Mushroom Monday - Two Weekend Finds

Here are two fungi I found this weekend for #mushroommonday

I thought this first find might be an edible meadow mushroom. Large and white with a brown spot in the middle.

I even found three of them merging together. It would have been a good meal but you always have to check the details especially with white mushrooms. (can't be eating destroying angels now can we?)

I picked on and noticed the gills were white (not pink like the edible meadow mushroom). Also I split the stem to see what color it was bruising. This might have also been a reddening lepiota (a nice edible. Sadly as you can see it started staining yellow.

I believe it to be a brown-eyed parasol or Lepiota cristata. They are said to cause stomach upset much like the yellow bruiser Agaricus xanthodermus. My rule of thumb is to avoid yellow staining mushrooms of any kind. Even then I would proceed to doing a spore print to get a better idea of what it is.

Now for a bunch of orange peel fungi.

Their Latin name is Aleuria aurantia and they are edible.

Sadly they are almost tasteless and have a sort of dried out cartilage texture to them.

The best thing to do with them is maybe present them as a colorful garnish on a plate of salad. Or possibly you can pickle them hoping they keep their orange color. I can see them blending in with a nice giardinera or sandwich spread of somekind. Either way there were a ton of them out. This is one of those summer fungi that appears in great numbers when its hot and humid with lots of rain.

That's all for now and keep an eye out for staining yellow mushrooms.