Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

Our water stopped coming again so blase hiked up the line to search for a leak and came back with a heap of huge chantrelles. We put them aside and spent the rest of the day fantasizing about the dinner they would become in just nine hours. Mushroom barley soup with pecorino and carmelized onions OR sauteed chants with garlic, wine, and butter OR enmeshed in sun dried tomatoes and ziti tubes… the fantasies were endless and titillating. It crossed my mind as I perversely peeped at the mushrooms throughout the day that their caps were excessively bumpy and their gills didn’t fade away at their bases as much as I thought they should….but several people assured us that false chantrelles don’t grow out here and my snowballing dinner fantasies drowned out my lingering doubts.

Our friend Jamie came by just before mushroom cleaning time to get a little enraged with me by watching the republican presidential candidate debates. We would then head to dance class to plie and releve our angst away. (Did you know there is a pose in ballet called “attitude“? It’s my favorite) Sometime in the midst of Mitt Romney’s immigrant bashing and Ossian’s strawberry smoothie demands, Jamie glanced at our clutch of wild mushrooms and asked, “are those your chantrelles?”. “Yes”, I replied, mouth wet with anticipation. “Yeah.. those are false chantrelles”, she said. I looked at them more closely… with their textured funnel caps and unfading gills… of course they weren’t chantrelles! And that was it. Thanks to the republican party, Jamie came and saved our lives with a simple string of words. Blase and I nearly killed ourselves – because we were blinded by our rampant addiction to that sexy little wild orange mushroom.

It seems we aren’t the only ones risking life for the taste of a savory fungus. In fact, “the wild mushroom business has also spawned violence. Some wild mushrooms sell for $100 or more a pound, Gecan says, and armed robberies are occurring in the Pacific Northwest, where the combination of heavy-covered forests and moist environment yields a plentiful crop…”(Wild Mushroom Safety). Who knew?!

But would it have been our last supper?? Likely not..but I’ve yet to find definitive information on what does happen to humans who eat Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca. Some say it is just terrible tasting and others insist that it is a highly toxic species. Either way, it’s pasta senza funghi for us.