This month's meeting will be at 7:30 on Thursday, the 17th, at the Natural History Museum. The time has come to begin selection of new officers. During this month's meeting we will establish a nominating committee, and next month we will hold elections. This presents opportunities for those of you who have been wondering what to do with some of your spare time.
To say that there's not much news this month is actually an overstatement. Since I haven't heard any reports of anyone's mushrooming success, or much of anything else for that matter, I'll relate the highlights of my autumn endeavors. in my front yard have had a very productive season. I have been picking the little delectables regularly for a couple of months now, and the dozens upon dozens of mushrooms I've harvested have added up to several grams (before drying). I found that by laying all the fresh caps on a dark piece of paper, it creates a sort of "mushroom art" which looks very much like a lot of little white spore prints on a dark piece of paper. Although I ate some of the first of the harvest, fresh from the lawn and sautéed in butter with onion (quite a bit of onion, actually), the rest are dried and fill up a good amount of the bottom of a baggie. These I will keep for one of those really dry times when the person just before me at the grocery store got the very last Agaricus from the produce bin.
I also stumbled upon a beautiful batch of Endoptychum agaricoides (puffball agarics) fruiting next to a concrete parking bumper in a sand parking lot at UNM. It has been fruiting steadily for about three weeks now. I reveal my inexperience when I express how impressed I was at bisecting the first specimen. I had never seen anything quite like it, and was, I admit, a bit mystified. I now realize that seeing one cut in half is about as exciting as it gets. Having read that this species is probably not inedible, I decided to try the taste. (Read closely; this is as close as you're going to get to a recipe this month.) I first cut a couple of prime specimens into thin slices. I parboiled them ever so briefly, and poured out the water. Then, in a saucepan I heated a small amount of light olive oil. To the hot oil I added the slices and let them sizzle, stirring steadily, for at most a minute. I then removed the slices and poured off the little bit of olive oil. In the same pan, I then melted some butter, added the mushroom slices, and let them cook for just a couple of minutes. The resulting treat is a bit difficult to describe. It had texture somewhat between undercooked cornmeal mush and that of cold, un-emulsified peanut butter. The flavor was very similar to something which has been briefly steamed, broiled in oil, and smothered in butter. I tried a couple of bites and decided to feed the rest to the dog. To the pan I added her usual dry dog food and a little water, along with a little leftover fruit salad, and stirred it up. With tail wagging and a contented slurping sound, she licked the pan clean--except for the mushrooms. I've thought of cooking them again, maybe differently this time, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
