Outdoors - If it looks good

   I am what would be considered an adventurous eater. If I am in a restaurant or grocery store and see something different or have not eaten before, I will try it. I have always been afraid to pass up something unique for fear it will be delicious and I will not have experienced it. Last week, while driving through the woods, my wife and I spotted something different, growing on a tree, that looked delicious. It was a large orange and white fungus about two feet tall and three feet wide. If it turned out to be good to eat, there was a lot of it.

   Not sure whether it was edible or poisonous, I thought it would be wise to research my giant mushroom. I looked on some trusted sights on the internet and learned what we had discovered was a large edible mushroom called chicken of the woods. Supposedly, when cooked, it has the texture of chicken, and the flavor also resembles chicken. That information was enough to get me to try it.

   The next morning, armed with my trusty pocketknife, we went back to the spot we found our chicken of the woods and I cut about one-quarter of it off the tree. We took it home, washed it off, and I fried part of it in butter after cutting it into strips. To my surprise, the texture was much like chicken. To me, the flavor seemed more like a portabella mushroom than chicken, but tastes do vary in individuals. We enjoyed the batch I fried and did not die, so the information from the internet must have been correct. I now had a whole bunch more with which to do something. More research on the internet gave me several ideas. I settled on making mushroom jerky. It was simple enough and seemed a good way to preserve my new find for an extended period of time.

   I washed and sliced the remaining chicken of the woods and placed it in a large bowl to marinate. I took some ideas from the marinate recipe from some random person online and added my own variations. It was recommended to let the mushrooms marinate for twelve hours. Usually, more is better, so I let it soak for twenty-four hours. I then put it in the dehydrator for the recommended twelve hours. When it was done, my mushroom jerky was more like lightly flavored Styrofoam. Neither my wife nor I liked it at all. Our grandson, Zane stopped by and I had him try it. He thought it was disgusting. I went back to the internet and found the recipe I followed to see what I may have done wrong. At the end of the recipe I had used, the author made a comment about the flavor of the mushroom jerky he had made. He said it really was not good. Why would a person take the time to publish a recipe that was not good to eat? The least he could have done is put the disclaimer at the beginning such as, “don’t make this recipe” so a person would see it before they wasted their time and mushrooms on something nobody would eat.

   By the time we made it back out into the woods to harvest more from the large chicken of the woods, its color had faded and the texture was much more woody. It was past its prime and was no longer suitable for eating. We will have to wait until next year for chicken of the woods, but now we know, it does look good, and we can eat it.