Local Mushrooms
I heard a car door slam the other day and looked out the window to see an unfamiliar pickup truck in our driveway. I stepped out onto the back porch and saw a man crouched under the big oak tree at the edge of our yard, white plastic bag in hand.
“Hello?” I said.
“Oh, hi,” he said. “I’m just here to collect these mushrooms. I heard you were going to be bringing some topsoil in today, so I wanted to save these before they were buried.”
I walked over to where he was crouched, and there were several large clusters of brown mushrooms fanning out of the ground—some of them larger than a head of lettuce.
“They’re Hen-of-the-Woods,” the man told me. “I sell them to the local gourmet restaurants, and they pay me well for them. I call them my ‘mushroom dollars’. You should try some!”
He handed me one of the mushroom clusters, then gave me his business card, which said, “Master Gardener” underneath his name.
I brought the mushroom cluster inside and washed it off, then looked it up on Wikipedia to make sure we weren’t going to poison ourselves. Everything checked out.
Evie and Emma checked out this alien thing that had been sitting near the kitchen sink drying off.
Apparently Hen-of-the-Woods is also known as maitake, and is prized in Japanese cooking, and amongst gourmands. I decided to sauté them in some olive oil with a bit of Kosher salt.
They were fantastic. Unfortunately for the mushroom collector, he’s created some rabid new fans of the maitake/Hen-of-the-Woods, so he’ll have to cross us off the collection list next year. At the very least we may owe him a dinner at our place (with maitake, of course) for showing us that those bizarre-looking brown clusters growing under the tree were not only edible, but delicious. If I were starving in a forest (or our back yard), that would probably have been one of the very last things I would have tried.
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October 7th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
sounds too good to be true, are you still alive?
October 7th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Eh, mostly. The hallucinations have stopped, and we’ve discovered our spirit animals.
October 7th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I look forward to the video of Evie hippie-dancing to “Uncle John’s Band.”
October 7th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I have to admit, even after eating (and enjoying) one of these for dinner, I was more than a little suspicious of the other cluster sitting in our fridge the next day.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
glad they were tasty.. but what a strange series of events! of course, my first reaction was to wonder why he thought it was ok to take the mushrooms after he openly admitted that he made money off of them by selling them….
October 8th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Yeah, he kinda had this attitude as if I’d come across him in a public park—not a hint of feeling that he should’ve asked us or anything, but excited for me to try them at the same time. I’d bet that most people just let them rot (or in our case, get covered by a delivery of dirt–the excavator tipped him off), so he just sees himself as saving what would otherwise go unused. But now our Hens-of-the-Wood are spoken for.
October 9th, 2009 at 12:54 am
I think you are very brave……and obviously ok
You could always sell to him what you don’t eat/want.
October 9th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Yes, I can see it now when Evie is 7 years old — instead of a lemonade stand, she will be running her own high-end mushroom stand!
October 28th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I ate some mushrooms in the Adelaide Hills in 1969. Shortly afterwards a kangaroo told me to dedicate my life to the Great Zorgon. Of course I ignored him and spent the rest of the day folding air. Funny that.