Polka Dots

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When I was an adolescent in my mother’s kitchen, eating ambrosia salad and pork steaks with gravy made from canned mushroom soup, I was surrounded by the latest pop design. We had just moved back to my hometown after living one year in a depressed town up north. I was about to start sixth grade, and my twelfth (or eleventh?) birthday was imminent. When Twiggy cut her hair short, my sister cut mine like hers.

We moved into the house across the street from where I had spent all my years before the move. The house was my dream house: big, old, oak trimmed, and where I’d played with my childhood friend Jimmie. But the kitchen was a disaster of rusted out white cabinets someone had decided were a good idea when they were shiny and new, the same time they slapped white aluminum siding on the outside. So my dad had the kitchen completely gutted and refurbished with wood cabinets and a pretty wood kitchen table for us who were left at home: Mom and Dad, my brother and me, and an array of foreign students mostly from Thailand.

I remember drawing mushrooms between meals at that kitchen table (along with Snoopy flying his bullet-dotted doghouse Sopwith Camel in battle against the evil Red Baron). Some of the mushrooms had polka dots, which I copied from orange, yellow and olive green placemats, napkins, canisters and glasses Mom had bought for the kitchen. I thought they were cute. I thought they were cartoon imaginings. I didn’t know until walking the farm eight years ago where our own magic mushrooms sprouted, that polka dot mushrooms are real. So yeah, you can assume correctly that I wasn’t ingesting anything psychedelic in the 1960s and 70s. I don't plan to grind these into powder any time soon, but sometimes I wonder what it would be like, after reading stuff like this at wiki:

Spiritual and well being

In 2006, the United States government funded a randomized and double-blinded study by Johns Hopkins University, which studied the spiritual effects of psilocybin in particular. That is, they did not use mushrooms specifically (in fact, each individual mushroom piece can vary wildly in psilocybin and psilocin content). The study involved 36 college-educated adults (average age of 46) who had never tried psilocybin nor had a history of drug use, and who had religious or spiritual interests. The participants were closely observed for eight-hour intervals in a laboratory while under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms.

One-third of the participants reported that the experience was the single most spiritually significant moment of their lives and more than two-thirds reported it was among the top five most spiritually significant experiences. Two months after the study, 79% of the participants reported increased well-being or satisfaction; friends, relatives, and associates confirmed this. They also reported anxiety and depression symptoms to be decreased or completely gone.

Despite highly controlled conditions to minimize adverse effects, 22% of subjects (8 of 36) had notable experiences of fear, some with paranoia. The authors, however, reported that all these instances were "readily managed with reassurance."

There are many psilocybin mushrooms on our walking path, 
more this year than ever. 
Maybe the heat and extra rain are good for them.

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morel alchemy

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Joy! There's gold in these here woods! At the end of April here on the farm we start hunting for until-now buried treasure: morel mushrooms. Although they look like it, they aren't brains, or Prometheus' liver, but they do grow again overnight, as big as the palm of your hand in a few hours. At the first silver of morning, we slip into jackets and farm shoes and out to the fallen apple tree, and to the woods by the pond, to comb the grass (and new poison ivy shoots if we're not careful) like Sherlock Holmes.

Morel mushroom cells don't reproduce. These fruits of the mycelium organism under the surface of the ground expand with water, which is why they appear after rain storms. They have the same number of cells when they're big Titan thumbs as they did when they were tinier than a baby's toenail and sprouted from mycelium legs underground.

These filigree toes magically dig up through the woodsy soil into the air where we pinch them from their lacy underground body - sort of like that eagle snatching poor Prometheus' liver, then carefully tuck them into deep pockets, empty them onto the kitchen table, bugs and all, soak them in salt water, throw out the bugs, toss the preciousness in flour, and sauté until the filigree turns to gold.

Morel season is just a couple of weeks, and I can't bear to add them to any other food and lose a single sliver of their identity. Sautéed in butter (or in our case, Earth Balance soy margarine) is the only way we eat them.

And after each small plate of delectableness, when I've absorbed the earthiness into my body through my tongue and blissed-out mouth, I swear I never need to eat anything, ever again.

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mushrooms, mycelium & swine flu

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While trees are popping chartreuse leaves at the end of April, after a couple of rainy days and warm nights, we slide our farm clogs on and head into the two little woods behind us to scour the ground for morel mushrooms.



I have to wear my reading glasses so the dried leaves and mushrooms don't blur into one another. With clear vision, I can see how hideously brain-like they look. To one who detests mushrooms - disgusting! To one who adores them - tantalizing!

Don found these clusters of morels hidden beneath brush Friday;
I had gone over the same spot that morning and missed them.

We have never had the luck of some who fill bags and bags with morels. We know a lady who refuses to eat them but will hunt and pick for hours in her woods to harvest them, then give them away with a smile. The most we've found any given year is around 70. Don found the season's first six last week - the ones in the top photo, the biggest being around 2". Then Friday he found the clusters in the photo above.

The season lasts about two weeks, and there is much lore on where to find them (at the foot of an old apple tree, or around fallen elms among them) and how to pick them and not pick them. The clumps of morels Don found Friday were under the jagged edge of the old fallen apple tree. When we picked them, we broke them off and left the base in the ground so they'll continue to propagate.

You can tell real morels from poisonous imposters by their hollowness.

We soak morels in salty water to float out dirt and bugs, then dip them in milk, dredge in flour, and sauté in a little mixture of oil and butter (oil keeps the butter from burning), tossing on some salt and pepper. They are delicious and rival truffles, which sell for hundreds of dollars a pound. (Part of the problem with truffles is that being so expensive, you only get thrifty bits of them in a dish concocted by a clever chef who spreads them out, otherwise who could afford to eat them? And in such small samples, you don't get to really experience their flavor and texture.)

Did you know there are estimated to be one to two million species of fungi? Only about 150,000 of those form mushrooms. Of those, I don't know how many thousands are edible. And of those, only a fraction are cultivated and sold for consumption.

Like humans, fungi "breathe" oxygen and emit carbon dioxide. In fact animals, including humans of course, are closer to fungi in makeup than to plants, protozoa or bacteria.

Beneath these treasures of the ground is a lacy web of mycelium, the root system of fungi. These webs of fibers lie beneath forests and fields all over the planet, and some of them stretch for miles. The largest known living organism in the world is a fungus called honey mushroom, discovered in Oregon in 2000. It's 2,200 acres, that's 3.5 miles across - about 1,665 football fields, yet only one cell wall thick.

In an interview in The Sun magazine, Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, and at fungi.com, explains from 30 years of research how mycelia are essential to the survival of our planet.

Stamets explains that mycelia quite naturally clean up pollutants in the soil. They also feed plants. And what is truly remarkable - when coupled with plants, they make them more resistant to heat and erosion. Grasses laced with mycelia are heat resistant up to 160 degrees fahrenheit, whereas without the fungus, they would wither above 120 degrees.

Stamets suggests we should couple mycelia with corn and other crops to make them "naturally" drought resistant, which sounds better than genetically modifying crops, but I wonder. If the fungi and plants aren't naturally coupled, are we messing with something that shouldn't be messed with? Maybe Stamets and other scientists have an answer.



I leave you with an exciting 18-minute YouTube video of Paul Stamets' TED talk almost exactly one year ago on May 8, 2008: 6 Ways Mushrooms can save the world. It is extraordinary and well worth your time to hear about the network of mycelia in the earth beneath you, and how these organisms benefit us, could help clean up our planet and even provide eco-fuel. There is a segment about their use against flu viruses, and I am very curious to find anything on the Internet connecting fungi with the current Swine H1N1 flu outbreak, since he mentions this strain specifically in the video. You'll get the feeling from his rapid speech that he is trying to tell as much as he possibly can about his favorite subject in too short a time.

quail eggs & morels

It seems like Don's quail were just hatched in his classroom. And they are so grown up now. A week ago this one, above, was a little over 4 weeks old.

Saturday, when they were five weeks and three days old, one - or maybe two - laid their first eggs! All we know for sure is that there were two eggs in the brooder. None of the birds 'fessed up. Don is trying to figure out which are male and which female. (Sharon?) We can discern at least one rooster: he crows incessantly. Maybe you already read about this monumental event over at Don's blog (or in your newspaper).

It takes about four quail eggs to equal the size of one large chicken egg. They are fairly common on sushi menus (cute on top of the salmon eggs) and you'll see them on fancy menus in other restaurants too. I found a recipe for Quail Eggs with Toasted Sesame Salt we're going to try.



Saturday I threw the first morel mushrooms of the season (!) into a pan, and Don cut open the quail eggs with a knife (they're too fragile to crack on the side of a bowl) and slid them in too. Wow, did they ever bubble up!




You can see the top egg was double yoked. But even if it hadn't been, a quail egg yoke is higher in ratio to the white than in chicken eggs. But they're little, so we're not too worried about cholestrol. (I suppose if we ate their equivalent to chicken eggs, like 4-6 of them, we'd need to watch it. BUT, Don read that eggs from free range hens have 1/3 less cholestrol than grocery store eggs; maybe that is also true of quail eggs. The math is starting to hurt my head.)

We each had three morel mushrooms and one quail egg (let's see, it took five bites each - two for each egg) as an appetizer before eating a bowl of Don's venison chili. We drank a toast of 'three-buck-Chuck' to our egg-layin' quail and our finger-nail sized morels and gobbled them up. The eggs were refined, the mushrooms fresh and tasty, having been soaked in salt water, then milk, then dredged in flour, before salting and peppering them and sauteeing in butter and oil (oil helps keep the butter from burning).

And below, in the fridge, is the lone egg from Sunday, waiting for more mates in the carton Don's quail eggs came in before they hatched.

Don broke this latest quail egg open this evening (after we moved the chickens into the chicken coop) and wasted it because it looked deformed, and he didn't think we should eat it. It was a double yoked model. Don said first eggs that are laid can be strange.

We didn't know the insides were blue.

Hyperreality II

More autumn orange

Click on photos to see larger views.

Yesterday while mowing Don came across this mushroom in the path. He hopped off his John Deere and ran to the house to get me.

It's so unreal looking we half expected a gnome to jump out any minute. I don't know what this type of mushroom is called. Anyone know? Update from Mei Shile: The mushroom is an 'Amanita Muscaria'. The English common name is a 'fly agaric'. It's a psychedelic mushroom. So, no wonder there were lots of illustrations of these in the '60s and '70s. If you click on 'Amanita Muscaria' above, you can read the wiki article about this mushroom. One botanist even speculates that these mushrooms are the foundation (literally and figuratively?) of Santa Claus!


Back under the spruce tree you can see more of them.

Here's a big "duh." I didn't realize yesterday that the mushroom in the path (first three photos) and these under the tree were the same type. These under the tree had opened, and the ball-like one in the path hadn't opened yet.


Here's the same mushroom as the top three photos, taken today, opened up. That's Don's foot (not a gnome's) for size comparison. He wears size 11 American (that's 10.5 English, 45 European, 29 Japanese :-D).

Morel mushrooms: Hunt, hunt, pick

Morel mushrooms are fairly new to me. I never ate them or recall hearing about them until well into adulthood.

Just google “morel mushrooms” and you’ll see what a fanatical world this is. In value and popularity, they are akin to the beloved French truffle.

Well, not quite. I’ve seen morel mushrooms for sale at $36-66 per pound. French truffles can go for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per pound.

I have had French truffles IN things, like the liver paté with truffles running through the middle we received for a gift last year. Yum. I’ll bet that cost a bit. Whatever the comparison, all I know is I LOVE them both, and morel mushrooms are here in Michigan. So I’ll “make do” with morels.

Our first April on the farm (2004) Don found a handful of morels near the pond in the back property. I found none.

Our second April here (2005) Don found another "handful" in the side yard under some trees, but each mushroom was almost as big as my hand! Again, I found none.

Both years Don soaked them in salted water, dried them off, then ASAP (within a day or two) floured and sautéd them in butter with lots of salt and pepper. A festival for the taste buds! (Sorry, Amy, I know you don’t like mushrooms! Bummer!) Finding only a few on our property and not wanting to pay $45/lb., we really savored this treat. These were my first morels to eat!

Morels soaking in salted water for a few minutes to remove dirt and critters

This week, the time they start popping up in Southern Michigan, we began the morel hunt on our 5 acres. No luck for several days though we looked in several areas. Then last evening, after a very cool night (28F), we went out to look, not really expecting anything since the best conditions are for night temps above 40F. So imagine my delight when I stepped on a patch of them before noticing them! (No worries, these are tough little guys that don't smush easily like some mushrooms.) Under the big old apple tree in the woods, my first morel find!

They look like tiny canteloupe

I would compare the feeling of ecstasy to that at the birth of my children. I ran to the house to a) get a grocery bag for the hundreds we would find (we actually found 47), and b) set “American Idol” to “record” so we could hunt and pick morels without missing who was going to be booted this week. (We picked Pickler, and we were right.)

I will be a bit late getting home this evening, and needless to say, I have asked Don very politely not to go out hunting until I get home. I have a feeling he will scout and maybe mark patches if he finds them. But I KNOW he won’t pick any until I get there.

Hunting and finding are almost as good as eating, and they round out the experience. What a glorious and spontaneous gift from Mother Earth.

We’ll do the eating this evening after the hunt. We did not eat yesterday’s find last night since we'd already eaten supper when we began our hunt, so we know we at least have 47 morels to eat for supper. And maybe nothing else, except a glass of cabernet sauvignon. Priceless.

The largest morel from yesterday was about 2 inches. The smallest less than an inch.