Good Morells

Here it is, my first "official" food blog. This is actually something I have been meaning to do for quite some time but had never quite found the time to do but there truly is no time like the present so here I am, blogging away...about food, and my love of cooking it.

Last night at about five thirty there was a knock at the door. It was a "family" sort of knock, the "shave and a hair cut, two bits" knock. Anyway, it was my Aunt Trish at the door who had come over to my house to bring me morrell mushrooms. She and her husband Gene happen to know a man (who is actually the brother of my step-grandmother) who has them all over his land for the week that they grow in the spring. He gathers them up by five gallon buckets and gives them away to friends and family and then sells the rest. I opened the lid to the container and looked inside and found this world of gnome sized brain-like objects, tough and beautiful-a labyrinth long forgotten. I had been morell hunting with my grandparents as a child, and we had found many, but it had been so long since I had seen one of those amazing fungi that my memory had completely dulled itself to how strange they truly are.
Today I sauteed them with butter and salt and then ate them. The oak paneled walls of my grandparents house suddenly appeared as my taste buds regained their consciousness. I remembered not only the morell mushrooms we had that rainy evening after a long day of hunting, but of how I stood nestled between my grandparents as we asked for permission to gain access to land that they thought might have morrell mushrooms. The owners of one of those parts of land were my other grandfather and grandmother, Howard and Sally. I didn't know Howard and Sally like I knew my grandparents and standing there with my Grandma and Papa while they laughed and joked with the grandparents I hardly knew, who never took the time to get to know me, made me uneasy and nervous. I thought I should separate the mushrooms from their land from the other mushrooms we had gathered so I wouldn't have to eat them. When Howard and Sally's grand kids came up the drive (my cousins), I felt relieved because I knew I could get back in the car and leave with the grandparents I came with. I guess I don't really like Howard and Sally and it's really a wonder I like morrell mushrooms, but somehow I do.