Adele Ferguson - Mushroom cautions top list for making it to 2013

WITH THIS YEAR nearly at an end, I’d like to use one of the last columns of 2012 to try to assist some of my readers in making it at least this far into 2013 without mishap.

1. There was a story in the newspapers recently about members of a family that met their deaths because their cook served them wild mushrooms she had gathered that turned out to he poison. Now there’s nothing wrong with gathering and using wild mushrooms, I’ve done it for years end have eaten more than a dozen different kinds I picked myself, starting off with chanterelles, which are abundant here, easily identifiable, and very tasty. I have canned many, many half pints of chanterelles.

The first one I ever ate was part of a basketful a fellow reporter brought to me who had been picking mushrooms for many years so I trusted his judgment. I bought several books on wild mushrooms with pictures to aid me when I started out on my own. I have even tasted mushrooms I couldn’t identify in the books but only a taste, fried in butter, not raw.

There is a big beautiful brown mushroom, by the way, that I’ve called deer mushrooms but a first taste proved they were too bitter to eat. Anyway, picking wild mushrooms is worth it but get a book or books to help you and don’t eat anything you can’t identify. And don’t eat mushrooms picked by somebody you don’t’know for sure is a seasoned mushroom hunter. The most common poisonous mushrooms found here, amanitas, are also very identifiable with warts so they don’t even look edible.

2. THIS NEXT ONE is a two-parter. My husband and I were invited to a picnic buffet one summer by a friend along with a couple of dozen other people. He had a table set up in his back yard and a whole slew of good food on it. During the pre-meal cocktail hour we were in the house when a woman came bringing a mushroom dish and I asked how she made it. She had used her own canned chanterelles, she said. I asked if she had boiled them first and she said no. They came straight from the jar.

You’re not supposed to do that, I said. All home canned meats, fish and vegetables require 15 minutes of boiling to eliminate any possibility of botulism. She did it all the time, she said, and nobody died of it. I didn’t pursue the matter but we didn’t eat any of her mushroom dish either. We also didn’t eat any of the potato salad after taking note of the fact it and the other food had been out there in the hot sun for over an hour.

I heard an executive from a mayonnaise company once say their mayonnaise was perfectly safe until you mixed it with something else.

The next day I got a telephone call from the county health department asking me if I had attended the buffet and what I had eaten there.

Some of the guests had taken ill and they’d gotten a guest list from the host.

I told them I don’t eat potato salad that has sat in the hot sun and I don’t eat home canned mushrooms that haven’t been cooked 15 minutes to destroy botulism spores.

I don’t remember the outcome except that nobody died, but bear two facts in mind.

Keep salads refrigerated until time to eat and boil any home canned foods except fruits for 15 minutes.

3.HARDLY A WINTER passes without someone killed by lighting off a charcoal burner in an enclosed place, like in the house or a trailer or back of a truck. Carbon monoxide is invisible but very deadly so only use a charcoal burner in the outdoors.

4. Candles should be in holders like kerosene lamps and put out before left unattended.

5. Never push anything, chair, footstool, etc., up against a heater. It will likely catch fire.

6. Don’t bed baby face down, it may smother. On the back only.

7. Don’t use gasoline to perk up an outdoor fire and watch to see nobody else does.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P. O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa. 98340.)