As the spring rains continue, the spring mushrooms are growing.

I just happened to be reading a book the other day that talked about hunting for mushrooms. I mentioned it to my friend, Rebecca, and we both agreed that it would be fun to go out and hunt for mushrooms ourselves.

On a whim, we both drove up into the coastal range looking for a forest road to turn off on to so that we could hunt for mushrooms. We spent a while looking around trying to find a good place to pick and we were not finding anything.

Finally, after training my eye, I started to see fungus growing everywhere! Daphne was especially helpful because she is low to the ground, and she knows was mushrooms look like. She liked finding them, picking them and putting them in the bag to bring home.

Many of the mushrooms are too hard to identify with 100% certainty, so we didn’t do much with them. We did run into one variety called Elfin Saddle that we found quite a few of. We were able to identify it with 100% certainty, but it turned out that tough they were edible, they were not particularly good eating. We came home with no fungus to eat.

Luckily, we did find some fiddle head ferns to eat out in the forest, so we brought them home, cooked them with butter and garlic and enjoyed them for dinner!

I feel like a real life forager!