“...with Sauce of Wild Mushrooms” - a guest post by Charlie

 

I have a complicated relationship with mushrooms.

I find them beautiful in nature - hugging trees, popping up out of the damp earth obscured by leaves, branches, and detritus - but ask me to eat one and my general response is something like “You know, they can kill and eat you from the inside!” I thought Suvir and I should take a Mushroom Foraging Class and go for long walks in the forest to harvest our local mushrooms, a romance for sure and a stretch of the imagination to think that my charming better half was about to walk solo with me in ANY forest! We took the class anyway, taught by Sue VanHook (wife of one of our favorite Plein-air artists George VanHook) and picked up a book on the subject...the walks, as I suspected, never came to be. But the snippet that stuck with me from that night only added to, and solidified, my general dislike of the taste, texture, and danger of mushrooms - be careful what you pick it is sometimes hard to tell the edible from the inedible, and there are species that can cause sickness and even death.

‘Nuf said, no mushrooms for me.