Loving the Rain

I was just warming up with the lichen post below... here we drop the photosynthetical element and are left with straight fungus, of the shitake variety, one of my favorites. Goodness from the garden. We feasted on these all week.


I couldn't resist hauling a log (alder) in for an MP photo shoot...

and from the archives: Getting a head-start in fungal culinary appreciation, CP at 6 mos. chomps heartily into a homegrown pancake size shitake. Now 3, she can identify all manner of plant/fungal life, and I totally trust her intelligence not to eat anything unknown.

Like a lot of mushroom enthusiasts, my entry came by way of enthusiasm for the entheogenic variety. Paul Stamets, the preeminent authority on matters fungal (just down the road in Oly; see FungiPerfecti), has some great stories about his experimental forays. But beyond the entheogens, the greater fungal kingdom—once you start looking into it—is utterly fascinating. Both in terms of the ecological niche they occupy, as well as their usefulness to mankind (which, ultimately, is really the same thing). Speaking about a recent contract with the military to extract anti-bioterrorism compounds from conk mushrooms—which thrive in our NW old growth forests—Stamets underscored our need for wilderness preservation, "I believe our old growth forests are important for our national defense."
I met his brother, John, a renown Seattle photographer, about a year ago at SAM. He told me how he helped stoke the initial enthusiasm by inviting his brother out to Seattle and introducing him to cyanescens. These days it's not something I'm too interested ingesting, but the thrill of discovery remains—even when you're not looking for them. Just the other day we were out with the kids and stumbled across a patch big enough to waste a small army (in a good way( :), right in the middle of town. It's funny that way, because I remember looking so hard for them back in the day... and not finding any. And now, only marginally interested, they so readily present themselves. "So it goes," as Vonnegut would say, spiraling outward into larger truth.