Fungus Fun

Lately I've been interested in mushrooms. May as well be, they grow like crazy here in August and September. Gemma and I have attended mushroom lectures, gone on mushroom walks, and collected various mushrooms for guidebook identification. At first she was unimpressed, but she's actually quite good at identifying different types of mushrooms.

This is called fly agaric or amanita muscaria, and they are poisonous. They grow huge here in Alaska, so I included my fairly large water bottle for scale. These are the classic red-capped, white-spotted mushroom that you see in fairy tale books...

...like this :) Here are Gem and Rick at the Girdwood Fungus Fair ;)

And speaking of huge, here's a grand champion vegetable at the Alaska State Fair. It's a puffball mushroom, and those are typically-

sized fair ribbons!

Here are some normal sized puffballs that I found growing in the park behind our house.

They're edible, so I fried them up. They tasted pretty much like sauteed nothing. Just...no flavor so we ended up throwing them away. It was a fun experiment anyhow!