False Chanterelles
Published in Widowism by chefswidowOnce upon a time there was a Chef. He was a passionate Chef who loved to use his surroundings as inspiration for his culinary creations. His passion for local could be seen in every dish that left his kitchen. He believed the closer he was to the farm, the better his food would be. His passion didn’t discriminate. He loved the farm but he also loved to look for edibles in the woods.
In the spring time his passion would take him to the beautiful emerald necklace in search of wild onions and greens. He would christen his spring dishes inspired by the forest’s bounty. He would also bring his mushroom guide and keep his eyes open for morels, a favorite of his in the spore family.
The Chef’s all knowing wife would warn him against this quest that he held so close to his heat. She would remind him again and again that he was in fact, NOT a Mycologist. Because of their love, he would kept the mushroom hunting to identification only. He knew the dangers of the forest as well as it’s bounty. His love of the shroom would never entice him to the point of no return. He would always show foraging restraint.
That is until he thought he found wild chanterelles….
A teaspoon of shroom and two hours later, the foraging Chef found himself in the hospital, puking. his. guts. out. FALSE Chanterelles had done him in.
Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca, commonly known as the False Chanterelle, is an orange funnel-shaped mushroom which has been confused at times with the true chanterelles. The difference between the two in identification is a tiny black dot in the center of the cap.
Moral of the story:
Always listen to your wife. She is ALWAYS RIGHT. And if the mushroom has a damn black dot on it, STAY THE EFF AWAY!!!
I jest about my Chef’s idiocracy but I do highly warn about the dangers of thinking you are an actual mycologist. Since this happened, over 20 people have filled me in on their own dangerous mushroom stories, some with an ending not as pretty as ours. So… if it grows on the ground and it’s in the spore family, keep on walking yo.
Has your friend, family, or sig oth done anything this stupid? Tell me their story in the comments section and you could win a gift certificate for a pair of Gap jeans. Any kind you like…
Best story wins on Friday September 10th.
xo
My husband, an amateur chef, finished sharpening his knives. “These knives are sharp as the devil himself,” he joked to me.
Not an hour later, he was cooking and I was watching football when I heard a string of expletives. He ran out of the kitchen with a towel wrapped around his hand and said we had to go to the emergency room.
Yep, the sharp as the devil himself knife had sliced the end of his thumb right off. Poor guy endured cauterizing, healing under the advice of a plastic surgeon, and many many reminders from me how one should not brag about one’s sharp knives!
You guys should take Ben’s food foraging class at Case this fall! http://studentaffairs.case.edu/farm/aic2010.html
I don’t know if this counts, but when the hubs was a wee lad, he decided to drive his tiny, ride on car down a flight of stairs. According to him, he though it was going to be like riding down a hill. Well, a cracked skull (and I mean, literally, a cracked skull) later and one really long, really uncomfortable trip to the ER for his Momma (my MIL), apparently, DFS really frowns upon when your child has a broken head. A social worker had to visit their house and didn’t really buy the story of the car and the stairs and the hill and the etc… OOPS!
And to this day, my very brunette hubby has a blonde streak in his hair exactly where he cracked his head open. And he has to explain to many, many people the story when the ask him why he has a lone highlight, thus reliving the tale over and over and over and over again.
My hubby has the annoying ability to make all that he possesses disappear. Vanish. Poof. Not little things either. He once lost our 1979 banana yellow Chevy Malibu in downtown Chicago. He walked around looking for the car for almost 4 hours before calling police and declaring it stolen. It was parked about 2 blocks away and had about 50 parking tickets on it when we finally found it.
how safe can your restaurant be if you pick your produce from the metro parks? i will be calling the health depaertment about this. i am sick to my stomach, i used to like your blog and restaurant and know i am freaking out!
Ahahaaha ladies. Your stories are great.
Wendy,
We don’t serve food from the Metroparks in our restaurant. My Chef forages in his free time for his own passions.
I also highly doubt you liked my blog and restaurant before this comment so if you don’t mind I would like to ask you to stop reading. Thank you for taking a story that was quite scary and twisting it into something it’s not.
Grow up.
Glad to hear that Jonathan is OK!!
My husband’s uncle who lives in upstate NY likes to forage in the woods as well, and will eat almost anything! A few years ago he came across some ‘shrooms (I don’t remember the kind), but he was also in tow of his “shroom book” and sampled some of his findings. He also ended up in the hospital and actually almost died, not cool (scary stuff!!) I’m happy to say that he is still alive and kickin, but this is serious….
Take Care!
Not food related and not chef related (it’s kinda nice tk say that- haha) but this summer my sister (19) got a wicked bad sunburn. She grabbed what she thought was aloe and rubbed it all over herself only to find out that she was terribly sticky the next morning. Hair gel is NOT aloe vera gel.
Chef and I are in Alaska this summer working a seasonal gig, cooking and teaching cooking classes. One of the best parts so far has been the foraging we’ve done. There are an amazing amount of wild berries (blueberry, strawberry, currant, salmon berry) and well as wild edibles like beach greens, fireweed and wild rhubarb. Being on the coast we’ve also foraged and eaten seaweeds, clams and mussels. (Chef has eaten a bad clam this summer – it was ugly.) But the mushrooms have been insane!! Hedgehogs out the ying. Boletes (read: cepes) out the yang and a whole host of other really gnarly shrooms. We’ve eaten a lot of them, but there have also been a lot of close calls where chef thought he had one type and then I checked to make sure and found another type that looked exactly the same. Something convinced him that eating a “Death Angel” was not a good idea.
I hope your chef has learned that when the wife is in doubt, don’t do it.
oh wow, at least he’s wearing a great shirt in the hospital.
No real story here…but I saw these exact mushrooms while walking my dog yesterday in the Rocky River Metroparks. I’ve never seen anything like them before….they are beautiful and I could see why Chef was lured in by them!. Glad he is okay!
“Wendy,”
Take a pill. Then indulge in some self-education. You might enjoy it.
Just because something didn’t come from a factory farm or a hippie farm or some other kind of farm doesn’t mean it’s dangerous. And we get plenty of reminders that stuff from farms can actually BE dangerous!
Read up on edible weeds, then try some. Taste some wild game. Catch a fish from the lake and actuallly eat it.
This ain’t exactly the Wild Side: It’s how we ate for about 125 centuries. Have some fun and learn about it.
The shrooms I can do without. If I wanted fungus in my diet, I’d eat my toes.
But please don’t bother the Health Department. There’s nothing that prohibits serving stuff from the Metroparks. Sorry.
I’m tempted to say my wife made a holly-berry pie, or some sort of castor-bean-hemlock-blowfish cassoulet, just to top the poisonous-shroom thing and win some free jeans. But every time she cooks, I’m thankful that she’s trying. She used to think supper came from a box and you pour milk on it.
Wow. I bet Wendy likes to eat tv dinners at home while she watches tv.
Anyways.. last week, after my chef had been coughing for a month, I had been nagging him for weeks to go to the Dr or the ER (since he obviously works too many hours and can’t get off work to go to the Dr.) Anyways, FINALLY got him to an Urgent Care Clinic…he has a double ear infection! Idiot. If he had listened to me sooner, he would be better by now! (Note: I love my husband, he is just hardheaded a lot of the time)
Jim.
Thank you.
I normally delete the negative nancies but her comment really irked me.
Wild ramps are still one of my favorite things about Ohio. They are so DARN DELICIOUS!
do u serve these at your restaurant? wild foods the chef is not sure about and ate it? what if that was served with your gnocchi? doesnt sound lawful to me? just sayin.
Yes Steve we serve poisonous mushrooms at our restaurant.
Why are you bothering to comment? You obviously didn’t read the post.
Glad to see the hubby is okay. Sad to see such overreaction by blog readers. I actually am inspired by his excitement to try ingredients that he literally found on a whim… even if he ended up where he did!
Interesting that two similar comments are made under a different name…
I certainly wouldn’t let an isolated incident that occurred in the chef’s off time discourage me from eating at such a fantastic restaurant. In fact, I think it’s pretty cool that he’s so passionate about experimenting with new things, though I’m sorry it required a visit to the hospital.
So I guess Wendy thinks all food comes in pasteurized, hermetically sealed, irradiated packaages. By all means go on eating like that. But the rest of us know that even in urban areas edible goods lurk in every forest and landsape. Heck, the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes even has “Pestival” fundraiser every year where local chefs use an envasive weed in creative dishes – and it sells out in a heartbeat. And no where did CW say that Jon was foraging for the restie – guess you used your jump to conclusions mat to come up with that one.
Glad to hear the chef is ok – shrooms are tricky like that (which may be why I don’t like any mushroom). He should take this as a message from the universe that the wife is always right.
My family has been hunting morel mushrooms for many generations, and you’re right, there are a lot of suspicious “look alikes” out there and you have to be careful. In all our years, nobody has ever made a costly mistake like that but you do have to know what you’re doing and really limit what you’re picking to what you know – we ONLY pick morels, and know how to look for the false ones. I think the foraging class would be a great one.
Glad the chef is OK.
Here’s a great link about morels:
http://thegreatmorel.com/falsemorel.html
I’m so glad to hear that the chef is okay, and thankful to learn from his (very uncomfortable) mistake! His passion for food is admirable and exciting!
As for the couple of comments about the safety of the restaurant, I’m puzzled! Do these people not realize that the chef cooks and eats at home, too? That is probably where he has imagined, experimented with and perfected some of the recipes most adored by patrons of The Greenhouse Tavern. If he leaves his socks by the side of his bed, would you also assume that his restaurant is unclean? Most people behave differently at home and at work. You should feel free to be more relaxed at home, but that has absolutely no connection to how strict you are in your place of business.
Many of our most expensive and most coveted ingredients are foraged. Someone had to be the first to find and sample a truffle! Although, I don’t think I want to know how Kopi Luwak was discovered!
I really like your blog! Good Work!!
Please check out my new blog dedicated to reviewing good food, beer, wine, and overall resturant quality around Cleveland.
http://clevelandfoodandbrews.blogspot.com/
Also become a fan of Cleveland Food and Brews Reviews on Facebook!!!
I am thankful that this is truly just a scare and not much worse. I remember a family many years ago that went foraging for mushrooms in the Cleveland area .They thought they knew what they were doing and picked a mushroom that they knew was safe (safe in their homeland Viet Nam). ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT IN OHIO THIS SAME LOOKING MUSHROOM IS HIGHLY POISONOUS. I think one or two of them died and another one of them needed a liver transplant because of the damage the poison did. Please make sure the Doctor checks his liver. Luv ya!
YIKES! So glad he’s okay (and that his little incident simultaneously proved you are always right)
It’s always good when a wife has ammo like that! But seriously – I’m sure it was scary. And I like Allison’s comment – good shirt!
Also -I know it sucks, but don’t let idiots bother you. They are just that. Idiots (and honestly – probably JEALOUS idiots at that) You, Chef & GHT don’t need them anyway!
Don’t let those bums get you down.
I guess Chef’s mushroom hunting radar wasn’t on.
But most importantly, glad to hear Chef is OK.
Haha, note to self, don’t eat random mushrooms from the forest, event though they look like there is even a minute possibility that they could be tasty. Thanks for saving my life in advance.
Okay. I can’t beleive I am telling this story. Anyways, when I was like 16 I grabbed a bottle of pills which I thought were Midol because I had crazy ass cramps. An hour or so later I started to feel like massive crap. Was having problems breathing, just felt really, really odd. Turns out I had taken my dogs pills for an enlarged heart. I ended up at the emergency room. Didn’t have to have my stomach pumped or anything like that but I had to explain to physicians why I felt the way I did. Still had cramps AND looked like an idiot. It was awesome.
also not a poison story… but my dad used to mow over the morels in their front yard. yea. true story. i threw up in my mouth a little when he said that.
I’ve burned myself multiple times doing stupid stuff in a hurry. It amazing how rushing causes our brain to stop functioning normally!!
not a doing something stupid story , but I find it stupid.
My husband is the son of a hunter and growing up he never knew what kind of meat he was eating and sometimes learned after the fact that is was something that he had rather of not eaten. Squirrel, deer, road kill… LOL
So he wised up and he and his sister always checked the garage cans for meat wrappers when their dad was fixing some mystery meat. So fast forward and we are married and he is the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to what he will eat. He will question where did you buy it? he only likes meat from our local butcher and not any grocery store. He is crazy picky
It drives me crazy, because I am not his dad and not going to serve him squirrel meatloaf
Oh and feel better Chef, maybe santa needs to bring him a really cool shroom indentification book
gerd symptoms…
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