The other night I watched Louis Schwartzberg’s “Fantastic Fungi” and then dreamed I was living in a dense, surreal, Disneyish forest of mushrooms. Yep. Covid quarantine may be getting to me, but after that movie, I’ll never look at a mushroom––or tree, for that matter––in the same light.
Fascinating, educational and absolutely entertaining, the movie described the complex mycelium earthscape beneath our feet. As Jeannette Catsouis wrote for The New York Times, “Louie Schwartzberg’s lightly informative, delightfully kooky documentary, “Fantastic Fungi,” offers nothing less than a model for planetary survival.”
Baked Turnips with Spinach, Blue Cheese, Walnuts
Which got me craving, and thus including, a variety of mushrooms on my last masked trip to the grocery. Here are my three favorite vegetarian recipes featuring mushrooms that I’ve made time and time again.
Pictured above are Buckwheat Crepes stuffed with Wild Mushrooms, Watercress and Goat Cheese, and to the right, a heavenly recipe for Baked Turnips stuffed with Mushrooms, Spinach and Blue Cheese. And I can’t forget a lovely citrusy and thyme-scented recipe for Lemony Pasta with Mushrooms and Thyme, pictured below.
Lemony Pasta with Mushrooms and Thyme
The movie also delved into the ancient rituals and hallucinatory properties of Psilocybin mushrooms, which are intriguing.
Although I’ve never confessed this to any of my contemporary peers––much less in a forever out there WordPress blog––I tried Psilocybin mushrooms back in the early seventies. I was an experimental eater even then.
It was back in high school, English class, 1973. We were studying Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or some similar ode to the natural world, and my friend (I won’t disclose her name) passed me a note, which read: “Take a bite and wait ’till night. The mushrooms undo your mind, sometimes.”
I shrugged, but accepted her gift of a ‘shroom after class. Later that evening, after dinner, I ingested the mushroom in the confines of my bedroom. The rest of the night was spent under my bed, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It was an experience I don’t ever wish to recreate, and I was lucky to survive–reality is enough of a mind-bender for me.
Ahem. Clearly, physical partitions erected during Covid solitude have obliterated boundaries while blogging.
Frivolity aside, be well, friends. With the nicer weather, I’m paying more attention than ever to safe behavior practices. Here’s a non-food related article, “Scratching on the Walls” I wrote for “Women Writers, Women’s Books”, that was recently published on how I’m coping when not commandeering a sauté pan.
♥♥♥
By the way, I’m one of the authors in a lovely Facebook group, Blue Sky Book Chat, which I’ve mentioned before.
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