Category: Fungi

A mild, wet summer makes for a mushroom cornucopia! I’ve done this before, so I’ll try not to hit any repeats. I found all these in my local woods, Bald Mountain Recreation Area North Parcel, Lake Orion, MI, between July and August.

White Hedgehog, Hydnum albidium, purportedly edible, but I was flush with chanterelles at this point.

Old Man of the Woods, Strobilomyces floccopus


White Coral Jelly Mushroom, Tremella reticulata. Heavily rotted oak stump.

Horn of Plenty, Craterellus cornucopioides, also known as black chanterelle, black trumpet, trompette de la mort or trumpet of the dead. So velvety and beautiful. Again, could have eaten this but had a basketful of yellow chanterelles already.

And these are just the ones I could identify and take a decent picture of before the mosquitoes found me!

Honey mushroom, Armillaria mellea, found growing at the base of a dead oak, Bald Mountain Recreation Area North Parcel, Lake Orion, MI.

This is what I had for lunch yesterday, sauteed with garlic and tomato on toast. It’s the mushroom my Italian great-grandmother Domenica referred to as “the good-a kind-a”, the kind she used to take her children and grandchildren hunting in the woods around St. Moritz Ponds in Quincy: i.e. the kind that was most abundant, easiest to identify, tastiest. My grandfather has been nagging me to try this mushroom for years.

Funny, then, that of the 4 books I’ve consulted (including an old field guide of my grandfather’s), only one referred to it as a choice edible. The Peterson Edible Wild Plants doesn’t even mention it. I am warned that honey mushroom has several dangerous near look-alikes, and that even when it is positively identified, it doesn’t agree with everybody.

I thought it was delicious—four generations of my family have thought so. But that’s all the more reason for me to give you the same warning I always give: don’t go eating any mushrooms you find in the woods just because I did. Do the research first. Find an expert. And if you’re going to do it anyway, cook them first at the very least. Please?