Chicken of The Woods
Since I have started cultivating a few of the gourmet and medicinal mushrooms in my backyard (shiitake, oysters, reishi, etc.) I have suddenly become much more interested in all the wild mushrooms and fungus that make their appearance around my property. Of course, I realize that few of these are edible (though few may actually be poisonous). 
Well every year this beautiful orange-yellow fungus grows on the trees around here (mostly oak). This happens usually in the fall, and so this time I decided to do a little research and found that it was the fairly common Chicken of the Woods, a.k.a. Laetiporus sulphureus. , After being convinced that there were no dangerous look alikes, my wife and I decided to do an experiment and try it in a risotto recipe. This turned out to be one of the better tasting mushrooms - though not the typical mushroom taste.
It is better to harvest this fungus before it has gotten too old. Just cut the fungus off from the tree using a knife, but don’t rip it off. I then cut the actual sections as I demonstrate here in the picture. The idea is to cut off the outermost tender margin of the fungus, and this is quite easy because when cutting it, the knife tends to ”find” the tougher part and ride over it as you cut.
Now once you get your sections cut off, just break it all up in a whatever sizes that you wish and use in your favorite recipe. If you do an internet search, you can find many recipes, and I will be posting the risotto recipe that we made with them here shortly. It just doesn’t get any better than eating such delicacies growing right in our own yard! Keep a close eye out in the summer and fall for this delicious fungus, as they are quite common (though the northern variety growns on different trees). On a final note, I have also innoculated one of my garden beds with the spawn of the native ‘Shaggy Mane’ (Coprinus comatus) and hope to be sampling this delicacy in the spring.
