2021-22 Season

2021/2022 Season

2021-2022 MCMC Monthly Meeting Lineup

General Club meetings - All are welcome.
We’ll socialize and talk mushrooms. If anyone finds any mushrooms, please bring them for show and tell.

Meeting Date: Second Tuesday
September through May
Time: 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm
Venue: online via Zoom
(until county/CDC guidelines permit indoor meetings.)

September 14: FIRST MEETING OF THE SEASON
Meet and greet, and catch up. Talk about ideas and plans for upcoming meetings.

October 12:
Eugenia Bone is the co-author and creative force behind the Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook. She will be speaking about this fantastic project, and may touch a little bit on her fabulous book Mycophilia.
Presenter: Eugenia Bone
Meeting Recording

November 9:
William Padilla-Brown has been very involved in encouraging food production is areas where it's scarce and where injecting fungal propagation into the social dynamic could be a real boost. He has also been instrumental in developing cordyceps into a cultivable product.
Presenter: William Padilla-Brown
Meeting Recording

December 14:
Herbalist-Forager-Chef, Jess Starwood presents her brand new book, Mushroom Wanderland. In addition to taking us through the sections of the book, Jess talks about the process of writing the book, shooting photos and getting it published in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presenter: Jess Starwood
Meeting Recording

January 11:
The January meeting will feature Wendy So, who is a mushroom forager with world wide credentials. Wendy's presentation is called "A Tale of Two Continents" and will focus on the mushrooming traditions and cultures of Southwest China and South-central Africa.
Presenter: Wendy So
Meeting Recording

February 8:
This month, two club members, Billy Sprague and Elle Mathews, will be talking about how they have focussed on many aspects of foraging for fungi and other forest delights into their businesses and lifestyles. They both have similar skills, but have parlayed them into quite different aspects of their everyday lives and personal businesses.

Please join us for what will be an interesting evening of mushroom focussed information.

Presenters: Billy Sprague and Elle Mathews
Meeting Recording

March 8:
James will be talking about culinary applications for the most common mushrooms of the Mendocino Coast. He will be demonstrating some techniques and recipes for preparing and using both dried and fresh mushrooms. You may download the recipe of the dish he prepared - See Recipe, below.

Presenter: James Sant
Meeting Recording
Recipe: Wild Mushroom Ragout

April 19: LAST MEETING OF THE SEASON
This Tuesday April 19th will be our last meeting until next September.

We don't have a guest speaker for this meeting, but one of the things I'd like to do is get suggestions from the membership on who they'd like to see as presenters for the next season and what topics you'd like to see covered. There are lots of fascinating subjects being researched out there in Mycoworld and I will put a link to a timely and interesting subject at the end of this email. Please don't stay away just because we don't have a speaker. Your input and discussion is just as important and will help us keep the meetings engaging and meaningful.

We still need someone or a couple of someones to help us with our membership duties, specifically some very basic bookkeeping. We have a description of what is needed and I'll share that with anybody that would like to help us out. The "job" (not really a job per say) only requires a couple of hours per week in the busiest part of the season.

I want to thank all of our members for keeping our Club motivating and viable. It hasn't been easy, through this awful pandemic, but with your continued enthusiasm, I think we've had some of our best meetings ever. We are crossing our fingers that come September we will be able to gather in person, but I'd like to keep the Zoom connection going, so that folks who can't be here in the flesh, could still join us when we get together. It was a great mushroom season this year and I'm very hopeful that we'll have rain and a good year next season too!
So please join us Tuesday April 19th for our last meeting of the year.

- Tom Jelen
Meeting Recording

2021/22 Speakers

Eugenia Bone

William Padilla-Brown

EUGENIA BONE is a nature and food journalist, as well as an author and speaker, whose writing is primarily about the connections between food, sustainability and the natural sciences. Eugenia has written for many magazines and newspapers including Food & Wine Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of six books, the most recent of which is Microbia: A Journey into the Unseen World Around You. Eugenia has lectured widely in venues like the Denver Botanical Gardens, the New York Public Library, and the Stone Barns Center. She’s currently featured in Fantastic Fungi, a movie about the magical world of fungi and their power to heal, sustain and contribute to the regeneration of life on Earth.

Founder of MycoSymbiotics, WILLIAM PADILLA-BROWN is a MultiDisciplinary Citizen Scientist practicing social science, mycology, phycology, molecular biology, and additive manufacturing.

William holds Permaculture Design Certificates acquired through Susquehanna Permaculture and NGOZI, and a Certificate from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences for completing their Algal Culturing Techniques Course.

William wrote the first books in English on Cordyceps cultivation.

William regularly teaches k-12 classes around the United States, for universities including Cornell’s Small Farms Program, private clubs, and events, as well as offers private consultations.
In 2021 William’s research has been sponsored by MUDwtr, and affiliated with Mydecine, Oxford Nanopore, MiniPCR, ExtractCraft, and OmegaBiotek.

William and his work have been featured on Fantastic Fungi, VICE, Buzzfeed, The Verge, Outside Magazine, Civil Eats, Public Goods, The Book “One Earth” , and much more.

Jess Starwood

JESS STARWOOD, herbalist, forager and chef, creates an innovative yet traditional approach to herbal medicine, wild foods and connecting the community with our local natural environment. She was recognized as one of the most creative chefs in Ventura County by Edible Ojai & Ventura County magazine in December 2019 and has worked with Michelin-starred chefs in Los Angeles, CA to bring nutritious, wild foods to the table. Not only sharing a love for unique and unusual foods, Jess strives to help students cultivate an intimate, sustainable and connected relationship with the land.

Mushroom Wanderland, her first book, is a celebration of fungi—perfect for both beginner and longtime mushroom admirers.

Wendy So

Currently a resident of Mendocino County, WENDY SO was a newsletter editor and speaker coordinator for the Mycological Society of San Francisco. She has traveled with David Arora, chasing mushrooms from California to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, American Southwest, Europe, Asia and Africa. Now she spends her free time experimenting in the kitchen with underappreciated mushrooms.

She spoke to the club about mushroom hunting and eating traditions in two mushroom-loving regions: southwest China and south-central Africa, and contrasts those traditions with ours here in North America.

Billy Sprague

BILLY SPRAGUE is a local here in Fort Bragg, CA and member of the MCMC since it’s inception. Around that time Sprague became an avid mushroom hunter pooling expertise from our club's members, Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast book and seasoned hunting mentors. Sprague curated a world of fungi around him by infusing them into his art, diet and social practices—using mushroom illustrations from vintage mushroom books to create collage works, creating a mushroom foraging knife and brush combination that enhances the harvesting process and creating a forage friendly “Shroom Shack” for fellow mushroom and foraging enthusiasts who visit the Mendocino Coast area. Shroom Shack is used as a home base and place to share and trade foraging tips and current intel on what's happening in the surrounding forests.

He sells his fresh and dried mushrooms to locals who can’t get into the woods or don’t have the time to hunt them down, often swapping forage stories and recipes along the way. Sprague also leads forays focusing on edible, medicinal and dye mushrooms and proper harvest and woodland etiquette procedures.

Elle Matthews

Hi my name is ELLE MATTHEWS. I live on a small farm on a river in Northern California with my partner and son and our animals. I am a small farmer, and forager and make products from our forages and the food grown on our farm. I sell these products through my mushroom and wild food company MushLove as well as leading forays and events focused on mushrooms and other wild foods.

I am passionate about nature and helping my community and love connecting the two by inspiring people to become educated about and involved in the natural world around them.

I have another Mushroom Tasting, Identification Hike and Dye Workshop at the end of the month with Wilder Herbertson in Mendocino. Join us by contacting me directly on Facebook as Ellle Matthews or on Instagram as @elfirefly.

Please feel free to follow my accounts or friend me to keep updated on my finds, events and small batch product drops throughout the year.

James Sant

In 2010, James was very seriously injured and chose to avoid unnecessary surgeries and prescription drugs through studying a 100% plant food diet.

This choice dramatically expedited his healing process and paved the way to a passionate new career promoting the power of food as medicine.

He went on to become Lead Instructor and Culinary Director of Living Light Culinary Institute until 2020.

James is currently teaching healing through plant foods, recipe development, foraging, fermentation, chef training and health coaching to students from around the globe through his new academy in Mendocino, California: Plant Food Culinary Arts.