MAW, fungi and the library

I have decided to learn about mushrooms (and fungi). My dad is a mushroom fanatic. David's dad used to go foraging as a kid in the Alps. My favorite authors (Tolkien & Gaiman) have both waxed poetic about the charms of mushrooms.
I do not love mushrooms but I have had a few mushroom dishes that were phenomenal ... and many that left me baffled about the fuss.
In elementary school we spent a week in the mountains preparing for the end times and also having sing-a-longs. One of the important survival skills we worked on was the wild edible plants class. I loved this class so much. I loved feeling that I could wander around the woods and not starve. I was reading a huge amount of books about Native Americans and about white kids that were raised my them. I loved the idea of living like those kids. Most of my youthful daydreams had to do with either riding dragons or living tribe-like in the woods of my native land without cities and cars. Our wild edible plant classes never included mushrooms and even then I felt the lack.

About 2 years ago I started taking pictures of fungi on my daily walks but I couldn't identify any of them.
I hate not knowing stuff.
A year ago I thought I would watch some mushroom documentaries on amazon like the one called Know Your Mushrooms . The beginning followed a group of foragers at a festival and seemed just what I needed. The guide reminded me so much of my hippy uncle or my dad at his tree hugging best. I thought that I could feel comfortable in the world of the fungi festival. Then the whole took a very . . . philosophical turn. It became a film about psychedelia and aliens and trips and lost me.
This year I decided to take a more academic approach.
I joined MAW The Mycological Association of Washington, Inc.
I used the family membership so that David would come with me.
I am the most interested in foraging and identification but the scientist in me wants to know everything.
Last night was the first meeting.





The highlights for me included:
A crazy dessert soup: it looked like fruit salad with strips of cabbage in it,and it tasted like cloves and had the consistency of a slightly rubbery tapioca. I think it was a version of this . It was made of dried jelly fungus.

I learned about a very expensive fungi that grows on moth larva and is quite a medical wonder kid. The cheap version is just the desiccated bodies of larval moths with some remnants of the fungi on them.

One of the features of MAW is that they offer identification services. Members bring in fungi of note or artistic value or ambiguity and display them. A man brought this beautiful oyster mushroom that he found in his basement shower!

I'll let you know how this all goes.