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> > You must be a student of mushrooms. Have you ever run across the name "William Alfonso Murrill?" In his early days, very early in this century, he worked at the New York Botanical Gardens, about 1930 he exlorered the Amazon basin looking for undiscovered saprophites (sp?) and a then spent his golden years, about 40 of them, as a professor of botany at the U of Florida. He was known as "Mr. Mushroom" and was at one time listed in Who's Who as the world's foremost expert on mushrooms. He taught my father, his nephew, how to distinguish edible mushrooms from the other kind. For many years, wild mushrooms showed up in our Sunday night stew and nobody ever got sick. "Uncle Will" died in the 1950's. I remember reading in his journals where he met William Bebe at a camp on the Amazon River. Seems like a strange place for an oceanographer!
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> Wow. No, never heard of William Murril as a fungi-mycologist, though the name sounds familiar in the field of general botany. Did your father teach you his store of knowledge concerning the local 'shrooms? I'd be interested to hear. The only ones I hunt for are the ones that are easily recognizable like Boletes and sweet-tooth Hydnums; the Armillaria just happen to be growing by the house every year. I'm surprised no one ever "got sick" from the mushroom stews though! Some of the delectable Hydnums, my favorite, can cause gas indigestion with some people... But then again, I know people who have the same reaction to certain cheeses, too.

No, I never learned to identify the little morsels. They went into beef stew only as a seasoning. For years I thought that was the only way to eat Mushrooms, but now there is a Monterey Mushroom plant just down the road and I can get them for $2.50 for a 2.5 pound bag, freshly picked.

Needless to say, we eat a lot of them. I like them battered and fried, raw in salads, in tomato sause and just about any other way you can serve them. We live in a forest, so all kinds of fungi grows in our yard, but I don't eat the homegrown stuff.
Howard