My grandmother, Betsy, used to harvest wild mushrooms and serve them for dinner with a reassuring, “I’m pretty sure these are all right.”

An avid botanist, and a former biology teacher, Betsy knew which fungi were friendly and which were fatal, so my mother and her three brothers lived to enjoy many varieties of wild mushrooms.

Whether you’re a seasoned scavenger or a curious eater, you can enjoy the wild and domestic mushrooms grown, harvested, or collected by local farmers and foragers.

Did you know?

• Different varieties of mushrooms are available almost all year round. Check out the wild mushroom calendar at http://www.wild-harvest.com/pages/wcal.htm.
• Black truffles only grow on the roots of the truffle oak. Since most of the mushrooms, like the roots, grew underground special dogs had to be trained to hunt for them.

Find it!

• There are six northwest Michigan farms that sell mushrooms. To find them, go to www.localdifference.org, click the “search now” button in the “Find a Farm” box, and type in mushrooms. You can also search by county.

Try it!

• Sautéed in butter or olive oil with garlic.
• In an omelet.
• On a pizza.
• In a stir-fry with other seasonal vegetables. Here are a few fresh ideas:
• Fresh peas in the pod with green onions for early summer.
• Matchstick carrots and green and yellow beans for mid summer.
• Eggplants and sesame seeds for mid-to-late summer. Just slice the eggplant into half moons, salt it and let it sit for 15-30 minutes, and rinse it thoroughly. Then brush it with oil and roll it in a few tablespoons of sesame seeds before stirfrying the eggplants and mushrooms together.)
• Use a few drops of sesame oil, a couple tablespoons of canola or peanut oil, a few tablespoons of soy sauce, a tablespoon of fresh minced ginger and a few cloves of garlic for seasoning with any of these stirfrys.
• Stuffed mushrooms make delicious hors-d’oeuvres. Wash the mushrooms, remove the mushroom stems, make a filling (I’ve included a few suggestions below), spoon the filling into the mushroom caps, and bake the mushrooms at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until the mushrooms are done. Use the extra filling as a dip for crackers, chips, pita bread, or raw vegetables.

Filling ideas:

• Sauté a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic in olive oil. In a separate pan, toast 1/3 cup of pine nuts over medium heat (this only takes a few minutes). Chop up the mushroom stems and add them to the onions. Once the mushroom stems look tender, add a few handfuls of spinach or argula and a few tablespoons of grated Gruyère cheese to the onions and cook until the spinach turns bright green. Mix in the pine nuts and ¾ cups of ricotta cheese and stuff the mushrooms!
•  Sauté onions and garlic together, add a few capers and some chopped sundried tomatoes, and stuff.
• This fall, try sautéed mushrooms over spaghetti squash. Boil the whole spaghetti squash for 20-30 minutes while you chop up lots of garlic, onions and mushrooms. Sauté the garlic and onions together, then add the mushrooms and sauté them for a few minutes. When the squash is cooked (it should be easy to pierce the skin with your fingernail), cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, scrape out the flesh with a fork (the flesh will turn into “spaghetti”), and add a little butter. Top it off with the mushrooms and enjoy.