Fall Mushroom Season is Upon Us!

As the weather starts to turn cool (ish – it is in the high 90’s this week, so I’m kind of imagining cool weather) I start to look forward to the fall mushroom season. While I love the challenge of spring mushrooms (morels are sneaky little buggers), the variety of types and colors of mushrooms that I can find in the fall makes it my favorite season. Some of the mushrooms I’ll be keeping an eye out for this season are shown below:

Coral mushrooms: These come in many varieties, but my favorite are the deep yellow ones that grow in abundance in the pacific northwest.

Glowing coral mushroom

Chanterelles: a choice edible, and also pretty easy to find since they are bright orange in a sea of green and brown.

The chanterelle – delicious pickled, or fried in butter

A variety of russula mushrooms: these come in lots of colors. Some are edible, some are not, all are pretty.

Pig’s Ear mushrooms: I have only found these once, and didn’t know what they were at the time. Apparently they are edible – I want to find them again and see how they taste.

Apparently these are often very purple on the underside – how cool!

Witches Hats: what a perfect mushroom for the Halloween season!

Elfin saddles: these come in both brown and grey, and I think they are very cool looking.

There are so many types of cool mushrooms that I can’t possibly list them all here. I’ll post picture of the colorful, strange, and otherwise cool mushrooms that I find as the season progresses, so check back to see what I’ve found!