The only mushrooming book that will introduce you safely and with confidence to the not-so “underground” hobby of mushroom hunting and gathering. Gathering edible wild food is a wonderful way to forge a connection to the earth. Mushrooms are the ultimate local food source; they grow literally everywhere, from mountains and woodlands to urban and suburban parks to your own backyard. The Complete Mushroom Hunter will enrich your understanding of the natural world and build an appreciation for an ancient, critically relevant, and useful body of knowledge. Amateur mycologists and mushroom enthusiasts will find this is a guidebook for their passion. Mushroom guru Gary Lincoff escorts you from the mushroom’s earliest culinary awakening, through getting equipped for mushroom forays, to preparing and serving the fruits of the foray, wherever you live. Inside you’ll find: A brief, but colorful history of mushroom hunting worldwide How to get equipped for a mushroom foray A completely illustrated guide to the common wild edible mushrooms and their poisonous look-alikes: where to find them, how to identify them, and more How to prepare and serve the fruits of your foray, plus more than 30 delicious recipes Plus, dozens of colorful, priceless anecdotes from living the mushroom lifestyle

Mushroom guru Gary Lincoff escorts you from the mushroom's earliest culinary awakening, through getting equipped for mushroom forays, to preparing and serving the fruits of the foray, wherever you live. --Book Jacket.

Known as the meat of the vegetable world, mushrooms have their ardent supporters as well as their fierce detractors. Hobbits go crazy over them, while Diderot thought they should be “sent back to the dung heap where they are born.” In Mushroom, Cynthia D. Bertelsen examines the colorful history of these divisive edible fungi. As she reveals, their story is fraught with murder and accidental death, hunger and gluttony, sickness and health, religion and war. Some cultures equate them with the rottenness of life while others delight in cooking and eating them. And then there are those “magic” mushrooms, which some people link to ancient religious beliefs. To tell this story, Bertelsen travels to the nineteenth century, when mushrooms entered the realm of haute cuisine after millennia of being picked from the wild for use in everyday cooking and medicine. She describes how this new demand drove entrepreneurs and farmers to seek methods for cultivating mushrooms, including experiments in domesticating the highly sought after but elusive truffles, and she explores the popular pastime of mushroom hunting and includes numerous historic and contemporary recipes. Packed with images of mushrooms from around the globe, this savory book will be essential reading for fans of this surprising, earthy fungus.

Learn how to grow wild and exotic, medicinally important, sustainable, and deeply delicious mushrooms right at your own home, just as people throughout the world have been doing for centuries. Mushrooms are healthy, packed with vitamins and antioxidants; rich with flavor, an excellent source of the fifth flavor know as umami; and can be used medicinally in teas and tinctures. By growing your own, you can enjoy these benefits while also enriching your soil, speeding up your composting, and even suppressing weeds—though the biggest draw may be the magic of watching this unique form of life grow. Understanding how mushrooms grow is crucial to successfully cultivating them, and Mushroom Cultivation offers photo-illustrated instruction both on how mushrooms grow and how you can cultivate them yourself, with a focus on six types of mushroom—shiitake, oyster, wine cap, hericium, blewit, and agaricus. You’ll learn how to: Grow mushrooms, step by step, in a variety of different mediums: logs, straw, wood chips and sawdust, and compost Troubleshoot problems, including identification, underwatering, overwatering, and insects Store, dry, and freeze your mushroom harvest Cook with mushrooms, including variety-specific cooking tips and 8 tasty recipes Find supplies and more information with the resources listed at the back of the book After reading Mushroom Cultivation, you’ll discover that growing a mushroom is really no more difficult than growing a tomato. You just need a slightly different set of skills. Picking your own fresh mushrooms at the peak of their flavor and nutrition is within your reach with this comprehensive, step-by-step guide.

Shortlisted for a 2014 Taste Canada Award, this newly revised and updated edition of The Deerholme Mushroom Cookbook is a comprehensive and expert guide that will expand your culinary knowledge of wild and cultivated mushrooms. Foraging for mushrooms is a seasonal pursuit that can be done in large groups or in peaceful solitude. Spring brings the promise of morels, late summer bears the first chanterelles, and autumn welcomes an explosion of mushrooms. In this illuminating handbook on all things fungi, Bill Jones, an acknowledged expert in the field of wild foods, explains in great detail how to safely forage for mushrooms, what to look for in markets and grocery stores, and how to effectively grow your own. But what do you do with your bounty once you arrive back at home? Jones, also a celebrated chef, presents more than 120 delicious recipes for basic pantry preparations, soups, salads, meats, seafood, and vegetable dishes such as Truffle Potato Croquettes Mushroom Pate Porcini Naan Semolina Mushroom Cake Beef Tenderloin and Oyster Mushroom Carpaccio Curried Mushroom and Coconut Bisque With The Deerholme Mushroom Cookbook, the essential guide to edible mushrooms, you’ll gain insight into the medicinal and cultural uses of mushrooms, and reap the health benefits of simple, unprocessed food.

From Richard Louv, the bestselling author who defined the term “nature-deficit disorder,” Vitamin N (for “nature”) is a complete prescription for connecting with the power and joy of the natural world right now, Vitamin N is a practical guidebook for the whole family, offering parents eager to share nature with their kids tips, activities, and ideas for young and old alike.

Antonio Carluccio, known as "the mushroom man," has been gathering, cooking, and devising recipes for mushrooms for more than sixty years. In The Complete Mushroom Book, this award-winning Italian chef brings together more than 150 recipes that show off the strengths and subtleties of widely available varieties. Mushrooms contribute tremendous flavor without adding significant fat or calories, and here you'll find dishes from classic to contemporary, from Asian to Italian -- accompanied by stunning photography. You'll learn how best to pair different varieties with cooking methods and other ingredients, as well as the uses of dried and preserved mushrooms. For those who want to join in the thrill of collecting their own mushrooms -- "the quiet hunt" -- The Complete Mushroom Book includes an illustrated field guide for North America. This section provides detailed descriptions of all the major species to help distinguish between edible wild mushrooms and their poisonous, look-alike relatives. Fruity, buttery, nutty, spicy -- mushrooms can offer a surprising spectrum of flavors. They can enrich your cooking with an earthy sensuality unlike anything else. Let The Complete Mushroom Book be your guide to reaping the pleasures of these delectable gems of the forest. Book jacket.

With the surging interest in foraging for mushrooms, those new to the art need a reliable guide to distinguishing the safe fungi from the toxic. But for beginner foragers who just want to answer the question “Can I eat it?”, most of the books on the subject are dry, dense, and written by mycologists for other mycologists. Frank Hyman to the rescue! How to Forage for Mushrooms without Dying is the book for anyone who walks in the woods and would like to learn how to identify just the 29 edible mushrooms they’re likely to come across. In it, Hyman offers his expert mushroom foraging advice, distilling down the most important information for the reader in colorful, folksy language that’s easy to remember when in the field. Want an easy way to determine if a mushroom is a delicious morel or a toxic false morel? Slice it in half – “if it’s hollow, you can swallow,” Hyman says. With Frank Hyman’s expert advice and easy-to-follow guidelines, readers will be confident in identifying which mushrooms they can safely eat and which ones they should definitely avoid.

A field guide to distinguish edible from the few poisonous mushrooms in Alaska. Includes a chapter of recipes.