Heh yes. I often go to various places to pick wild mushrooms, its one of my favourite ways to spend a cool autumn day, getting out of bed and going up to my haunts at the very first sign of light, up and out at the crack of dawn, and not coming back until it gets too dark to actually see anything, stopping off at a bar on the way home to slake my thirst and sooth my tired feet with a nice cold pint or three, then getting back home to cook up a nice tasty dish of whatever wild treats I might have found during my day out mushroom hunting.
Went out the other day and had what has to be the absolute luckiest day of the entire season so far, brought back some Lyophyllum, I think they are L.decastes, and almost 3kg of Lactarius deliciosus, the saffron milk-cap, quite a scarce and lucky find here in the UK, as they are ranked amongst the very finest wild mushrooms of them all. I happen to agree, on the day I found them once I got home, I roasted some over an open flame until they were tender and crunchy, stained orange and green by the milky liquid Lactarius bleed, and oh-so-tasty. Took back several carrier bags full, enough for me to keep munching on any time I get peckish for quite some time to come I think. Methinks I'll be having them for tea nearly every meal for the next two or three weeks to come.
Psilocybe cyanescens, now there is a 'shroom of quality. They are seriously, seriously potent little fuckers. Last time I had a harvest of those, I found several woodchip beds outside a local macdonalds absolutely laden with cyans, picked several 'happy meal' takeaway boxes full, and when I got them home and started the task of cleaning the bits of woodchips and assorted grime off them, to spore-print (which is ESSENTIAL with P.cyanescens!!! there are two lookalikes that would be fatal if consumed, namely Galerina spp. such as G.autumnalis, and Conocybe filaris, both of which have ochre-rusty orangy brown spore prints, and both of which can grow right in amongst the cyans, indeed I found one or two C.filaris in that harvest, that were successfully rooted out and disposed of when the spore printing showed those telltale giveaway rusty brown prints in amongst the dark violet blackish purple colored spore-prints of Psilocybe species, inc. P.cyanescens)
Spore print !EACH AND EVERY SINGLE MUSHROOM! snap the stems off and leave each individual stem lying next to its associated cap. This can, and if those two lookalikes are present, WILL save your life. Both Galerinas and Conocybe filaris contain the same notorious and lethal cyclopeptide amatoxins that are the poisonous principles present in the infamous death cap (Amanita phalloides), the destroying angel (A.virosa), Fool's mushroom or spring amanita, (A.verna), A.ocreata and a few other Amanitas.
These poisons act by inhibiting RNA polymerase III, which inhibits protein synthesis, specifically targeting the liver, although as poisoning progresses kidney failure and cerebral oedema as well as fucking around with blood chemistry, then causing fulminant liver failure and death. Its a slow, drawn out and miserably painful way to die. So do your spore printing when hunting cyans. They are, though, when correctly identified, a very worthwhile psilocybin mushroom, very strong indeed. Whilst I was cleaning them, as I was saying, I hadn't actually ingested a single mushroom, but merely from the damp caps, prolonged skin contact was quite sufficient enough to start both myself and the then housemate who went picking with me and helped clean our find tripping. Both our eyes got our pupils dilated to dinnerplate-esque proportions, the walls started breathing and warping, colors brightened, while I certainly tripped far harder when I actually took some of our mushrooms, just from the cleaning of them and cutaneous absorption of the actives, I'd say I reached a ++ that evening.
Took us both quite by surprise that did
Best fresh, or very carefully stored, as there is more psilocin, than there is psilocybin in P.cyanescens, and psilocin is the less stable out of the two to oxidation. Best rapidly dried in an inert atmosphere, such as a squirt of argon welding gas, and plenty silica gel packs, or if one can obtain and feel comfortable handling chemicals in a lab environment, in a desiccator full of nitrogen or argon, over some phosphorus pentoxide, the drying agent to end all drying agents, even capable, IIRC, of dehydrating fucking conc. sulfuric acid to sulfur trioxide! P2O5 (more correctly P4O10, but usually written P2O5) will aggressively rip the fucking shit out of the slightest moisture content of the shrooms and dry them very rapidly and effectively indeed. It is however, the anhydride of phosphoric acid, to a syrupy, highly concentrated and corrosive liquid of which it will turn once it completes its dehydrating action, and must be carefully handled, disposed of, or recycled as conc. phosphoric if one has a use for that.
