Russula in my backyard

This photo and the following two are of a mushroom I found in my backyard. It's a Russula sp. How do I know? Well, for one, the bright white gills which reflect the white spore print. Okay, that's not a great character because gill color often doesn't betray spore print color. But the next clue is the crisp break in the stalk. This is a giveaway for the Russulaceae, and is caused by distinctive boxy shaped cells called sphaerocysts. The two main genera in the Russulaceae are Russula and Lactarius. Lactarius spp, as the name suggests, exude a milky secretion when the cap or stem are broken. So that leaves us with Russula. Which Russula? I don't know. There are no distinctively green capped Russula spp. in Bessette et al. Some Russulaceae are edible and choice, others not so much and could hurt you.

Lots of material for bawdy jokes in this one.

The stinkhorns are a group of mushrooms that are even more phallic than most mushrooms, and include a genus, Phallus. There's a new species of Phallus to be described in the next Mycologia from Sao Tome and Principe. It is to be named after the expedition leader, a herpetologist

Boletes

Found some more boletes. I think I'm ready to try some. They look like
B. hortonii But I'll drop some ammonia ok just to be sure. Also looks
like some are being parasitized by Hypomyces (white stuff)

A-looky heeyah!

I was walking out of the lab today and came across this bright orange something. It turned out to be a chanterelle, the first I've seen in Alabama. All this late wet weather we've been having has brought out all kinds of strange things.

This one is most likely either Cantharellus confluens or C. lateritius. Bessette et al. have pictures of both but indicate that they may be a single species. The folds are not well developed, so they don't look very much like gills, as chanterelles are not directly related to gilled mushrooms in the strict sense. Chanterelles are some of the more 'easily identified' mushrooms, but as always, that's a relative term.

So what did I do? I said I wasn't going to eat it, because it looked a little beat up, but the more I looked at it and the more certain I became of my ID, the more it seemed to be crying out for some brushing off, chopping, and frying in Amish butter. So that's what I did. Just brush off the dirt (soggy mushrooms aren't very nice), chop, fry in butter with a pinch of salt. Dee-licious!

I'd almost forgotten how delicious fresh wild mushrooms can be. What a treat!