I went mushroom hunting. It was fancy mushroom hunting at a winery on top of a hill, and afterwards a chef made us a 3-course meal featuring local mushrooms.
It has been a hot, dry spring, so there weren’t many mushrooms to be found. I found this one. It was covered in tiny spiders. We didn’t try to eat it.
I learned a lot about mushrooms. I learned, for example, about candy cap mushrooms, which only grow in Northern California. They made us ice cream made out of this candy cap mushroom. It had a slightly spicy maple syrup flavor that stayed in my mouth for hours afterwards. I didn’t know a mushroom could have a flavor like that.
Mushroom season is over now, even though there are some growing in my yard. In the fall, I’m going to go hunting again.
A thing that amazes me: there are millions of mushrooms that have not been identified. No one has bothered to figure out what they are and what they are capable of.
We think we know how the universe formed and what the past was like and how we got here. The truth is, we don’t even know all the mushrooms yet.
Side note: two dogs lying on the sidewalk this way. Oh dogs…