[pct-l] Food Dehydrator Tips or Recipes?

[Scott Williams]

Great books MendoRider.  Mushrooms Demystified is the Bible for West Coast
mushrooms, and David Aurora is a wonderfully funny writer and local member
of the Santa Cruz Mycological Society, or at least he was years ago when I
was with the San Francisco Mycological Society.  However, it weighs about 5
lbs, and is bigger than most Bibles.  If you're inclined to bring a mushroom
book in your pack, especially in WA, bring his field guide, "All that the
Rain Promises, and More."  Much lighter, great pix and very funny.  He
describes certain mediocre mushrooms as, "Better stomped than chomped,
better kicked than picked."  One caveat however, learn mushrooms from a
person who knows and not from a field guide, as some look so much alike in
pictures, and the descriptions are never like handling them in the field
with someone who can show you the differences up close and personal.  The
classic in terms of this is the confusion between amanita caliptrata, (the
cocoli, or cocorra), and amanita phaloides, (the death cap).  Caliptrata is
edible and delicious, but pictures don't get across the differences between
it and the death cap, which is a close relative.  When you hear of liver
transplants and deaths it is usually the confusion of these two.  When shown
them side by side in the field, you would wonder how anyone could ever
mistake them, but they do.

But wild foods on the trail can so enhance the usual dried fare we live on.
And Steel-Eye, when our mountaineer, Swiss, vegetarian, Smiles was
introduced to the wild onions of the Sierra she did an absolute dance on
trail, and added them to her lunches and dinners from then on.  They are so
delicious, and grow in such profusion over much of the trail.  Also in the
desert sections were absolutely delicious lettuces, some very similar to
endive.  Eating trout and wild salad greens sounds like a great way to go.

Shroomer