Adam's mushroom find (see kriipseldus.blogspot.com) prompted me to take a walk in the woods after I got home today. I love the woods in the fall/winter - it's more inviting - everything opens up, there are hardly any spider webs, no bugs... you can walk in peace, see far and breathe the crisp air... well, today the air was hardly crisp. We're having another warm spell. SO. Look what I found! Lions Mane - Hericium erinaceus by it's Latin name.
I've never been lucky to find one of those before!This one looks slightly bit old, or maybe just soggy from all the crazy rain we had last night.
Anyways - since we're already going to have a mushroom orgy tonight I've got my mind set to sauteing this baby up with some butter and onions for the first tasting. I made a mental note about it's whereabouts in the woods, so during this winter there will be more excursions into the wilderness - to harness the power of 'mother earth'.
As a kid we gleaned the woods every fall for wild mushrooms - mmmh, -can still recall the different tastes of different types of shrooms... anyways, since I don't roam the woods quite as frequently as I did in childhood, I'd forgotten, how sometimes the woods are friendly, eager to offer the goods... but more often you need to earn it's trust. It takes at least 30 minutes of slow quiet walking, pausing often to look, hear and breathe, before you start SEEING. And sometimes nothing happens. You come out as blind as you walked in.
Well, this time I had just decided to stop looking, and walk back to the house, when I noticed something small glowing on a dead wood... that's right. Oyster mushroom. A small cluster of shrooms that must have just popped out the log. And down on the forest floor on a different log there were some light gray ones- probably a different strand... Picked them all. Yep. Took these pix with my I-phone. Yep. looked at the compass on my I-phone to remember the direction of the gold mine. Yep. Did I tell you I thought that thing (I-phone) was a stupid fad and it took Adam at least 2 years to convince me to give up my stone age bare bones Nokia and replace it with this "small-world-in-the-palm-of-your- hand" thingie? I was afraid it would overwhelm me and take over my world... I dont "LOVE" mine as some people seem to. But I do find it to be a convenient tool that helps minimize the amount of gadgets I used to haul around (phone, watch, camera, battery recharger, different cables for everything jada jada jada)
Allright. Got off the topic here. Oh, the beauty of exploring the wilderness with the help of modern gadgets... ("yes I love technology... but not as much as you - you see... but still I love technology" - to you, the Napoleon Dynamite fans out there)
After picking those pearls of mushrooms I thought myself lucky and humbly decided it was enough, I was not gonna push it any more (Adam had already picked a mega -load at I'm-not- telling-you-where).
But whaddayaknow. Looking back to where I had come from - was that beauty!
