I want to thank all of you who posted such excellent pictures and discussed what you did with your mushrooms in terms of storing them and actually eating them.
All of you have far more experience than I do,but I'm a mushroom lover myself.
My maternal grandmother Hedvig (Hattie) Carlson Wigand was from Sweden, Uppsala area to be exact. She taught my mother which ones were Ok to harvest and which were not.
There were two sources of mushrooms where I was raised on the farm. Along the Hudson River south of us,there were many who raised mushrooms in natural caves,harvested them and brought them up to the regional market in wooden oval containers that had oval wooden lids with a metal handle. These were the typical white button mushrooms.
My father delivered his produce to that same market and mom was always telling him to bring home some of those mushrooms, and he did. She used them in all sorts of ways, in a cream sauce on toast was my favorite.
I have a metal recipe box filled with mom's recipes,many of them from her mother, several recipes with mushrooms.
Another source was the farm of a distant relative where they raised cows so lots of pasture and lots of what we called cow plops,or meadow muffins,your choice. Yes,the mushrooms grew on top of the meadow muffins, especially after it rained.
A third source I found when I moved up here was an actual HUGE mushroom farm where they were grown inside, I don't know how, the public was not allowed there.
But they had a store where the public could go and buy mushrooms. No way could I ever tell you what they were and they shipped them to many places.
But then a fire started there and burned down the whole place, so there went the mushrooms.
Some of the more upscale grocery chains in my area still sell lots of different kinds already packed in trays with cellophane coverings.
Hmm, my USPS person just came, lots of useless catalogs and nope, no mushroom catalogs either. Yes I know I could buy those kits but I'm not going to do it.I may just put an ad in the local paper and ask if anyone local goes foraging for "Mushrooms in The Forest".
Carolyn,who notes lots of forests here , I'm between the Adirondack MTs in NYS and the GreenMTs in VT.