I'll have to refer this question to Don or Vince on the yahoo group. Don is a member of the yahoo group and moitors it regularly, everyone should check it out.

Sylvia,

I have picked the Amanita in both the rounded cap and flat cap stages. I dry them in the oven on low setting with the oven door open until they are crispy dry to the touch.

You will find that everybody has a slightly (sometimes significant) difference of opinion over these things. However, this is the approach that I take and it works for me.

I recently ordered some educational material on this from a husband and wife couple that calls themselves the Red Angels. Thier web site is called Somashamans.com. They have put together a 300 page book and a 1 1/2 hr DVD. They provide a wealth of information based on several decades of personal experience with Amanita Muscaria. The act of harvesting that they describe involves a very subjective form of intuition that does not lend itself easily to a scientific interpretation. My understanding is that you are looking for mature specimens that are uplifting thier caps as if to say that they are ready to be picked. However, this seems to be a generallity and not strictly a rule. To the authors, these mushrooms are seen as individual spirits, each with thier own personality. One uses intuition, or in other words, a form of Shamanic sensing to determine which mushrooms are ready and when.

As for preparation, a less subjective *tried and true* method is able to be provided by the authors. They adamantly state over and over throughout the book that fresh is a wonderful way to take the mushroom. We are told by the authors to never, never put them in an oven, even on low temp with the door open. Instead they should be dried over indirect radiant heat. Stringing them up like popcorn on a string several feet from a fire place or a space heater should work nicely. Or laying them gently in the branches of a pine tree all afternoon on a warm sunny day is supposed to work well also. Another method is to bring *only fresh* mushrooms to a very light simmer in water (enough for them to float in) for exactly 20 magical minutes as they say. Then strain off the liquid, let it cool, and it's ready to be consumed, or frozen to be stored until a later date. They make no mention of the mushroom material that is strained off. Supposedly it is discarded. Dried mushrooms are never prepared this way since they claim that too much of the spirit of the mushroom is lost. Instead they either eat them as they are, or they place them in a blender in enough cool distilled water to cover them and let them sit for 20 min, then add in your preference of some type of fruit juice, or maybe ice cream etc. and blend it up into a tasty drink.

They are very much agains vendor shrooms since they claim that the proper care may not have been taken in which mushooms to pick and when, and they also suggest that poisonous variety could get mixed in by accident somehow. I can see thier point. With a variety as potentially dangerous as the Amanita family it would be wise to learn how to find, identify, and hand pick what you will be taking instead of letting someone that you have never met do it for you. But with Teeter's method, maybe that won't be so much of a concern any more?!?

Again, I highly recommend the Secrets of Soma DVD and the Soma 101 book by the Red Angels. They really have the experience under thier belts. You are taken on an amazing jouney with them over the course of several years across the West coast in thier never ending search for thier loving sacrament and along the way you learn everything you need to know.