A huge, black, slobbering dog took me for a walk through the woods yesterday. He loves the forest, and dashes this way and that, sniffing up one tree, marking another. As we neared home (my husband's parents' place), he bounded away and didn't return to find me. I was left alone under the trees.
I stopped to check out some bark that was peeling off onto the forest floor, when I spotted the strangest looking mushroom I had ever seen.
It was huge for one thing. The cap was almost as big as my fist and looked like a strange brown brain. The stem was thick and white with folds and wrinkles that looked a little too much like human skin not to be eerie.
I've got to admit, it looked seriously phallic.
At this point, I had absolutely no inclination to eat aforementioned phallic, brainy mushroom, so I left it where it was and returned to the house where people were gathering to celebrate the wedding anniversary of Grandma and Grandpa Reid. Everyone was sitting in the late afternoon sun in adirondack chairs out on the patio.
"You'll never guess what I found," I said.
But I was wrong, they did guess. They knew as soon as I described it to them, that I had found a morel. One of the most sought-after, prized fungi around.
"Go get it!" they said, eagerly.
So I did. I brought it back in a pail, and we chopped it up and fried it in enough sizzling butter to supply Lobsterfest for a week.
I chewed on the rubbery, butter soaked morel and contemplated. To me, the taste was certainly not worth all the fuss, but I think the real mystique and appeal of morels is in the finding of them. This is one kind of food you can't just go into the grocery store and buy at any time of the year. Morels must be hunted, stealthily, through leafy places in the glimmering wood.
No comments:
Post a Comment