The Adventures of Paul and Sue

For about a year and half we’ve been learning how to hunt for edible mushrooms here in Oregon and it’s been an awesome experience! Mushrooms are amazing, they are so diverse and abundant. Oregon has some of the best edible mushrooms in the world and the wet, rainy climate is perfect for fungi.

This fall we joined the Willamette Valley Mushroom Society to learn as much about foraging as we possibly could. The group goes out on forays every weekend and sometimes multiple times during the week to BLM land and national forests where experienced hunters know the good spots. Someone recommended to us: All That The Rain Promises and More to learn the basics of identifying mushrooms. It’s helped us a lot to know the different kinds of edible mushrooms and which ones to avoid! But the only way to learn is to get out and just start looking.

We’ve mostly been finding Chanterelles, but we’ve also found some boletes, slippery jacks and someone in our mushroom society even found a matsutaki the last time we were out! We have so many chanterelles we don’t even know what to do with all of them. I’ve made chowder, quiche, we eat them in eggs and on toast. We’ve pickled and frozen enough to last all winter already and there’s still a few more weeks left of the season. We’ve made some videos of our most recent chanterelle endeavors: