my wife and I walked through some woods yesterday with my folks. I was mildly curious when my dad grabbed a long wooden pole and a bucket out of his car – so I asked their meaning.
the pole? – that’s for snakes, he said. [note: my dad does NOT like snakes.]
the bucket? – that’s for mushrooms.
I’ll admit – in my years growing up at home, where we had about 20 acres of land, and most of it was woods – I think I can remember only finding a handful of morel mushrooms in that whole time. yet morel mushrooms are a hot commodity in Michigan – some people have closely guarded secret morel mushroom hunting grounds, where they can find them growing in the spring by the bushel. there is even a town up in northern Michigan that has an Annual Mesick Mushroom Festival that starts in a few weeks.
so yesterday we took a long hike through the woods to the back of the property, and just a short while after we had turned around to head back, I heard an excited cry: “I found one!”
as he bent down to grab it, I heard: “oh look, there’s a bunch of them!” all four of us then scoured the ground until we had a whole bunch of them in our bucket! and we found them all in that one little area, even though we kept “our eyes peeled” for the rest of our hike.
that night, my wife sauteed some of them in butter, and she said they were great. (I was at soccer practice with my son, so haven’t tried them yet!)
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