The EndTimes Guide to Dining Out

For Tea-Partyin' Gardeners Who Wanna Kick It Up a Notch, Dispatch 2:

Near Death in The White Mountains

By Regina DeAngelo

Have you ever been hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire? If you haven't, here is an image: woods, woods, woods. Up, up, up. Woods, woods, woods; up, up, up, ... WO.

Wowza.

Wow.

Aerial views of miles of valleys.  Flat green plots spread wide and far, ringed with farther mountains. The town of North Conway's white church sticking up like a little stalagmite on your right.  Falcons at your shoulder.

Late spring in the White Mountains yields Painted Trillium, Spiderwort, and big white mushrooms with brown nexi that smell like leather mixed with jasmine tea. I found about three of these mushrooms on a hike up Mt. Washington with some friends last May.  I picked one for each hand, holding them to my nose and sniffing them all the way up an down the mountain. They smelled so exotically sweetly umami-mushroomy that I wanted to eat them right there. I didn't, because my guide, Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America, was 219 miles away in Rhode Island.

So I waited, and carried the mushrooms home on the back dash of my car. I put the mushrooms on the kitchen counter top, where they waited to be brushed clean and sauteed in olive oil and shallots.  But my field guide yielded no exact definitions. So I went online, to Rogers Mushrooms.com. I searched and studied the pictures, holding one of the mushrooms to my nose and inhaling its scent like an addict.  But there was no exact identification for this guy. It bore so many commonly found characteristics that it could have been a Platterful, or a Fawn Mushroom, or any of the beige ones in the edible chapter of my mushroom book.



Uh-oh, Amanita Pantherina. Not good!!!



The human nose is awfully close to the mouth.

Surely if a specimen of god-given produce smells this good, surely then it must be good to eat. And surely, a tiny bite won't kill me.

I took a bite.

It tasted nice and mild. I searched clicked around the web site some more. I took another teensy bite. Finally I clicked on the image of the Amanita Pantherina.

And then I started to sweat.

(To be continued).