The garden has gone down (along with the government), but the recent rains have nourished our mushroom logs to blossom these beautiful Pearl Oyster Mushrooms. We just had a wonderful lunch putting them in a vegetable soup.
Robert Shinn started his mushroom crop a few years ago, working to find the right size logs, ordering all his favorite mushroom spoor plugs and setting up a shady, wind protected area for the logs to live. The weather this year has been... different, so we mostly saw small flushes of oyster mushrooms in the rainy times, but we have several bags of beautiful sliced mushrooms stacked in our freezer and lots of dried mushrooms in jars for the winter. I enjoy watching Robert’s face when he comes in with a basket full of bounty and sets to work figuring out how to cook them immediately. My investment in the “food network” and lots of obscure cookbooks is paying off!