We’re home and the work begins again. I cut the grass
Saturday. It was quite high. Because of
all the rain we’ve had, our grass has never been this green and still growing
this way in September.
When I cut the grass, I came across a whole bunch of
mushrooms growing underneath our Tamarack trees. I’ve seen them before in other
years, but never in such abundance. I usually run them over with my lawn
tractor, but they always make such a mess. This time, I got off my tractor and
began pulling the mushrooms out of the ground. Then I noticed the spongy belly
(that’s not the right word for it, but it’ll do). I remembered finding these
mushrooms in the forest. I knew they were edible. We used to put them into
soup. They are quite mushy when fried, though.
I picked a half ice-cream pail full, and then I found a
couple more spots. Altogether I picked nearly two ice-cream pails full of
mushrooms. There were quite a few I had to discard, because they were infested
with worms. Another indicator that they are edible. I looked them up in my
mushroom book just to make sure they were okay, not having the desire to poison
myself. We used to call them ‘Butter-mushrooms’, because they are so soft, but
that is not the correct name. According to my book, they belong to the
‘Suillus’ family. There are approximately 50 species of those mushrooms in North America. None of them are poisonous. The ones I
found in our yard are called ‘Suillus Grevillei’ and they appear in abundance
under Tamarack (larch) trees.
That evening, it was Saturday, we barbequed beef steak, shrimp,
and fried up some of the mushrooms with onions. We also ate one of our own
Yukon Gold potatoes I dug up from the garden (It was so huge, too large even
for the two of us.) Then we had a glass of my home-made wine. What a scrumptious dinner, a gourmet feast, actually. And
it didn’t cost an arm and a leg, they way it is when you go out for supper. Neither did I have to fork over a large tip. Another thing, you couldn’t even get these particular mushrooms.
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