I haven’t gone “mushroom hunting” since I was a kid, but I have some very vivid and wonderful memories of going with my father and grandfather through wooded hillsides looking for the fungus among us. Other people have old family photos of walleye or sunnies they’ve caught. In my family, we had photos of the sink full of mushrooms. Eating them was tasty, but finding them was better (and warmer) than looking for Easter eggs.

We’ve got a fair number of dead elms in our rambling backyard now and I’ve found one or two morels in the past years, but never more. Last night, while doing my daily circuit around the yard, I gasped when I saw a big yellow morel in plain sight. I’d never seen mushrooms on this side of the yard. I picked it, and then forgot about it until around noon, when I was telling GreenGirl Jaime about finding it. She thought it might taste good on pizza, and suddenly I had to jump up and go look for more.

Wandering through the wilder parts of our four acres, I was beyond delighted to find another morel. Then, just beyond it, still another. I grinned a huge kid-grin. Oh, happy day!

Then, just as suddenly, my fortune turned again. I looked around all the dead trees, and slightly sunny areas I thought might yield some mushrooms. I found only an errant golf ball. I bushwhacked through poison ivy to an area I’d had my eye on since the elms there died a couple of years ago and had no luck. I explored every nook and cranny to no avail. Pretty soon, I was asking the morel gods for just one more so I could end on a positive note.

When I got back to the spot where I’d started, I saw it …one more big yellow morel. Not a foot away from another I’d picked. Thank you, thank you, thank you I whispered to the gods, to my father, and to my grandfather. We’ll have fried mushrooms for dinner tonight.

And I’ll save a couple for Jaime’s pizza, too.

Are you a morel fan? Have you found many this year? Or is it enough to find them at local gourmet menus and supermarkets (how do you like to fix them)?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.