Fungi Friday - Aesthetic Mushrooms vs Ugly Mushrooms

Here are a few nice looking aesthetic mushrooms for this #fungifriday by @ewkaw

Look at these symmetrical beauties. These are edible reddening lepiotas aka Leucoagaricus americanus. They are a nice edible that has an annoying poisonous lookalike called the green vomiter aka Chlorophyllum molybdites. The key is to cut the stem a bit and see if it eventually stains a red color to get a positive ID on reddening lepiota.

Here are some classic shaped large mushrooms. The key to their ID is their pink gills and lack of ring on the stem.

This is what they look like from above, quite large in diameter. These are deer shield mushrooms aka Pluteus cervinus. Technically they are edible but don't really have an powerful enough taste for use in cooking. Also they can be confused with some other toxic looking mushrooms with the same shape unless you really know what you are looking at.

Here is a perfect batch of crown tipped coral aka Artomyces pyxidatus. This is one of my favorite edible mushrooms. The key for identification is their tiny little crowns on the tip and they have to be growing out of dead wood. Another way to ID them is to take a tiny nibble and see if it burns like black pepper. If so then it is crown tipped coral. Other lookalike coral fungi causes stomach aches and lacks the spicy taste when raw. Once you cook this it will lose its spicy taste and has a rich mushroom taste with a texture of angel hair pasta. I've read it is good in ramen soup flash boiled, where you just dip it in boiling water for a few seconds to cook it a bit so that the some of the spicy taste is left.

Here are some super tiny little ufos. They were completely infesting a dead tree stump, there must have been hundreds growing.

I've searched quite a few guides and online for these tiny little guys but found nothing. You would think the yellow color, dark brown foot and size would narrow it. Perhaps its not famous enough of a mushroom to be documented by most guides.

For visuals this is one of my favorites. This is raspberry slime mold aka Tubifera ferruginosa. Too bad they are not edible nor do they taste like raspberries.

Now for some ugly mushrooms. Normally this would be a nice huge symmetrical white mushroom but the weather conditions were really wet, then dry and windy and it got caught halfway grown and ended up cracking.

I was only able to identify it after looking at the gills and stem. This is a stunted meadow mushroom a nice edible. Technically even though it is beat up it is still edible.

Here's another ugly looking one with a gross name. This is called dog vomit slime mold aka Fuligo septica. Though it is ugly it does have some antibiotic properties and you can even extract a yellow dye from this with the right chemical treatments.

Here is a corticoid crust mold. Not symmetrical or too interesting other than its color. Many of these crust fungi come in different colors that can be used to make dye. One of these days I'm going to have to try and make mushroom dye, I think it just involves soaking it in the right chemicals then putting cloth in the resulting refined mixture.

That's all for now, happy #fungifriday :-)