grand outdoors
Porcini mushrooms
YOUR GUIDE TO MUSHROOM FORAGING Words by Kimberly Nicoletti | Photos courtesy of Kristen Blizzard
T
56
he biggest “threat” of getting into mushroom
need to know to make mushrooming a lifestyle
foraging may not be poisonous species; the
choice, from finding and storing to preserving
most common risk that seems to come with
and preparing common and unusual species,”
foraging involves its addictive nature.
according to the book description.
Kristen and Trent Blizzard began foraging
“This obsession has totally taken root, and it
for mushrooms in Eagle County about 10 years
grows,” Kristen Blizzard believes. “It feels like, in
ago, and these days, their “addiction” has taken
a way, some sort of DNA switch flips on, igniting
them into the forests of Wisconsin and the Pacific
an ancestral hunter-gatherer gene. Part of it is
Northwest. They even wrote a book, published
about the hunt, and part of it is the thrill of being
in 2020, titled Wild Mushrooms: A Cookbook and
outside and seeing the connectedness in nature,
Foraging Guide, which provides “everything you
and all of it turns into this passion. This long-lost
