Mad about Mushrooms . . .

Where have all the matsutake gone?

My Japanese friends in Kanazawa-City, Osaka and Kawasaki-City have sounded the alarm. Their beloved matsutake mushroom (Armillaria ponderosa) is no longer in bountiful supply. What used to be a celebration of the changing seasons from summer into fall and winter, marked with generous bowls of broth and slivers of the revered matsutake, has now become a concern for them due to the scarcity of domestically harvested matsutake.

Mushrooms can stir memories
of years gone by.

Do you want to be waste or compost, asks Loop's website

A number of September’s newspapers and online sites tended to repeat stories of the Living Cocoon designed by Loop. The central question was: Why settle for a non-environmentally friendly traditional casket that normally takes more than 10 years to decompose when you can select a Living Cocoon, a coffin made from mushrooms that returns the deceased to the earth while enriching the earth?

We continue to learn more about how fungi
can play a role in our life...and death.

Harvard Museum of Natural History & Their Virtual Fabulous Fungus Fair

Here we go again sharing content and learning, thanks to the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s YouTube channel with highlights of their Virtual Fabulous Fungus Fair. Check out the short videos addressing such subjects as Fungal Biofertilizers (in which fungi are considered as an alternative to traditional fertilizers, thus taking advantage of mycorrhizal relationships to better reach nutrients in the soil and improve plant growth) along with Mycoremediation (when fungi are used to break down pollutants in the environment), Small Fungi, Big Pharma (where fungi behind the popular drugs penicillin and statins is discussed) and Fungal Biofuels.

We can continue to learn more about
fungi, thanks to various presentations such as this.

November, 2020's Recipe of the Month: China Beach Retreat's Wild Mushroom Frittata

While many mycological societies and festivals cancelled their events this year, not so the Long Beach Peninsula Wild Mushroom Celebration where a fine collection of restaurants are offering mushroom focused dishes.  We congratulate them all for persevering in this difficult time, and especially the China Beach Retreat for their wonderful breakfast entrée which we have printed below.

Laurie Andersen (The Shelburne Inn and China Beach Retreat) suggests that it "carries over nicely from breakfast into lunch and dinner.  It can be finished in an oven, or flipped and served in a sauté pan by simply adding a couple of tablespoons of water, then covered to contain the steam and finish the cooking."  For 2-3 person servings, steam the entrée, for 6 or more, such as the recipe below, finish in the oven.  

Pig's Ears (Gomphus clavatus) could be a nice inclusion   
in the assorted wild mushrooms option of this entrée.