Mushrooms are as weird as anything else in the world. They thrive in the craziest locations and live in outlandish conditions. A friend of mine told me his best spot for hunting and harvesting shaggy mane mushrooms was the old garbage dump in East Helena, Montana.
Morel
mushrooms are another case in point.
They flourish like nobody’s business in areas devastated by wildfires. In our region of the Rockies, mushroom pickers
swarm the charred landscapes during the first two spring seasons following fires. On a good day, an ambitious mushroom hunter
can fill grocery bags with the highly regarded fungus in the fire blackened backwoods.
And, of course,
morels will occasionally pop up in random and unexpected places. Last
week, while mowing the smallish patch of grass I tend at my lakefront, I ran
across four smallish morels. Desiree had
never seen a morel. We picked them and
she later sautéed them in butter and ate them.
Yesterday we
found two more four-inch-tall morels near the same spot in my lawn. “I want those,” Desiree announced. “I want to eat them.”
I managed a
photograph of the morels before they were whisked off to the frying pan.
Our Morel
Mushrooms
—Mitchell Hegman
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