...but the first rule is really "Don't smoke them"

Okay, the first actual post, and since I have been up to my ears in mushrooms of late...

I wasn't shitting you, okay? And this was only half of them.

...let us start off lightly with some basic survival tips concerning mushrooms. Picking them is great fun (at least I think so, but I enjoy wallpaper-watching, so my opinion is not much to go by), and eating them is very joyous. The part in between? Not so much fun and joy, no. And yet there it is, and you have to do it quick too, or what was just a short while ago your pride and joy will have turned into a festering mess of blackish slime that looks like it will either eat you or collapse upon itself and turn into a black hole. So the task looms in front of you, and the more urgent it becomes, the less you want to do it, and you start wondering if maybe you really want to eat these mushrooms so badly. Only, you do. But do you really have to mess about with them before just frying them, shoving them into tin foil and freezing the hell out of them?

And here’s where our first rule comes in: I don’t care how boring it is, or how much you hate it; always go through your mushrooms and clean them. Why?

First of all, because unless you are desperately craving extra protein with your mushrooms, you probably don’t want to be eating those beetles, spiders and ants that, without fail, you WILL have brought home along with your prize. Finding something crunchy in your mushroom soup that isn’t a piece of onion is probably not a nice experience.

Secondly, because mushrooms are fucking filthy. Dude, they come out of the ground, and pretty fast too. Do the math.

And thirdly, because no matter how savvy you think you are at mushrooms, once in a while some evil little thing will have snuck its way along with the rest of the good stuff, looking for all the world like something that won’t have you vomiting your liver through your nose until you take a closer look. Now, it won’t be every time, and even then, it’s not certain that the sneaky stowaway will be poisonous, but here’s the stickler: Are you willing to bet your life on it? No, you’re not. So clean your mushrooms and try to be happy about it.

I found this little bastard hiding among all of my yellow foots (feet?):

It looks so innocent, but it is in all probability poisonous. Not that I know, but here comes the second rule for today (and ever, as far as this blog’s concerned):

If you don’t know what it is, and it’s small and brownish, just assume that it is poisonous. And not really because there aren’t any mushrooms that look like this that are edible. The different kinds of yellow foots are absolutely delicious. But they are easy to recognize. With most small, brown mushrooms, you aren’t that lucky. If it’s not a yellow foot of some kind, it’s a lethal webcap as far as I’m concerned. Of course, if you have a good book on mushrooms you can try to look for the edible ones if you like to, but I prefer not to bother, since there are far more other edible mushrooms that I know that aren’t small, unidentifiable brown things that might stab you in the kidneys.

Om nom nom.

I WILL KILL YOUR FAMILY!!!11!!!

And that leads us to the final rule: Don’t be fucking stupid. Don’t take risks. If you aren’t a real expert – and when I say expert, I mean Doctor of Mycology or similar – don’t mess with species that basically look the same. Mushrooms taste good, but I think we can all agree that they don’t taste good enough to die for.

You’ve got a good book on mushrooms? Excellent! That will keep you from mixing up a field mushroom with destroying angel, because the two really aren’t that similar if you look closely. But if the mushrooms are as alike as the example given above, it’s probably best to not fuck about with them. Especially since pictures of in books can be misleading. You see on the pictures above that the edible ones are a lot more yellow, and you might think they’ll be easy to tell apart. Only the edible ones might be darker in real life, depending on what kind of ground they grow on, or the poisonous ones might be fairer, and how can you tell for sure unless you eat them? And die. So don’t trust your book too much. It won’t be any kind of comfort when you’re lying there shaking in your own vomit to know that you could probably get a refund for that book.

Anyway, that’s it for the mushrooms. I can imagine that you think that this wasn’t very impressive for being my first real post, but to this I simply say “Fuck you in the face, I’m too tired to be more creative than this”. I am positive that this is the perfect way of getting readers to stay. I’ve read “The Game”. Randomized rudeness makes people like you.


UPDATE: I have hereby proved the "brown mushroom" theory. I tried to find out what my unwanted find was, going through literally HUNDREDS upon HUNDREDS of mushrooms, and I still have no damn clue. I think it might be part of the Telamonia family, possibly a very deformed example of Cortinarius umbrinolens (poisonous, fyi), but I really have no damn clue. Basically, those little fuckers are evil.