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slimy boletes
Monday, September 14 2020
The stench on my side of the bed was so bad that at some point in the night I moved out to the couch in the teevee room. This morning I investigated the problem further and found the rotting mangled remains of some mammal (I didn't look at it too carefully, but it might've been a baby rabbit) under my side of the bed. With the fur and what not were some large globs of excrement that had probably come from the unfortunate animal's intestines. I removed what I could reach with a broom and then spelunked beneath the bed with hot water and paper towels to remove what hadn't been easily dislodged. Some of that fecal matter had dried and formed a tough material on the floorboards that I had to attack in several phases. The smell was pretty bad and lingered well after I was done, though after a few hours (once the dampness of my cleanup had dried away), the smell was completely gone.
I've never seen so many boletes as I have this September, so yesterday I'd gathered a good many in a plastic bag while I was out walking the dogs. Today I wanted to cook them up before the disintegrated into a bunch of brown goo, so I fried them up with onions in a large frying pan with oil and sliced onions. Initially the mound of mushrooms was too big for the pan, but eventually it all cooked down. I knew Gretchen wouldn't want those boletes, but perhaps Powerful would (he'd liked the chanterelles okay earlier in the summer). So I also made a big pot of conventional bean chili. It was all ready to eat by the time Gretchen got home from work.
The cooked-down boletes proved too slimy for Powerful, who was grossed out after attempting to eat them. In a burrito with chili that I'd made, they also seemed kind of gross to me. They had the consistency of melted cheese, which would be fine in a cheese sandwich, but is a bit weird when you have it in your mind that you will be eating mushrooms. After dinner, I was plagued by phantom stomach complaints that were some combination of late-day hangover syndrome (the hangover had been fairly mild) and second guessing about those boletes. Later, though, after the season debut of Jeopardy!, I too a bath and felt better.
Jack o'lantern mushrooms on a stump along the Farm Road today. Some people mistake these for chanterelles, though they are mildly-poisonous and glow in the dark.
A fungus that resembles coral west of the Farm Road today.
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