Black Trumpets

On my latest mushroom foray my daughter and I stumbled across a whole area rich in these marvelous black trumpets!

These are supposedly not an uncommon species in my area but I have only encountered one other patch in all my 25 years of mushroom hunting. And I went back to that same patch again and again for several years (until I moved from that area) to gather a few. Sometimes finding some, sometimes not.

I dunno. Maybe I just wasn't looking for them hard enough before... they are rather difficult to spot on the litter of the forest floor. Or, maybe I just missed them season-wise. According to sources on the web they go through periodic fruitings (which I take to mean, not continuous) from May through November, so maybe I just havn't been in the right place at the right time. Once we found this big patch and started looking, we did find lots of smaller ones.

Got a pretty fair harvest (and still left plenty for others) of which most were dried for later use. A good portion, though, went into a lovely quiche.

Yummy.