Going to put up any photos of the new look ren?
Hope so:)
As for little ol' me, went out mushroom-picking again today, this time at a different forest, much acid pine and larch woodland, with plenty sections of deciduous trees present, oak, birch mostly, and oh boy, I hit the JACKPOT. More of a bank robbery than mushroom hunt in terms of goods taken.
Found the absolute mother-lode of Lactarius deliciosus, a large milk-cap that has been esteemed since roman times, bright orange, as is the milky liquid they bleed when wounded, and absolutely delish. Must have picked a pound or two at least. Not common, although not so scarce as to be considered rare. Just a damn lucky find. And at that, found a few really damn big bastards, over and above what my species field guide (at least the one I took with me, Phillips along with Rayner for the authority on Lactarius and Russula species) gives as the general maximum size. (10cm or so), the cap of the really large one is as big as the bowls used to serve single portion meals in, if not bigger.
Found some fairly prolific fruitings of larch bolete, some lesser numbers, but still a good handful or three of the similar species, Suillus luteus, the slippery jack. Those are going to get fried up with some lemon and a bit of garlic once my feet and legs stop aching like the've just hiked across a third world shithole complete with minefields, think I'll (after cleaning and in the case of the slippery jacks, divesting those of the layer of viscid slime on the cap surface, fry them in a bit of home-made garlic butter and serve them up with a wedge of fresh lemon to squeeze over 'em.) and the delectable L.deliciosus, those I think I'll clean of any woodland material of course and then impale them on the end of a sharp point of some sort, and simply roast them over a gas flame with a tad of non-garlicked butter for added flavour and to keep them from drying out. Managed to nab a handful of young, firm, hopefully free of maggots Bay Boletus (B.badius syn Xerocomus badius), damn difficult to spot, and tending to occur one or two, maybe three over a moderate area, dark oak-brown cap surface, pale yellow pores going blue in a short time when wounded or the pores bruised, and if you can get the damn things before those damn mushroom-fly infest them with larvae then they are very good eating. Still, managed to spot quite a few over the course of the 2 and a half hours or so I was out scrabbling around in the woods and occasionally pausing to dissect portions of this, that and the other mushroom, give a small portion a taste-test, after smelling the finds, before deciding whether to bag them and take them home for eating, or whether it got thrown back into the woods.
Did need to take several doses of oxy now and then during the hike, along with a pre-loaded syringe filled with a few hundred mg of morphine and a little bit of proxymetacaine (a local anaesthetic) to numb my bad leg some and help me drag it by hand out of the car. Quite a demanding hike, although not as bad as the clay pit the other day. Still steep, but the ground was dry, and soft/springy from the carpeting of pine needles, and often sphagnum moss, although there was still a lot of frequent bending and straightening out again, grubbing around in the leaflitter and what seemed like way more than anybody's fair share of steep crawl-climbs and slithering up and down embankments and having to drag myself down very mixed-elevation terrain and back up again with my arms laden with mushrooms, fresh and ready for the 'getting munched' bag, for those I could ID on the spot and wanted to take home with me for the cooking pans and roasting trays.
And a rather amusing moment where my old man was walking along a path (or at least, a direction from one place to another that wasn't interrupted by a body of water:P), grabbed a small (golf ball sized to a bit larger, but light-weight, spongy, so wouldn't have done any harm) polypore, and sent it rocketing towards the back of his head, and missing by about an inch or two too high, sailing just over the top of his head, and carrying on to thump into the path ahead of him. He turned round, looked up, and around, and said to me 'where the fuck did that come from?' puzzled, because we were in, and he was under a stand of larch and pine, and the polypore I slung at his head is confined exclusively to birch, almost entirely or entirely silver birch and kept wondering where it had dropped from.
He still doesn't have a clue that it was me that launched it at the back of his noggin from long range, didn't hear me quickly making sure I wasn't openly sniggering in a 'busted!, caught red handed' (literally in this case, since they were, and are still, stained bright orange by the liquid from the saffron milk-caps when their tissues are broken or cut, which is as lurid and bright orange as the mushrooms are.) and must still be pondering how a polypore confined exclusively to silver birch tree trunks dropped out of the sky, flying forwards rather than straight down, came to come flying an inch or two over the top of his head:P)
(wouldn't have hurt him, it wasn't heavy or hard, but lightweight and pliable rather than woody, a small razor-strop immature enough not yet to have developed into a bracket, but still vaguely hoof-shaped, was just pissing about and pranking him)
Just waiting for my just taken dose of pain meds to kick in, antiseizure meds, and the stuff I take to block the monoamine release part of my adrenal activity to make sure my appetite isn't spoiled, then I think I'll start cleaning some fungus and giving it a frying, a roasting, maybe a boiling here and there in certain cases where things need to be rid of poisons. Not that they'll all be eaten today even between the two of us, there are just too many fruitbodies in the bag assigned the role of 'goes in here if its definitely for the pot, no further ID needed, enough to make my backpack keep slipping to the side of the arm that had the bag of mushrooms, and leave my shoulder and arm aching like a shit after the hike, might just have been a few miles if it had been a straight walk round on the footpath, but there was a lot more time spent than it seemed given the covering it side to side as comprehensively as possible, and all the climbing, slithering and ferreting out the choice morsels made for rather more than a simple round trip. More of a rounded square trip of sorts
