Bruce with a basket of boletes

Buoyed by my success foraging the other day, I ventured off to some other forests this morning. There were quite a few boletes around, mostly Boletus ornatipes, the ornate-stalked boletes. There were also pockets of some variety of suillus, which I don’t care for and left in the forest. I’ve found ornate boletes in these same woods in some other years, usually a little earlier in the season. They like pathways and usually when you find one or two there are others nearby. My experience with these is that they are a tasty edible. I’ve read that some people have collected these and found them to be slightly to distinctly bitter, while others report them to be very good. Hopefully these will be true to my previous experience. I saw at least as many as I collected today which were too far gone for the table.

When I cleaned this batch of mushrooms up, I found the caps to be generally in great shape, but most of the stalks were buggy and had to be discarded.

While I was in the area, I visited another forest which is usually excellent for lobster mushrooms, but there were none today. What I did find was an old chicken of the woods.

an old chicken

Although it doesn’t look so bad in the photo, this chicken was well past its expiry date and was not in good shape. I made a mental note of where this mushroom was, as it may be back on the same stump next year. It’s too bad because if this baby was young and tender it would have meant several pounds of choice mushrooms.

Bonus: as I was driving around, checking out forests, I came across a fry truck. Even better, it was a busy fry truck with people in line on a Wednesday afternoon in a sparsely populated area. Further investigation was necessary. The first thing I saw was somebody peeling potatoes. Ah-ha, this place showed promise. I ordered up a medium sized box of fries and they were excellent, best fries I’ve had in some time.