Autumn is my favourite season! I love celebrating the equinox, my son's birthday, Thanksgiving, Halloween and Samhain. Autumn up here in the Northwest Coast has been quite rainy, but still lots of vibrant colours. My kids like collecting leaves, acorns and pine cones. Last year, I enjoyed the abundance of the Okanagan Farmers' Market with endless potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and apples. We did some canning this year. We got 6 large jars of tomato sauce from our garden and the local Farmers' Market. That's impressive for up North, but nothing compares to how much canning we did in the Okanagan.
We're always very resourceful wherever we are, so this year we took up foraging. While looking for good sprigs for pineneedle tea, we found a lot of mushrooms! Some edible "shaggy mane" or "lawyer's wig" mushrooms we battered and fried for lunch immediately after picking. The other mushrooms we put in a dehydrator.
After setting up the dehydrator, we washed and chopped our mushrooms in preparation for drying. It takes quite a while...
An expert at the market identified them as "research mushrooms", called Amanita Muscaria or fly agaric. What a pleasant find...a new opportunity! Foraging and preserving really satisfies an ancient part of my brain.
Drying of the mushrooms causes decarboxylation of ibotenic acid into muscimol just like 'decarbing' the acidic forms of cannabinoids like THCA or CBDA into THC and CBD. The ibotenic acid (raw form) is toxic, whereas the decarbed muscimol is psychoactive.
It's fun to harvest in the fog and fall. Pick some up now for those special people on your Christmas shopping list. But be careful, you might have to fight the reindeer for them! They'll attack you for the drug metabolites in urine.
Image Source: usda.gov
Oh yeah, the hashbrown recipe! Hahah, blockchain flashback.
Mmmm can't wait until they're done! Let's go check them right now. : D
Yeah! I'm glad we have good potatoes and that we got a nice big shipment of okanagan apples in!
Wow amazing mushroom find