It's been a rainy summer and the mushrooms have, well... mushroomed. I've always had a fascination with eating things I catch, kill, or find in the woods, and so I've been watching the little fungi hungrily. My wife, however, has a typical midwestern hysteria about eating mushrooms and told me she would be furious if I ever ate a mushroom that I did not buy in the grocery store. It's quite silly because there are really only a few deadly poisonous varieties. They are generally little brown mushrooms or whitish free gilled mushrooms of the Amanita family. One can easily avoid eating anything that falls into these two categories and find wonderful families of mushrooms that do not look anything like the deadly mushrooms, but are only mildly poisonous at worse.

After buying the a guide to mushrooms, I've been photographing and trying to identify the mushrooms that I see in our woods. Boletes are one of the great varieties whose most poisonous types will only give you an upset stomach. This lovely bolete is probably a "Burnt-orange Bolete" or Tylopilus ballouii which is edible, but has to be cooked a long time before the bitterness disappears.

Here is one that is just driving me crazy. It is a "Viscid Violet Cort" or Coirtinarious iodes "Purple-bloom Russula" or Russula mariae. My Audubon book says it is "Edible" "Good" and I'm sure it would look just lovely cooked up nicely in a salad. There are dozens of these along my morning run and they are just rotting back into the ground or getting eaten by critters.