Now, you’ve followed me through the forest, learned a bit about various species and their applications, and how they can be used to help, heal or create hallucinations. So, let’s go through how you can find and cook up a mushroom dish of your own.
The first thing to consider is getting a mushroom identification book. I use the National Audubon Society’s field guide to North American Mushrooms by Gary H Lincoff for preliminary investigations into mushrooms I find in the wild. I would only recommend it if you are willing to take the time to learn mushroom anatomy and dedicate yourself to identifying mushrooms. It isn’t the best resource for beginners due to its nebulous and complicated nature. Unfortunately, you need more than just pictures and descriptions to make sure the mushroom you want to eat is safe to do so. With more than 10,000 species in North America alone, there’s no book or website that can cover them all with full descriptions of their unique attributes and properties. Indeed, even some cataloged mushrooms still have no descriptions regarding what happens if you eat them. So, you have to be very smart about the mushrooms you eat. Especially dangerous are little brown mushrooms; often called LBMs, these small mushrooms are impossible to tell apart, and can have massive ranges of side effects. 
For example, the one on the left, the scaly psilocybe, is a potent hallucinogen, while the galerina marginata will cause liver damage, hypothermia, and death. Therefore, it’s much more smart to start with easy to identify mushrooms until you have a real idea of what you’re foraging for. One example of this is the morel mushroom, with its unmistakable brain like cap:
If you don’t really value your own health and safety, there are other ways to test if a mushroom is safe to eat. After being pretty certain that the mushroom you’ve foraged is an edible species, cut off a little section of the cap and eat it without anything else. If you have no side effects 48-72 hours after ingestion, try a little bit more. If you can eat the whole mushroom without side effects, it should be safe. Unfortunately, mushrooms like the death cap can be fatal in very small doses, so this method isn’t safe. But if you are very confident in the identity of your mushroom, and have done extensive testing not limited to collecting spore print samples, verifying it with an experienced forager and testing small parts of the mushroom, you can start cooking.
Generally, mushrooms have a faint, mushroomy taste with some earthy tones. Mush like lobster, they need to be cooked with aromatics and oils to give them a more complicated flavor profile. A recommended method of cooking that I have used is to chop up your mushrooms into small pieces, then to fry them in butter with salt, rosemary, and pepper. Served over orzo, with scallops or beef, or in a pasta dish, they bring mountains of complexity with their spongy texture and ability to hold in flavors.
