The protagonist of Melany Kahn’s recently published picture book, Mason Goes Mushrooming, is modeled on Kahn’s son Mason when he was about 8 years old. With his dog, the boy heads out through illustrator Ellen Korbonski’s sweet seasonal scenes to find morels under the apple blossoms, a circle of bright yellow chanterelles after a July rain and distinctive black trumpet mushrooms hidden under crisp fall leaves. Notably missing from these adventures is supervision, until Mason’s parents help cook the mushrooms in simple recipes included in the book. While the first page of the tome clearly instructs readers not to eat any mushroom until it is identified by a knowledgeable adult, Kahn’s message is that youngsters can successfully forage fungi if they master some basic information. Kahn, 58, grew up in West Brattleboro with artist parents, Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn, who introduced her to mushrooming at a very early age. She and her husband, Bo Foard, a Brattleboro restaurant co-owner, still own her family’s farmhouse and also have a home in West Chesterfield, N.H. Kahn’s résumé includes divorce mediation and teaching film, along with more than two decades of instructing kids and adults about foraging through schools, mushroom clubs and nature centers. Over the years, she searched for mushrooming storybooks to share but, she said, “there just weren’t any that made mushroom hunting seem OK.” Kahn resolved to remedy that. Kahn talked with Seven Days about “carshrooming,” how to build foraging confidence and why even winter can be a productive time for mushroom lovers. SEVEN DAYS: Did you really start mushrooming at the age of 4? MELANY KAHN: Foraging is a great example of an oral tradition in most countries. That’s how it’s usually passed on, and my parents were no exception. My dad spent a summer in the 1950s in Martha’s Vineyard and on Cape Cod living in a dune shack and being a bohemian artist. He got introduced to mushrooming by a fellow out there. My mother was very interested in the science of mushrooms. [My dad] liked to forage for anything, whether it was digging for steamers at the beach or finding wild ramps. He loved this idea of getting your food from your land. We had an old Datsun, and my dad used to open the hatchback, and me and my sister would sit on the back with our feet dangling. I remember seeing…