Tilden mushroom hunting with Shannon

Today I went down to Walnut Creek to pick Shannon up so we could look for mushrooms.  First we went to Briones, but we didn't find much.  Just a couple of boletes that were infected with another fungus.

So we decided to go to Tilden, because I know there are mushrooms there.  We found a couple, but nothing like what Drew and I found a few years back.  Here are some photos:

Western Grisette (Amanita pachycolea), below with Shannon to show the size. It's a pretty cool mushroom, in the Amanita genus, which includes the mushrooms that are deadly poisonous - the Death Cap and the Destroying Angel. I went on a mushroom hunt with Sunshine when we lived in Santa Cruz and she found a HUGE Destroying Angel. 

The Western grisette is edible, but we let it be.

 This is a Cauliflower mushroom (Sparassis radicata), well-spotted by Shannon.

Apparently these are cultivated for food in Asia. Here's a quote I lifted from Wikipedia: Sparassis crispa can be very tasty, but should be thoroughly cleaned before use as the folds can contain dirt and other material, as it grows and envelops objects around it such as pine needles. Antonio Carluccio reports that European Sparassis crispa should be picked when creamy white, and once yellow are too indigestible to eat. It is good for drying and reconstituting as it retains its cartilaginous texture and hence is good for soups.

A Sulfur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare). This guy is NOT edible.  Here's what wikipedia says: "consuming it can cause vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions." We didn't pick this either.

So that was my day.  Not too many mushrooms this year. There was a hard freeze for a few nights in a row last month, which I think put the kibosh on a good mushroom year.