30. pick wild mushrooms

in case you missed my haiku...

i love mushrooms and so i was very excited to have the opportunity to hunt them in the wild.  we went on a couple of expeditions and we were lucky enough to find lion's mane, matsutakes, and chanterelles.  they all tasted amazing!  and lion's mane is not only good to eat but is also supposedly good for your brain?!  in China they used to be reserved solely for the emperors.  all i know for sure is that it is one of my new favorites.  matsutakes are very hard to find and so they are highly prized (Japanese pay a lot for them!)  they have a very distinct spicy smell, almost like cinnamon.  these too are delicious.  chanterelles are another mushroom that command a high price.  they are fantastic sauteed in butter and served over a nice steak.

Saraya absolutely loved looking around in the wet woods!  we found all kinds of fungi but you can't be too careful because there are a lot of deadly look-alikes so we only stuck to ones we could definitely identify.  it was fun looking up some of the unknown ones in Mushrooms Demystified.  David Arora is a pretty entertaining mushroom expert.

it was also fun taking pics of non-fungi while we traipsed through the forest.  this is our friends' son Ezekiel.  he was a helpful mushroom hunter.

these little truffle hunters were helpful too...

isn't this so pretty?