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The Worst Summer Meal of My Life
A cautionary tale that might take the fun out of fungus
It is a splash of bright orange in the middle of a dark summer forest. We have turned the corner of the trail and a beam of sunlight enters the forest in front of us, illuminating an oak stump that is studded with an orange shelf fungus that ladders its way up the wood. This is the mother lode, a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom bigger than any we have ever seen.
We leave some of the chicken-of-the-woods on the stump to drop spores for the next generation, but most of it is carved off and filled into our backpacks for the trek back to the house. At the house, we clean the piles of orange fungus, cut it all into strips, and saute the strips in butter before cooling them and packing them into freezer bags. When we find an abundance of mushrooms, we like to stock the freezer.
Chicken-of-the-woods is a safe mushroom in our region, where it grows mostly on oak trees and stumps. One day when I was living in Northern California, I saw my old friend chicken growing on a huge eucalyptus tree. It was a little past its prime, so I didn’t eat it, but I was on the lookout for more. Later on, I learned that chicken-of-the-woods is more accurately named “sulfur shelf” and that it only is edible when it grows on oak trees. Had I eaten the sulfur shelf from a eucalyptus tree, I might have gotten…
