’shrooms withaview
A day spent picking honey fungus with friends leaves lasting memories, including the joy of eating them
ROCK RIVER VALLEY, Ill. — Pokeweed and prickly multifloral rose cloaked the honey tree, a downed tree trunk, on Columbus Day weekend. Honey fungus clusters covered the log and kept us busy cutting a long time.
“These things must have been fed MiracleGro,” said Pat O’Byrne as he spaced us out to cut the honeys from the log, then he climbed into the tangles. “They are growing underneath the log. You just wonder how the spores got there.”
We filled five plastic carrier trays, which O’Byrne bought at a garage sale and could have filled more.
For years, O’Byrne and his wife, Cathy, a longtime kindergarten teacher on the North Side, hosted a mushroom gathering on Columbus Day weekend. A couple years ago, I received an invitation via a mutual friend, Ron Wozny, the great collector of Chicago fishing memorabilia and photography.
I had worried about the dryness of early fall, but there were mushrooms. We found some huge hen-of-the-woods, which looked dry. I don’t think we saw any of the other common massive fall mushroom, colorful chicken of the woods.
After breakfast, the O’Byrnes shepherded Wozny and his pipe-fitter friend Mike Zasanski, me and my wife, Karyn, and Zach Sitkiewicz, a young law student, into the woods.
O’Byrne is a defense attorney known around Cook County courtrooms for his mane of white hair and for being involved in some notorious criminal cases.
He slings stories as easily as a short-order cook flips eggs. I found his motivation for going into law. An early job was doing kitchen work at the old Martha Washington Hospital at Irving Park andWestern. That’s not a life plan.
He told the story of a fawn trapped in a fence in McLean County. It bawled loud enough to attract several does and a coyote. They watched a doe head-butt the coyote away. They found the fawn, freed it and watched it run off.
O’Byrne has honed his mushroom skills for decades. Experts are smart enough to know: When you don’t know, ask someonewho does.
“When I am in doubt, I contact friends at Illinois My cological Association,” O’Byrne said.
Don’t screw around with mushrooms. If you don’t know, don’t.
Cathy found lots of honeys as we ambled. She picked one handful, then gave me a quick primer in basic identifying skills. The cap is scooped down and the center brown; the underside is gilled. Identification in this case is important because the death cap may look similar to honeys. Death caps also look somewhat like young puffballs.
Puffballs are one of the easiest fall mushrooms, but, as O’Byrne said, “Emerging mushrooms all look like puffballs.”
Cathy found one that looked like a honey fungus with a yellow band on the stem. But the O’Byrneswere uncertain if itwas a honey.
“If we don’t know what it is, we throw it out,” she said.
I found one dying tree with fungus growing under the bark, but the O’Byrnes were not positive that they were honeys. I did not collect them.
At the honey tree, O’Byrne said, “Look at that growing right under the bark. Look at those emerging. Those are super, super fresh.”
As he gathered mushrooms, O’Byrne diligently dusted them off.
“It’s so much easier to do it out here,” he said.
By early afternoon, we had the carriers filled. As we walked the mile back, I found two honeys on my own, the truest sign of learning. Cathy confirmed the ID.
It was time.
Back at the gathering, O’Byrne recleaned the honeys, then sauteed them slowly in olive oil and fresh chopped garlic. He put them on a plate with paper towels. I carried them to the people sitting in haphazardly arranged folding chairs outside.
“I think these are choice and [as are] Bear’s Head, which looks like a bar of soap with icicles on it,” O’Byrne said.
Wozny heated jambalaya and slow-smoked ribs. O’Byrne sliced up corn-fed venison sausage. The venison came from McLean County deer; sausage processed at Bittner’s Meat Company in Eureka.
The fall afternoon warmed, a memory of what was.