A few years back Robin and I signed up to take field class on identifying edible mushrooms in Missouri. I ended up with a conflict and could not make the class, but Robin went. She came back that Saturday evening with a bag full of edible wild mushrooms and a chest full of excitement.
About a week later she decides to go mushroom hunting on her own in a local park, Faust Park, which has several heavily wooded acres. She comes home again with a chest full of excitement and bags full of wild mushrooms. However, this time she did not have an expert teacher with her, and she did not really know what she had. She spread her bounty upon newspapers on the bar between the kitchen and the eating area. I had loaned her my mushroom identification book so she was hoping to identify what she had gathered.
I was not living there at the time and had been invited over to dinner with her and her daughter. Her daughter was living in the city at that point.
She pushed the mushrooms to one end of the counter and prepared a nice spaghetti dinner with a tossed salad and bread. Robin is a good cook and I was enjoying the meal quite nicely. I had eaten all of my salad and half of my spaghetti when Robin asked me, “Are you sun burnt?” I looked at her funny as she knew I had not been outside for any extended period of time for several days. Shortly, thereafter I mumbled something about not feeling well, managed to get to couch, and collapsed onto it. I do not really remember anything until 12 or 13 hours later when I woke up in the morning. Somehow she had managed to get me to bed.
Meanwhile the meal concludes, and they clean up. Her daughter leaves and begins to drive back to the city. Robin gets a call from her. She is in the men’s room at a convenience store as the lady’s room was occupied. She had diarrhea and was vomiting at the same time. I did not ask and she did not really say, but I imagine she left the men’s room a mess. She completed her “business” and went on home. She did not suffer any more ill effects.
My best guess at this point is that there must have been poisonous mushroom s amongst the collection on the kitchen bar. Either through contamination from handling them, perhaps spores or some other method something reached the salad. We are assuming it was the salad as Sarah and I both ate that and Robin did not. Perhaps as a former Health Inspector I should have said something to her about possible cross contamination. But every since my ex told me one time just after I took that job, “Go ahead and condemn my kitchen I’ll never cook again”, I have tried to keep my mouth shut in other people’s kitchens.
And that my friends is how my girlfriend of six months tried to poison me and her daughter. She does not hold my looks against me so I have not held this episode against her. There, however, has not been a lot of mushroom gathering by Robin since then.
have a friend who raised mushrooms in his backyard. He took oak logs about 6″ in diameter and drilled holes in them. He then soaked them in a water barrel. Next he put mushroom spores in the holes and capped them with beeswax and stacked them in a rack he built. The mushrooms grew on the bark of the logs. He harvested several grocery sacks full.