hobo

I opened few jars with these my marinated mushrooms recently and tasted them. The stems of little mushrooms are soft and good but the stems of big ones are a bit "woody". But the caps are very good of all of them. The recipe was: 1. Put cleaned mushrooms in a casserole and add water. 2. Boil them for 20 min. and then discard the water. 3. Put in a casserole with mushrooms a new water and boil again for 20 min. Also you need to add (for each 1 liter of water) 2 table spoons of salt and 1 or 2 table spoons of 6% vinegar. 4. After that put the mushrooms into clean jars and pasterize (with adding to each jar 1 leaf of laurel and few grains of smelly peper). 5. After pasterizing put the jars up the bottom on the towel and keep in this position for few hours - if marinate will begin to leak out of the jar you will easily notice that. 6. After that put in a dark cool place. After 60 days they are ready for eating. I heared somethere that these (my) mushrooms could be called also tianma mihuanjun (gastrodia honey mushroom; mihuan means honey). I am not sure, of course, because I do not speak Chinese. I personally drink all the "juice" which was left in a jar from my marinated mushrooms. I was interested about these mushrooms because I also heared that they promote cerebral blood flow. One person even said me that I don't needed to discard the first water when making marinated honey mushrooms "because you will waste out the best part of them". So the "juice" could be good also.

These mushrooms resemble me "Honey fungus" (Armillaria). Very good mushrooms for preserving for winter in jars with salt or marinade. In September I found a lot of them in the forest in Lithuania (photos bellow) and made them marinated after boiling with salt and vinegar. After 60 days after marinated they should be ready for eating.