat kills the mycelium and stops the growth. When broken up and thrown into a compost pile, the packing material biodegrades in about a month. Van Hook retired from Skidmore to work full time with Eben and Gavin at their company, which they call Evocative . She gives lectures to prospective clients and investors where she projects on screen the molecular structures of chlorophyll, starch, glucose, cellulose, lignin, and chitin. “These are the molecules that nature builds with. For us to have a sustainable planet, we must design and build with these.” The air nearby Evocative often smells of cream of mushroom soup! In a corner of the building a sealed-off space called the Dirty Room receives the agricultural wastes and other substrate materials when they come in. Big white nylon bags filled with chopped up cornstalks, husks, crushed remains of cotton plants, barley hulls, peanut hulls, buckwheat hulls, milo hulls, hemp pith, rice husks, wheat straw and ground up old blue denim. At a conference, Gavin held up a block about the size of half a stick of butter, lighter than balsa, but as hard as pine, a piece of solid mycelium pure chitin that had been grown from nutrients and without any substrate. He said it had possible applications for aeronautics. He added that chitin is also an excellent insulator, and explained how he and his colleagues are growing electric circuits on fungal tissue made of the mycelium of household mold. In the presence of toxic materials, certain molds get around the toxicity by sequestering the metals onto their cell walls. Therefore you can put tissue taken from the mold into a copper solution and impregnate the tissue with varying amounts of copper by changing the concentration. In other words, you can make a fungal resistor that can be part of the circuitry in a computer or a cell phone. Then, instead of sending old computers and phones to be taken apart hazardously in the Third World, you can recycle them with the chitin providing nutrients for new tissue and the metals going back into a solution to be reused. In a press release dated September 24, 2013, Evocative Designs announced upcoming production of Myco Foam surfboard core material. Editor's Note: As of 2025, Evocative has gone on to release numerous mushroom-based meat alternatives, textiles, packaging materials, and construction materials. They're exploring applications in medicine and biotech, as well as computing. The original New Yorker article is now available online. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/20/form-and-fungus Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts Algae and Fungi Team Up--and They're Lichen It... Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

News & Stories / Field Reports How Many Mushrooms in One Day? I have always wondered how many mushroom species it would be possible to see in one day in Santa Cruz County. Since this fall has been so exceptionally fruitful for mushrooms, I decided to give it a go… How else to find out? Christian Schwarz • December 26, 2014 Found on that day in 2014. © Christian Schwarz Antrodia sp. (a small, large-pored species on Santa Cruz Mtn. manzanita). © Christian Schwarz I chose this time of the year because the fall mushroom assemblage is rapidly transitioning into the winter assemblage, briefly bumping up easily-seen diversity during the period of overlap. Hunting had to be spread out over 4 days (eleven hours), but I’m quite sure that all the mushrooms I encountered could have been found on either the 18th or the 21st. I ended up with 270 species (not all identified to species, but recognizable RTUs). To find out what was found in Santa Cruz County on that day in 2014, visit my post on Tumblr: A Pseudo-Big Day in Santa Cruz , Notes of a Mycophile Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts Citizen Science - Amateur Ain't a Dirty Word Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

News & Stories / NAMA Foray Kudos The North American Mycolocigal Association foray held in Scotts Valley in December was a resounding success. Wendy Wells • January 1, 2013 Photo by Hugh Smith The Mission Springs facility worked out wonderfully. The event was sponsored by NAMA under the aegis of ace Santa Cruz organizers Noah Seigel and Christian Schwarz. Their abundant energy, organizational skills and good cheer made for an educational and memorable foray. Thanks also to lead foray mycologist Else Vellinga and the many organizers and presenters who helped make it all possible! The recent rains produced bountiful collections that kept the ID and vouchering process busy all weekend. Members Only Content Login Join FFSC Related Posts Previous Article All News & Stories Next Article

Clathrus ruber. Photo by Anne Elvin Clathrus ruber Anne Elvin "It is nice to know that although my family is not quite excited about mushrooms as I am; I have made a difference where when they see an interesting fungus, they let me know. Texted to me from a Palo Alto Elementary School."--Kitty Clathrus ruber , Wikipedia Camera Phone Focal L. Aperture Shutter Sp. ISO Flash Photo taken on November 1, 2016 Mushroom(s) ... Previous Photo Back to Gallery Next Photo