About Sandy Springs reporter. (Sandy Springs, GA) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (July 12, 2013)
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. 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