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COMMENTARY
Her ‘purposeful’ walks lead to
fresh mushroom suppers
Susan Konkel spotted a promis
ing patch of brown at the foot of a tree.
“Here’s something,” she said, bending
down to take a closer look.
She plucked a small mushroom, held
it up and inspected it quizzically. She
couldn’t tell for sure what it was or if it
would be good to eat. She set it aside and
moved on. She was just getting started.
There were plenty more mushrooms out
there.
“That’s without even trying,” she said.
“This is the week for mushrooms.”
The wet days of June have been hap
py ones for mushroom hunters. Konkel
started seriously looking for wild mush
rooms about a year ago, she said, and now
regularly strolls through her comfortable
Brookhaven neighborhood and nearby
parks with an eye on the ground and a
thought for the dinner menu. She’s not
casually watching for fungi. She’s forag
ing. She seeks dinner-table treats among
the suburban forest.
“I walk around the neighborhood for
She
stopped as she
reached a tree
she had vis
ited
She
ed to
flat
AROUND
TOWN
JOE EARLE
JOE EARLE
Susan Konkel spots a shelf mushroom
in her Brookhaven neighborhood.
exercise. I thought it’d be nice to find
something,” she said. “You notice things
all the time. This gives you a reason to be
out there and a purpose to be out there,
which I like.”
One recent afternoon, as the rain
lightened to a slight drizzle and wind-
driven spatter from the trees, she took a
purposeful afternoon walk around her
block, hunting for edible mushrooms
along the streets winding through new,
closely-packed brick homes. “I’m always
looking now,” she said.
She’d already been out hunting mush
rooms once that day. During a break in
the storms, she headed out to a near
by forest, where she’d found a basketful
of chanterelles, golden mushrooms that
now were drying on her kitchen counter.
She planned to turn them into a pate for
an upcoming dinner party.
before,
point-
a large,
mush
room with a
brightly col
ored top. She
had a small
er mushroom
from the
same patch
dried for dis
play in her home. “They’re called shelf
mushrooms,” she said. “It’s growing like
a shelf.”
Konkel learns about mushrooms from
books and at meetings of the Mush
room Club of Georgia. The club orga
nizes mushroom hunts and holds regular
meetings to discuss favorite fungi and to
learn how to tell one that’s good for sup
per from one that will make you ill, or
worse.
That, of course, is a problem with
eating wild mushrooms. A bite of the
wrong one can send a diner to the
emergency room. It pays to be cau
tious. The Mushroom Club has num
bers for Poison Control prominent
ly displayed on its website. “There’s
not a lot out there that would actu
ally kill you, but there are some that
may make you wish you were dead,”
Konkel said.
During the club’s July meeting, held
the night before Konkel’s chanterelle
hunt, more than 40 members gathered
at Intown Community Church just
south of Brookhaven to hear a speak
er talk about how different kinds of
mushrooms smell. Some, he said, don’t
smell so good.
Members filled a tabletop with ex
amples of unusual mushrooms they’d
found. They shared notes on upcom
ing mushroom-centered events and
even a few mushroom jokes. One T-
shirt read: “Amateur mycologists have
questionable morels.”
Konkel first gathered mushrooms
when she was growing up. “When I was
a little girl, my grandfather would take us
out for nature walks. This was in Wiscon
sin. I would collect button mushrooms.
Even then I was amazed. There were so
many mushrooms. He’d say, ‘No, you
don’t want that one.’ ... It was a differ
ent time. He was a big fisherman. People
lived off the land more.”
Now, remembering those hikes, she
tries to take her own grandchildren
mushroom hunting. So far, they haven’t
had much luck, but she’s hopeful. After
all, one good gullywasher and soon there
are plenty of mushrooms out there wait
ing to be found.
“You just have to start paying atten
tion,” she said. “Once you start paying
attention, they’re everywhere.”
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