You actually ATE stinkhorn eggs more than once? Yeech!
Never again, never, ever, ever again.
Lol I should relate a rather funny tale about those witch eggs.
It was when I was younger, still a kid. To this day we (family) do not know who is the guilty party. But presumably after one of my foraging walks, after a while, we noticed a smell, like a gas leak (well, like mercaptans and alkyl sulfides at any rate). It just got stronger, and stronger, this awful rotten meat/fecal kind of stench. We called the gas repair people out, guy comes, searches the house from eyeteeth to arsehole and finds nothing whatsoever, leaves empty handed with the stink still..well..stinking, as stinkhorns are wont to do.
Eventually we pulled aside the fridge and freezer, to find a big cluster of Phallus.impudicus, as ripe as ripe can be, stinking away like the diaper bin in an old folks home, they weren't on any proper substrate, but had actually managed to germinate upon the carpet and make it to their rancid smelling adult stage. And oh BOY do stinkhorns ever hum in a small confined space.
The smell was absolutely sickening up close. For those of you who have never smelled one, stinkhorns take the form of a white, network-lacy like column, topped with a bellend-shaped floppy layer of thin tissue, that becomes covered in an olive-khaki slime that gives off a selection of really foul smelling compounds to attract flies, which land on this layer, actually the spore mass of the fungus, and thus act as their mode of distribution for the spores.
We all laughed our arses off, after getting rid of them, someone must have brought the spores back and trodden them into the carpet or something, either me, or my old man who at that age, had to go with me when I went out hiking/foraging.
Do try the fly agaric idea though sham, it is really meaty and gives a really, really strong umami flavor to dishes its added to. I assume its trace quantities of the glutamate receptor agonist ibotenic acid that remain after curing, acting as a sort of natures fungal answer to MSG. I use a lot of fly agaric in my cooking as a spice, for meat based dishes, typically I can harvest a good many kilos of raw, whole mushroom from a local golf course/woodland that I've walked since I was tiny, and it all gets used.
Right now I have a few broken caps left in a tub from last years harvest, out of carrier bag after carrier bag full of the things during the growth season. Chilli, curries, steak mainly. I find a fair few other goodies there too, sometimes sulfur polypore (Polyporus sulfureus, some ppl are allergic to this one, same as honey fungus, but I enjoy eating it fried in strips, sometimes charcoal burners (Russula cyanoxantha), Russula atropurpurea, honey fungus, beefsteak fungus now and then, and if I am REALLY really lucky, puffballs, which are one of my absolute favourites, fried in breadcrumbs as cutlets, and grisettes and blushers (the latter, Amanita rubescens contains a haemolytic poison called rubescenslysin, but this is not a thermostable compound and breaks down upon boiling, throwing the water out, boiling again then cooking)
Needless to say, DON'T eat ANY member of the genus Amanita, unless you are certain of your identification, to make a mistake and eat some species, mainly those in the stirps Phalloidea, such as the death cap, destroying angel, A.ocreata and friends. One bite is enough to turn a person's liver into mushy soup, slow, messy and painful way to go. There are a few others that contain nephrotoxins also, but these are not related to the Phalloidea.
Amanita is, to say the least, a genus to be most careful with, although there are some species that are great to fill one's cooking pot.
Oh, and another good recipe for fly agaric, is in beef stew. Absolutely divine, so meaty and full of flavor. Guaranteed to get your tastebuds twitching in anticipation.
I'll pass on the spring onions though, I don't (can't) do veg, I simply cannot make myself swallow any of it without triggering an instant gag and if I'm unlucky, barf reaction. Like the time I was forced to eat sprouts in my LFA school, I had to literally run full pelt to the bogs and dispose of the noxious material the way it came. Felt really queasy afterwards...*shudders* ugh. The thought of those textures still makes my skin crawl.
And yes, swampdragon, good to see a fellow forager, I've been doing it since I was barely verbal. Had quite a lot of funky, strange fungi and berries, every so often its good to come across a real treat, like say, a giant puffball to take home for a feast.
