Did you know puffball mushrooms are edible?

Aaah, a puffball mushroom, fried in butter with a little salt... WOW!  I am now a confirmed puffball mushroom nut....  How did THAT happen?  Glad you asked.

Yesterday, as I got out of the van, I looked over to the grass on the side of the driveway and saw a round, white thing poking out of the lawn.  It was about two inches wide and almost perfectly round.  As soon as I got within a few feet, I could tell it was a puffball mushroom.

Now before this encounter, I had the vague inkling that they were edible, but I was well-trained by all the mushroom documentaries where they tell you that mushrooms are delicious -- but every delicious mushroom also has an icky-tasting and/or completely deadly look-alike.  So, these documentaries always say, "Don't EVER try to identify mushrooms without a mushroom expert at your elbow, and even then, you may just die."  Or something like that.

After a few clicks on Google, however, I was able to learn that all varieties of puffball are edible, and some are gigantic.  I could cut and paste some photos, but if you google puffball, that would save me a lot of work.

Anyway, there is one lookalike, and it's pretty easy to tell when you've got the destroying angel mushroom, as it's so descriptively called, versus a puffball.  Since this is a little more important to know, here's a link that  shows destroying angel mushrooms:  http://americanmushrooms.com/taxa/Amanita_virosa_03.htm  .  The interior of a puffball does NOT have that cap-shaped pattern -- it's evenly textured all the way through, kind of like the Magic Erasers you use to clean your walls.

I'm sorry, this is a really pathetic blog today, but my main goal is to tell you that puffball mushrooms are a taste that is out of this world.  I'll try to tell you what they taste like as soon as I finish the rest of the story.

So I picked this round mushroom up off the lawn, and it left a neat, round depression in the grass (where I'm hoping more puffballs will sprout or whatever they do).  This was not the first puffball I've picked out of this lawn, and I'm so sad to say that I threw the other ones out.  I found a similarly-sized one about two weeks ago, in almost the same section of grass, and last year, I found a huge five-incher.  That just makes me want to cry, thinking about the wasted deliciousness.

After examining the snowy-white and firm, spongy inside and determining that it was not, in fact, a destroying angel mushroom, I peeled it, sliced it, and fried it in butter with a little salt.  With just a little trepidation, since I didn't have a mushroom expert at my elbow, I took a taste.  Amazing.

It had such a meaty, almost chicken-y taste, but with a bit of nuttiness (that could be the butter)... it is nearly indescribable.  You have to try it yourself sometime, or, if you're still a little nervous about the lingering after-effects of eating a puffball mushroom, send them all my way.

I did monitor myself afterward, and got a very slight tingling in my throat within an hour after eating it, and maybe a little bit of delirium/hysteria, but that could be explained by my instant addiction to this humble fungus.  The tingling in my throat went away within a few minutes.

You can ask my sister-in-law, who lives across the street about the delirium/hysteria.  I went over there to look for puffballs in her lawn, too, and she witnessed a little bit of the... enthusiasm that I had.  Hysteria's such a strong word.

Brian and Noah both tried little, tiny pieces of cooked puffball, and they're both as normal as could be (or as they normally are, which may not be completely normal).  They both liked it.  Brian was even willing to walk through the woods at his brother's house to look for more.  We'll have to do that as soon as all the poison ivy leaves fall.  Can't wait!