Hunting the Trophy Mushroom

With so much rain, assuming we have warm weather to follow, we could have a prolonged morel mushroom season, especially in northern parts of the Ozarks. And if you find a few, you ought to find a lot of them. Mushrooms fascinate me, maybe because as a kid I never got to hunt Easter eggs out on the farm like the town kids did. 

I didn’t miss it so much. I remember one year grandpa told me he had found the Easter bunny hung in a barbed wire fence and he had spilled his whole sackful of Easter eggs in the creek. So my cousins and I had some hard-boiled eggs he had spray painted, and were just happy to know that the Easter bunny had got loose and recovered and there would always be next year. But you don’t have to have many hard-boiled eggs to be satisfied, and I always did want some chocolate ones. 

I realize now that morels are like chocolate eggs, you can’t wait to eat some of them, but if you gorge yourself on them, you’re liable to get sick. Every year I eat so many mushrooms at the first setting that I get a little bit queasy. I give away a lot of mushrooms, but not until after the first bunch I find have made me a little bit sick. I do the same thing with spring crappie!  And I am sure that if I had all the chocolate I wanted, I would get a little bit sick from eating them. I don’t know… I never did have all the chocolate I wanted. But I did eat a whole chocolate pie once in about ten minutes and it had such an awful effect on me that I think now I probably wouldn’t be able to eat more than half of one at one time.

Morels make a few people sick and you have to remember that. It is because some people just cannot eat any kind of fungus without having a reaction to it. You will hear many people say that the big red mushrooms which look like a morel are poisonous.  They are commonly called ‘beefsteak mushrooms’, and they look like a gigantic morel, sometimes growing to the size of a bushel basket. They are definitely not poison, I have eaten a passel of them. But they will certainly cause a great deal of stomach distress for some people. 

Morels began to grow here on Lightnin’ Ridge this year early in the second week of April, about the tenth or eleventh. I went out and found a couple dozen small ones on the 13th. They were all fairly high on the eastern-facing slope in scattered timber, but down the slope I couldn’t find any, and that is where they usually are the thickest. On the 20th of April, I found four dozen or so popping up down lower on the slope, but up high where I had found those first small ones, there were no new ones. That seems kind of odd to me. The early mushrooms were small, and drying out just a little and the later ones were larger and fresh. But remember that if you find drying morels, if you put them in the water, they will soften up and taste just fine.

The rain began the next day and continues as I write this, threatening to flood the whole Midwest.  I am sure that any mushrooms still out there will last awhile, and a few new ones might grow. I think I can find some more while turkey hunting, if the sun ever shines again, and likely eat enough to get sick of them again.  It is unusual to see a grizzled old outdoorsman like me who is sensitive to too many wild greens or mushrooms or too many fish at one setting. I have never had any trouble eating too much wild turkey, which I hope to do later this month. But I might also point out that while that one chocolate pie was a little bit hard on me, I have been able to eat well over a dozen donuts in only a matter of minutes, and I feel like I could do that any time. All the food groups that I have mentioned in the above paragraph, combined with lots of home-grown tomatoes and blackberry cobbler later in the summer, will perhaps keep you as healthy as I am. You need quite a few watermelons in the summer too, to stay anti-dehydrated.

Before I get off the subject of spring mushrooms, I might add that I have studied mushrooms for many springs, and I once watched a small mushroom that came up fresh one April morning, for three whole days to see if it would grow at all, and it did not. I believe they grow late in the night, perhaps in a matter of hours, and at dawn, they are as large as they are going to get. The little grey ones grow early in the spring, and lack much color, and the larger ones which are a more yellow in color, come up later. The largest one I ever saw was about 15 inches from the base to the tip.  I may someday attempt to establish a wild mushroom record book, in which we can begin a trophy mushroom category, and a scoring system involving girth, height and some other factors. The world can never have enough trophy hunters, and this will help create more of them. There is a lot of money to be made from trophy hunters, and I believe many of them could be sold bags of mushroom seeds at a premium price!

If you want to be a trophy mushroom hunter, you had best do it on the next few warm sunny days we have. If you eat too many and are still a little selfish about giving them to your relatives, remember that you can just fry them, then freeze them when they cool. Then all summer you can thaw them out, heat them in a microwave and get a little bit sick all over again from eating too many mushrooms.

We have decided to have our historic john-boat building day on Saturday, July 9th, at which time we will build two different wooden river boats, one of them an authentic White River johnboat, and the other a Big Piney style johnboat like my grandfather made nearly a century ago. We are not sure where it will be, but we are going to select a place where there is plenty of shade and have a big dinner that day put together by Richard’s Hawgwild Barbecue out of Aurora, Mo. We hope to find and invite other johnboat builders, paddle-makers, wood-carvers and lure makers; in fact anyone who has a trade or craft relating to the 1900’s through the 1950’s, and just have an enjoyable day reflecting on the good ol’ days. I hope we have ladies bringing canned goods and baked goods, some watermelons and homemade ice-cream, musicians (without amplifiers) coming to play old-time instruments, and folks there displaying or selling old lures, carvings, quilts, etc. If you would like to come and bring something, you need to contact me about it. It is all free and you can set up a table and display your work or sell anything that relates to the old days before the 1950’s. The johnboats will be sold to the highest bidder, and sassafras paddles will be sold as well. I will let you know soon where we have decided to have this historic day-long event which may last way into the night. It will be a lot of fun, so keep that weekend open.

See my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, and e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net  My address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.