Last Sunday I went to Fungus Fest held by the New Jersey Mycological Association:
http://njmyco.org The exhibition was held at the sprawling Frelinghuysen Arboretum in North Jersey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frelinghuysen_Arboretum.
It was a very enlightening presentation with lots of vendors, mushroom walks, classes, cooking demonstrations, etc.. The Frelinghuysen Arboretum was beautiful and would have been worth the trip by itself. My friends and I ended the day with a long hike around the grounds.
I went there with the hope that afterward I'd be able to safely identify at least a few edible varieties of mushroom that don't have a deadly look alike. Nothing like that happened... instead I learned exactly how daunting a task mushroom, lichen, and morel identifidation is. There are at least twenty different criteria to identify a species and just about all mushrooms have poisonous look alikes. Anyone who takes to the woods looking for edible fungi after one seminar is either insane, stupid, or suicidal.
We sampled mushroom curry, a mushroom/potato/cheese dish, and mushroom cookies. I bought some Black Trumpet Mushrooms, Hedgehog Mushrooms, and Lobster Mushrooms, mostly because I'd never seen them before. They are all excellent and the Lobster Mushrooms actually taste like lobster... for real.
Anyway, it was a fascinating trip that I'm glad we took.