My Beautiful Chanterelle: Art Deux

Cantharellus Cibarius

Photo by sensesworking

The good news: this was delicious tossed with pasta, butter, and garlic. I found this perfect chanterelle within walking distance of my house, across the street from a park where I'd found lesser examples of this fungus. It was just after a light rain and it fairly glowed, orange-peel bright and smelling typically fruity.

The bad news: I returned three days later to see how the smaller eruptions were doing, only to find that a construction company had untreed part of the property and laid it upon the holy ground, perhaps removing the rhizomal foundation the mushrooms need to survive.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Art and Politics: "The Industrial Complex"

The Faculty Art opening last Monday featured many fine works by VSU faculty. The following piece by Michael Schmidt, one of my first new friends here, was for me the most striking piece.

Photo by Michael Schmidt (click photos for full size)

Oil in, bullets out? Bullets in, oil out? It depends on where you stand, how you read--left to right (English, western) or right to left (Arabic, Hebrew). Michael Schmidt's work features a melange of styles and materials, as he indicates on his web site, but the two most interesting are used motor oil and cast 50 caliber bullets. The oil is from all of us and represents our rapacious appetite. The bullets are molded from an actual spent round provided by a young soldier who will soon leave for Iraq again, if he hasn't reported already. (We hope he will return soon and safe, hopefully accompanied by most or all of our troops.)

Photo by Michael Schmidt

The bullets enter or leave from a vaginal, gothic-cathedral-style door that pierces the blue line, penetrates some watermark, exceeds a reasonable limit. Their whiteness violates the meaning of the word purity.

The oil in porcelain "styrofoam" cups drinks in your eye. It shines back, accusing. It's not subtle, not meant to be. It is, however, a beautiful sculpture. The cathedral door is too big, but barely large enough, as though the cups were once smaller, the factory walls wide and high enough. Everything now is squeezed, soon to be crushed perhaps. I also imagine bullets and oil both entering, filling the factory with the blood we refuse to see boiling down into our want for more and more, "honoring" our spirit of rapacity, of privilege, soon to go up in smoke.

Photo by Andrew Nuse

Mike also produces a lot of functionals, many embellished with old logos from oil and gas companies, many no longer in existence. They function as art. I call them post-oil retro pieces, because they already feel quaint and nostalgic, but they also suggest an apocalypse, like kitsch from the future come back to warn us that our thirst will make deserts everywhere, that the age of oil was some dream become myth. They make us remember the future.

Crying Game, Porcini style

Photo by Jamie Harmon/uberphoto.com

At twilight on the way to the Faculty Art Opening Monday evening, I spotted these two large fungi under some old longleaf pines. "Porcini," I said to myself, salivating, planning meals in my head, "Big ones!" I picked them quickly and headed off with my bounty, catching odd glances from students who must have thought I'd lost my mind (or that I'd hoped these might help me do so). I bore them proudly, however, arriving at the opening, entertaining numerous glances and, from friends, questions about what the hell I held and what the hell was I going to do with them. I patiently explained that these were porcini, worth about $40 a pound on the fresh market, and that I was going to eat them. They asked whether I might poison myself, and I explained that I knew which were poison, which weren't, and I wouldn't risk my life for a taste of amanita phalloides, the death cap, or any other liver killers. I enjoyed the art (more about that later, I'm awaiting another photo), talking to friends, chatting with my students afterward, and then taking these home for verification and an immediate place on top of my pizza. I Berenstain Beared these babies (If they look like porcini, if the smell like porcini . . . ). However, I noticed a certain amount of staining and the pore tubes, upon closer inspection under a lamp, were browner than normal. I decided to give it the definitive test--the taste test--so I sliced the smaller of the two up and sauteed a sliver in butter. It wasn't bitter, which was good, but it wasn't porcini, either. It was a Tylopilus, a boletus edulis lookalike. I put a little on my pizza anyway, and while it didn't detract, it didn't add much flavor and its texture was a bit grainy. No, this wasn't the choice dish I had expected, and I ended up discarding the rest of this bland date.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Early Halloween Photo

A reason to look up once in awhile while foraging for mushrooms. This cluster of argiopes stretched their webs over a cluster of mushrooms in the lot beside my house, and I nearly walked into all of them. (I'm learning to appreciate the dangers of hunting and gathering.) Their prey is a rhinoceros beetle, mine, boletus edulis. We resolved the issue peacefully.


Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.

Yes, We Have No B. Ananas

I found this warty mushroom growing at the base of a longleaf pine on the VSU campus. It's boletellus ananas, an odd bolete due to the presence of a veil remnant on its warty red cap, but it's a little dried out so the cap has dulled.



This shows the classic blue staining qualities that many boletes possess. Just behind them, drying porcinis, and just behind that, the base of a glass of cab and a sliver of my swiss army knife.

Last week I went to the Mostel estate and picked mushrooms with Aileen and Jane Whitehead (an Etruscan scholar). Most weren't edible, though one bolete was tasty sauteed in butter. We found two deadly destroying angels, too, but the highlight was a mushroom giant, the macrocybe titans, growing near their house (photo by the Mostels). These can grow to enormous proportions (larger than two feet tall) in Central America and Mexico, but in North Florida they tend to stop at dinner plate size. They are supposedly edible, but one commentator described their cooking smell as something akin to "dirty laundry," so we left it to sporulate.




Note: reports on mushrooms that I found and/or cooked represent my personal experiences, and in no way should be taken as recommendations for readers. This is not a guidebook. Eat wild mushrooms at your peril.