Lobster Mushroom RSS

boletes, chanterelles, Lobster Mushroom, lobsters, Puffball Mushrooms, Shaggy Parasols -

Fall is our favorite time of the year here in the Pacific Northwest ... because the weather is nice, the colors great, but mostly because of the mushrooms! They are springing up everywhere. Recent forays have yielded lots of Boletes (Slippery Jacks and Admirables), Golden Chanterelles, Lobsters, Puffballs, and others. This blog shares more about upcoming forays in the Puget Sound, and also a status report on cultured Shaggy Parasols now springing up.

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Lobster Mushroom, lobsters -

It's August 21. It's warm and dry and the skies are filled with smoke from British Colombia (and some Washington) wildfires, but we had a decent rain at the beginning of last week, and I've been reading reports of lobster mushrooms appearing in Oregon. So I decided to take a few hours off today and do some look-see down in the Gifford Pinchot. And I did find lobsters -- all of them near streams at the 2,500-foot level southeast of Ashford, WA. I collected about a dozen in a two-hour foray. None were much larger than my fist, all were...

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Lobster Mushroom, lobsters -

When I suggest to people that we are heading out to hunt Lobsters, I get a lot of raised eyebrows. "I thought you were into mushrooms?" they say. "Are you switching over to seafood now?" No, I assure them. While I do like seafood — a lot, and crabbing is one of my favorite things — of course I'm speaking of Lobster mushrooms, which is the vegetarian equivalent of the tasty crustacean. And there's lots of good news here ... the first is, you don't need to get wet (well, at least not very wet) to hunt them. The second...

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Crimini Mushrooms, Enoki, H-Mart, King Trumpet, Lobster Mushroom, Matsutake, Oyster, White Button Mushrooms, White Shimeji -

I have to interrupt my current obsession with Golden Chanterelles to chat briefly about some wonderful new mushrooms I tried yesterday. I was running an errand in Tacoma and saw an H-Mart. If you're not familiar with the big H, it's a large Asian supermarket chain. They carry all kinds of weird (from my Gringo viewpoint, at any rate) and wonderful things. And LOTS OF exotic mushrooms, in addition to the normal (boring) white button variety, and criminis. When I saw the H, my brain whispered: "Matsutakes!" In case you've never tried Matsutake, which I think is synonymous with "Pine...

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Boletes, Coltricia Perennis, Coral Mushroom, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Golden Chanterelles, King Boletes, Lobster Mushroom, Porcinis, Ramaria, White Chanterelles -

Our first big hunt of the Fall season took place yesterday in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (at the 2,300-foot level, north of Mt. St. Helens). My brother Don and I drove the Shroom Mobile (fondly named Jedediah, after the famous explorer) up into the national forest Thursday night and camped. We were then able to get out early in the morning ... right as the first raindrops began to fall! Despite the rain, we conducted a total of three forays into the forest, an average of two hours each. We were joined by new hunters (with kids! The youngest...

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