Mushrooms, E-bikes and Beer

Have you noticed how weird people get once they’re a bit older? I think that all of these strange little things that we do were always lurking within, it’s just that the societal expectations forced upon us as children crushed them out of us. Boys can’t play with dolls! Skateboarding isn’t a real sport! You can’t play board games into your teens! You eventually hit a point where you stop caring what other people think, or you find enough people that share in your obsession that it doesn’t matter. To me, this is the greatest thing about growing older. You just stop giving a shit about what anybody else has to say and live your own life. Add in disposable income, and the world is your oyster.

Mushrooming is one of those things that society isn’t really pushing you towards embracing. Nobody trusts a bearded man wandering through the woods, knife in hand, head pointed at the ground. The time investment is bonkers. Mushrooming is nothing if not an advanced class in being in the right place at the right time. You can go to exactly where you need to be for years and years and years and still come up empty if you miss by even a week or two. Hell, you can be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time and still come up empty handed! You wind up spending hours and hours and hours, wandering in circles, staring at bare expanses of forest just because you have a feeling about them.

Over the past few years, there has been a steady development of NSMBers into mushroom heads. I like to stake claim to starting the trend, but Pete insists I had no influence on him. As we continue to talk about it over the years, fewer people have tuned the conversation out and as 2024 turned into a Mushroomgeddon, our ranks have grown. What better time to launch the first annual (invite only) NSMB Mushroom E-bike-a-palooza!

I can smell the angst brewing out there amongst a few of our devoted readers. How dare I besmirch these pages with yet another article about e-bikes! Am I being paid by big e-bike, or big mushroom? Hard to say, but I’m always surprised by how unimaginative some of the e-bike critics seem to be. Can you honestly not think of a use for a bike that makes it easier to cover long distances and haul things? Pretty early on I started dreaming of the mushroom hauls I could pull off with an e-bike. It says something that I fantasize about being alone in the woods astride a bike with a backpack full of mushrooms.

The other thing about getting older is that plans become more complicated. People blow everything off. I approached Pete with my idea and expected a half-assed commitment followed by a full-assed flake. But not only was he into it, we had a crew! A day was selected, a ferry was caught and off we went.

Pete – Logistics and supplies

Deniz – Photos and encouragement

Graham – Trail directions and unbridled enthusiasm

Dave – Along for the ride

Pull a group of NSMBers together for a ride is that there’s always SO MUCH GEAR! Which results in SO MANY DELAYS! Stop for a coffee. Fiddle with your solar powered charging apparatus. Try on different knee pads. Shoot photos. Goodness.

“Hey. What’s the plan for today, anyhow.”

Blank looks. Shoulder shrugs. This is something that we should have discussed pre standing around on the side of the road, but we quickly came to an agreement to “ride some bike trails and hunt for some mushrooms along the way.” The specific percentage was up in the air.

With mushrooms, you either get it or you don’t. And if you get it, things get a bit weird. You start on a bike ride and then pretty quickly you’re stopping every 100 feet and then tweaking through the woods, poking your head under things. First up was lobsters on lobsters. Pete was non-plussed, and we quickly figured out why. Most of the time when you see a lobster mushroom, it’s terrible. Huge, and terrible. Crumbly and smelly. You have to turn over a lot of lobster mushrooms to find a good one, and we were finding a lot of lobster mushrooms without finding many good ones. Every minute or two Deniz or Graham would pluck a russula and yell out “Is this a pine?!” Still no.

Like many other days of foraging for mushrooms, it started to feel like a bit of a wild goose chase, so we hit the bikes and put some distance down. And then, when it hits, it hits. You find that right combination of elevation and temperature and moisture and pretty soon you’re tripping all over chanterelles. Indeed, most of the spots we found just by almost running over trailside chanterelles. Find one and follow the trail deeper and deeper into the woods. After 45 minutes, start yelling and see if you can find the rest of the crew. At one point we had stuffed our bags and wrangled the crew back together, ready to ride on and I realized I had absolutely no idea where my backpack was. Right…we found that big flush of chanterelles and I put it down and forgot. Some brief hunting and 15 minutes later we’re back on the trail. Wait. We lost Graham to the woods again.

This repeated itself over and over again. Ten minutes of riding, 45 minutes of mushroom hunting, wrangle the crew and on you go. Graham turned into a mushroom hunting madman, running and yelling and presenting his latest find with enthusiasm and bluster. Deniz got pretty excited too, but admitted he hadn’t brought a bag to carry anything out. Pete was captain of the research squad, helping with identification via texts to his wife. I already had a fridge full of chanterelles at home so I was on a grade A only picking plan, so I mostly just snooped around, pointed at things, watched the spectacle and swooped in to claim the prime stuff. And then…pines!

I’ve never actually picked a pine mushroom before. I’ve read a lot about them. I theoretically knew what I was looking for. And it was all true. The little mound. The fine soil. The firm pick. The smell. I thought Graham might injure himself as he sprinted towards the others to show off our find.

It reached a point where we had to either start riding or admit that we weren’t actually on a bike ride. Our mushroom pile was getting pretty large, so we stashed everything in a stump and turned the rest of the ride into a loop. We climbed for a while into weird places, happy enough with the state of the day based on our mushroom haul, stoked on the bonus of the trails to come. Eventually, our climb turned flat and we rode along a ridge that looks like it’s seen its fair share of teenage parties, redneck waste disposal and…I dunno…murders? I wasn’t so sure about things, but then it turns out there’s actually something to this Sunshine Coast bicycle riding thing. Not too fast. Not too hard. Not too smooth. Not too worn in. We slapped and we slid and we hopped and we rode and we forgot about mushrooms for a while, until, again, we were bombarded by another trail lined with lobster mushrooms. No time! Keep riding.

We collected our mushrooms, rode the final section of trails, loaded up the truck and finished it all up with a quick beer at Tapworks, which is definitely a place you should check out if you’re on that side of the sound. The general mood was one of “I can’t believe we did all that today and why haven’t we done this sooner?”

And this is it for me. Riding bikes is great and I love doing it, but there’s many other things going on in life. But when you can smash two or three of those together, and turn it into some sort of hedonistic bike/mushroom/food/beer orgy of happiness? Well. Hopefully next year mushroom season is this good, and if it is, we’re probably going to need a couple of truckloads to haul the crew for Mushroom E-bike-a-palooza 2. Shit, even if it isn’t, we’re going to repeat this day. Maybe twice.

What to do with all of those mushrooms?

There’s nothing better than the first meal after a big mushroom hunt. Less exciting is the third or fourth meal, but that’s a good problem to have. For me, if I have a big batch of chanterelles, a risotto is at the top of my list. This recipe looks good, but it’s pretty easy to freestyle. You’re more likely to screw up the risotto than the mushrooms, so find a risotto recipe that works for you and figure out a way to add your chanterelles.

Pine mushrooms are a bit more complicated. They’re touted as a subtle Japanese delicacy, so I figured it would be best to treat them as such. I made a version of this recipe, making a nice dashi, cooking the rice in it and then steaming the mushrooms on top. I thought it was nice, but the rest of my household thought it was “weird”. They definitely are a bit of a different taste, and pine mushrooms might not become a staple of our kitchen, but the dashi infused rice might.

Uncle Dave’s Music Club

I’ve been grappling with many life decisions these days. Why am I like this? What’s wrong with you? Etc. one thing I’m still confused by is how much I hate answering questions about myself in social settings. Imagine how tremendous a skill this is during holiday party season.

Whenever I see Graham, he asks me what I’ve been listening to. I never have an answer. It’s like…you want to know right now? Without a link to a video? Why would I tell you this when it would form a perfectly good ending to an article instead?

So, here is my longish response to a question asked by Graham way back during our mushroom extravaganza. I’m cheating here a little bit, because at the time I wasn’t listening to this song. A few weeks ago I was driving home from a ride and it looked like death was coming for us all. As the hail pounded down and the light disappeared, this song came on. I pulled over, both out of safety and captivation. What was this beautiful noise? Where could I find more of it? It makes me so happy to hear such urgent sounds coming out of the youths.