Girls just want to have fungi

Anybody out there know what a mycophagist is?

Nor did I until this weekend, but apparently I am one.

According to dictionary.com, a mycophagist is "an epicure whose interest is mushrooms." (I had to look up epicure as well - "a person dedicated to sensual enjoyment")

Last summer, my uncle's girlfriend Heidi, who previously lived with hippies in Oregon (thank God for hippies), discovered that our family's property in Northern Colorado has a propensity for growing wild mushrooms.

Excuse me, what I really mean to say is that our property produces an absolute shit ton of mushrooms.

We can go mushroom hunting for an hour and often return with somewhere around fifteen pounds of edible fungi.

Eating wild mushrooms is a tricky business. There are all sorts of kinds that will mess you up and even kill you. Luckily Heidi knows a couple tricks for identifying the good ones and we also found this gem in our house:



Though we leave our trombones at home, we have found and identified about four types that are edible, delicious, and rampant on our property: Aspen boletes, oysters, giant puffballs and Meadow mushrooms. The title of this post is also a tasty morsel from the book.



We haven't found any puffballs quite as big as the one pictured above (nor can any of us grow such a killer stache), but we have found several slightly larger than a volleyball, and plenty about the size of your average cantaloupe.

For so many years we never knew we were sitting on such a gold mine. Now we can't wait for each summer to run peeking around the base of trees for the orange and red caps of the boletes and always have our eyes peeled for anything round and white popping up out of the trees.

It's like an adult version of a scavenger hunt with an added bonus of a tasty appetizer when you get home. It's perfect for me - I get to see exactly where my food is coming from and I get to feel like a kid again.

Tomehto Tomahto

We live in a townhouse. It's a great size for us, the rent is shockingly low for Boulder, and our landlords are incredible.

But we don't have a yard.

Well, kind of, but it's not ours. There is no fence, and the HOA makes all sorts of rules about it.

While it's nice not to feel so entrenched against a siege by our neighbors (besides, what is a 6 ft. wooden fence really going to do against a trebuchet, flaming arrows, and a battering ram? I intend to find out if I continue to have the misfortune of living in the suburbs for much longer), this lack of yard has two major downsides:

1. No dog.
2. No garden.

As noted in a previous post, we are combating (2) by potting plants on our back porch. Still working on (1).

In our makeshift, back porch Eden, we have four tomato plants (2 Patios and 2 Yellow Taxis), three pots of basil, two pots of oregano, one pot of thyme, sage and some failed cilantro (damn), a pot of chives, and a hanging basket of flowers mostly obtained from the Boulder Farmers' Market.

It doesn't look like much, but the herbs are incredible. I love smelling them as I water them, and it's even better to pick a bunch and crush them up. We've spiced up marinades, pasta sauces, potatoes, pizza dough, and bread with them. Every time we use them brings big smiles and always makes the meal.

AND, we've started getting our first tomatoes, much to the chagrin of both my grandpas and my parents. Granted, we cheated and got our tomato plants from the market where they were started in a greenhouse months ago, but I still plan to rub it in as long as their plants are running dry.

I really can't stand grocery store or restaurant tomatoes. It's hard to imagine how the farm industry could take such a deliciously flavorful fruit and turn it into a tasteless, pinkish mush. I haven't even gotten to make anything with ours because I've been eating them like apples. Actually more like outrageously juicy plums. They are that good.

Ironically enough, tasting good is not how a tomato qualifies for the produce section at the grocery store. Perfectly good tomatoes, and all other kinds of produce, never make it to the consumer because of the way they look. Again, this stems (haha) from the vast disconnect between us and our food. Since we never see the food we eat on the plant, all we have to base our selection off is what we see at the store, and we logically choose the tomatoes that look the best.

But take a trip to a local farm (or even my back porch), and you'll find that not every tomato is perfectly round without any blemishes on the skin. But if you're brave enough to take a bite, you'll also find they taste a helluva lot better than those bland, gelatinous excuses for flavor from aisle 6.

Sorry for the rant. I promise I'm done. I need to go water my tomatoes.