Potentially toxic fungus, anyone?
There was a story on the radio the other day about mushrooms. This was rather timely and of particular interest to us as we seem to have a few patches of them growing around the yard. There’s a patch out the front that is producing some freaking huge specimens. Forget your Swiss Browns, these babies are the size of something you’d put on your head, or over your head if you were caught in a sudden shower and didn’t want to mess your hair. (Because, of course, wearing a giant fungus on your head is much less embarrassing than having frizzy bangs.)
Both C and C’s mum are certain what we have are field mushrooms. And you can tell the poisonous ones because they’ll go yellow if they’re bruised. They assure me the ones we have don’t go yellow.
The radio show mentioned death caps. These are mushrooms that essentially cause liver failure. I don’t know how. Not really. No idea what fungi get up to in there. But once you start getting stomach aches from eating these, you’re pretty much done for. I remember it happened on Midsomer Murders, the show that has that guy from Bergerac in it.
It may be just me but I’d rather not risk death from something I know nothing about. It’s not like you’re picking lemons off a tree. You’d think twice about sqeezing lemon juice over your butterfish if someone said “Hey, that’s not one of those lemons what can kill you, is it?”
I know $5.99 a kilo at the supermarket isn’t going to kill me. Whatever it is growing in the front yard, I’m not so sure about.
Death caps are amarinta something-or-other and have red caps with white speckles (I think) — they’re the mushrooms you see in old children’s book illustrations of bunnies and gnomes and such. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a crime novel (for once not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey) using them as the murder method, called The Documents in the Case. Didn’t know we had ‘em here in Adders.
But I saw some gigantic field mushrooms today too, in the excellent independent fruit & veg on Semaphore Road. Must be all the rain.
Some of these mushrooms in our area look OK and we get a lot of them down at St John’s. I took a huge bag home one day and by the timeI got them back to Blackwood in a supermarket plastic bag there was this yellow liquid oozing in the bag. It didn’t seem like a good idea to cook them.
Incidentally on our honeymoon my wife fouind she was allergic to mushrooms and vomited all over me as I cleaned up her shoes…..it’s all been down hill from there.