Hahaaha FUBAR, no, 'fraid not. I was taking a pic mostly of the giant puffballs, the peppery bolete I was just busy slicing the majority of the pores, since they don't dry so well, as they are much higher in water content than is the rest of the mushroom.
The corals, well those I couldn't find until the last minute after I'd got all my harvest home. I need to dig up some specialist lit on the various clavarioids, Botrytis, Ramaria, Clavariadelphus, etc etc. with the microscopy details included to see.
After the lengths I went to in order to obtain those two puffballs, artful composition didn't even cross my mind. In fact my old man did the cooking and I actually fell asleep on the sofa (albeit aided by morphia and chlormethiazole, with a side sprinkling of oxy)
And I woke up hours later to a slice of fried Langermannia gigantia (personally I'd have left it in Calvatia, its much easier to remember and pronounce haha.
You can find libs at the dam? where? because I'm GOOD at beating others to the finish line believe you me. When I go fly agaric picking, and hunting peppery boletes with them (Chalciporus piperatus is a parasite of the Amanita species, I looked it up recently after for years observing that wherever I found peppery boletes I'd find fly agaric fruiting or if I didn't, I'd find the boletes in places where I KNOW there is a fly agaric mycorrhizal network underground because its in places I hunt the things year after year after year. And its so reliable that if I see one species in the distance I know I can either close in for the kill, so to speak, and find the other mushrooms nearby, or wait a while and they will be there later on. I use either one as a marker for the other species .
I'd theorized that there was either a symbiosis or a parasitic relationship like between ergot species and grasses (Found plenty Claviceps purpurea last year, and what I THINK just MIGHT be Claviceps sulcata, but the latter I need to confirm by germination of a few of the suspected C.sulcata sclerotia and examination of stipe, capitulum and perithecia as well as both ascospores and if the species is of a strain which produces them at all, them examine the honeydew for both macrconidia- and microcycle conidia
under the oil immersion lens, in consultation with TGC. Although whilst I've never yet seen any in the wild, what I'd MUCH rather work with is C.paspali. Avoids a whole bunch of chromatography.
Going to have myself some fried puffball steaks for breakfast this morning. Not yet as I'm not yet hungry, will be after I've had some chlormethiazole and morphine, maybe a bit off oxy if I feel I need it, and once thats done I guarantee I will have a rampaging case of the munchies once I wake up from my post-morphia nap
Got a couple of slices of brown bread going dry out of the bag ready to make the breadcrumbs but need more eggs for batter. God, that battered puffball steak yesterday evening was just divine. I've not had them for years. Not helped by being robbed of my prize the last time I found any.
But yesterday, there was quite a walk, went right round lymm dam, and had to do no small amount of fence-hopping, tree-swinging (hawthorn to boot some of it) and slithering down a steep, muddy, slippery embankment towards the water, using aforementioned hawthorn to break my fall, grab the trunk, swing round and down and grab the buggers one at a time. But once actually spotted, there was nothing on the face of this earth that would have, or could in this century, possibly have saved them from the frying pan....ooooh no! I'd seen my prize, and damn the mud, damn the thorns to Tartarus all, they were coming back with me in my mushroom-collecting bags, brought especially for just that purpose, lest I see anything that was destined for the frying pan full of sizzling butter
I don't know about looking like Theresa May, half-hatched from the egg-case and busily looking for a host, no. To me, they looked like, and still if I peer in the fridge for a snack, look like my breakfast in a few hours once I'm done with the videogame I'm playing at the moment, for the timebeing. I do hope theres some sausages and some bacon left to go with it. Grilled bacon, with the fat trimmed off after cooking wrapped round the slices of puffball under the batter before frying sounds very tempting to me indeed. By the time I'm ready to cook, the morph, clonidine, chlormethiazole, cimetidine for CYP-P450 inhibition, pramipexole and oxy will have done their work and I'll have come round from my morning nap and my stomach will be growling its demands for puffball fritters once again
