This morning, I took Belle over to my parents' for her weekly exercise and my weekly notification to my parents that I'm not yet deceased. After a quick breakfast of biscuits and gravy, my dad and I jumped on the gator and headed into the woods to hunt the elusive morel mushroom.
Rather than tout the morel's tasty virtues, I'll merely say that the little bastards are delicious when pan fried in an egg batter.
The hunt did not start well. I'd say for the first 33% of the expedition, we merely stumbled around the woods, acquired ticks, and sweated. Is it really going to hit 90 today? Wasn't it snowing two weeks ago? I did manage to take an interesting frog picture so the first part of he expedition wasn't a total loss.
I was thinking about abandoning the hunt and taking pictures of insects instead, like the bee that kept landing on my arm, when my dad finally found one. I promptly stomped through the woods to where he was standing and found another. Then we returned to the tedium for ten minutes before finding two more.
"How many do we have to find before Mom will cook them?" I asked.
"A lot more than this," Dad said. "Let's try another spot."
At the next spot, the hunt followed a similar pattern. Dad would find one, I would find one nearby, and then ten more minutes of tedium until the cycle repeated. We agreed that another shower would benefit the woods and their fungal bounty.
With eight morels in our bag, we decided to try one more spot. The hunting was much easier in this undisclosed location. We found twenty in less than twenty minutes and decided to hang it up. We had enough to justify cooking.
They were delicious!
"Rather than tout the morel's tasty virtues, I'll merely say that the little bastards are delicious when pan fried in an egg batter."
ReplyDeleteha. they do sound yummy!
They have an almost nutty flavor once they're cooked. Not like most mushrooms at all.
ReplyDeleteOh, man. I haven't gone mushroom hunting or had any good fried ones in years. They're especially good with beer.
ReplyDeleteI still hold the title of best mushroom hunter ever in my family for finding a massive patch of them while out with my dad and a buddy of his once while I was in high school. I stumbled across a little hollow that a big dead tree in it and the whole thing was just filled with them to the point where you had to watch where you stepped.
We go as much as possible every mushroom season. I can remember times when I was younger when we found three or four hundred in one hunt.
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