The Great Mushroom Hunt

Hullo!! Today we are going on the Great Mushroom Hunt! Now... Gramma is a bit skeptical as she says it has been quite dry lately, but the last few days of rain means... maybe we'll find some!

First we have to hike up a ways - Gramma has a walking stick which makes it easier to hike up and down.

I found some cute little orange mushrooms but Mama says they are too small to identify.

Whew... this mushroom hunting is hard work! We haven't seen hardly any and the fall leaves make it beary challenging. We are looking for apricot coloured mushrooms and the yellow leaves keep fooling us.

Ohhh... this is a weird mushroom! Gramma says it is a cauliflower type and quite delicious.

She cut off the icky bits and said this would make a nice lunch... I have to say, while I love to hunt mushrooms, I am not a big fan of eating them.

A couple of years ago we found a tonne of mushrooms at this spot... but this year there are none... sigh...

We headed back down the trail and found this lobster mushrom in the leaves. It is an orange fungus on a mushroom that makes the mushroom taste sort of like lobster. Gramma is not a big fan of this one, so we left it there.

It sure is pretty in the forest.

But those darn leaves are annoying!

Maybe it's cause I am closer to the ground but... I found some mushrooms!!! Little slimey ones! At first we thought they might be a slimey Boletus (good) but they ended up being slimey gilled ones (bad).

But I was on a roll!! Look what I found!!! The elusive, super yummy, chanterelle mushroom!!! Gramma loves these...

And a few feet farther away, another clump of them!

Our mushroom bag doesn't look so woebegone now.

 I also saw this orange mushroom which you might mistake for a chanterlelle but the underside is different. This one has gills and a more-or-less even edge (the stem is also hollow).

 You see... the chanterelle doesn't have gills so much as it has ridges and the edge is usually fluted (and the stalk is usually solid).

I had a lot of fun hunting mushrooms... even if we didn't find tonnes of them.