Mushrooming - The beginning

Important: If you're gathering your own fungus, don't eat it unless you're 100% positive of the ID. You may die.

So I was driving home from work the other day and heard a book reading on the radio. You may have heard of the book it's called The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it's about a chap who goes out of his way to hunt, gather and forage his own food for meals. The section I happened to hear, yep you guessed it, was the section when he went mushroom hunting. I'm typing this up here (and hope to continue on) in the hopes that someone with some mushroom knowledge of South East Queensland might stumble across it and have some pointers for finding wild mushrooms.

It sounded like a blast and it rained the other weekend so I managed to convince the lady to accompany me out and about into the big scary world. We went for a drive north of Brisbane to some pine plantations to see what we could scrounge. We did forget to take the camera. I know right? A trip for food gathering, in the woods, with no camera! The Shame. However, we did have some success, we found a bunch of orange mushrooms, sadly they were pretty tiny. But hey, it was only a day after the rain and maybe they were going to take a while to grow. So slightly disheartened, but full of vim and vigour, we resolved to head back the weekend after and see if the little suckers had sprouted some more.

Was that the end of our adventure that day? Forsooth! Forsooth and Gadzooks it was not. Is that the right way to use those? I think perhaps not, but it has been awhile since I have had a good forsoothing so I thought it might be time. We ended up going to the supermarket and picking up a three pack of strange new mushrooms. We also grabbed some fish and I made a garlic, butter mushroom sauce and fried the Sweetlip up in it. Served with some rice it was quite delish. More on the recipe and dinner side later on when I remember to make proper notes and pictures!

Week 2.

This is what happens when I only think about this afterwards. I end up with a massive wall to collapse on top of you and you go tl;dr bucko. Here's where it gets interesting though. Hah! Not really, but there are pictures this time around.

We went back to the same spot, a little bit earlier and we got some really nice pictures. You can spot Wally in one or two, he's dressed in blue for the occasion. We arrived about 9am which was a nice change as it was bright and early in the morning with the whole day ahead of us. I was a little bit nervous to say the least. I was worried that we wouldn't find any significant improvement over the last week.

I was mostly right. But on the plus side we got a few pictures which turned out pretty well. As you can see above and below. We managed to snap some of the mushrooms in their native habitat as well, but we left them alone this time. With their size we would have to take oodles and oodles of the tiny little buggers.

After an hour or so of traipsing through the woods we headed off to Maleny for morning tea. Stopped in at a cafe called 3 and had some lovely blueberry pancakes, then we headed off to the Baroon Lake to see if we could any luckier though. I was hopeful that due to the fact it had a higher elevation it might be a little bit damper. Not to mention the fact that there was a lake there, might mean a lot more moisture around. Disappointment struck again. There was no real noticeable change in the temperament of the region. The forest was different as it was native bushland for the most part.

Pictures die off again as we left the camera in the car.

We did find two mushroom types though on a trail that wound it's way through the woods (we also discovered some Bunya Pines which are apparently tasty eating - more on that later). I've got pictures of one of the mushroom types we found as we brought it home with us. The other mushroom went soggy and squelchy and pretty gross before I could pictograph it unfortunately.

Sunday morning we went to a local cafe for breakfast and struck gold. There was a farmers market on in the street and it had a mushroom vendor with porcini and forest mushrooms and a variety of types. We were pretty happy and were all set to step in after breakfast.

They left early...

The search for interesting fungi continues...

tl;dr - went wild mushroom hunting. Had no luck. Found a wild mushroom vendor. They left early and we still haven't had any success with wild mushrooms.