At the time I had decided, for a couple of reasons, not to do a post about the dinner in they had appeared last week, but these locally-foraged wild mushrooms are so gorgeous that I’ve decided I had to at least publish an image of them, as they looked in the Greenmarket before I brought half a pound of them home with me.

They’re called ‘pheasant back’ [Lat. cerioporus squamosus], but they’re also known as ‘dryad’s saddle or ‘hawk’s wing’, and all of these names seem appropriate.  Until I saw them on a table at the Windfall Farms stand in the Union Square Greenmarket on Wednesday I had never heard of them. While there I also snapped this picture of another wild mushroom, one which I didn’t buy that day, but which I’d cooked before, the ‘wine cap’ [Lat. stropharia rugosoannulata], a name that seems equally as right as that of its neighbor on the table.