the Walnut Diary

Agaricus Campestris or meadow mushroom

These are the mushrooms both my grandmothers taught me to find and bring to their tables, so in spite of my wife’s misgivings I regularly pick and cook them. Today I learned a new rule of mycology, though: don’t hunt from a lawn mower.

I accepted that I had to remove a lot of green chaff from the caps. What threw me a bit was the quantity of sand the gills had collected from a single pass by the Kubota. I guess those brown folds work very like an air cleaner. They not only hold spores. They also do a wonderful job of trapping airborne sand.

I told myself that it was the sea salt in the omelette, but my molars were unconvinced. Great aroma, though.