Bacon that grows in the ground

As I've detailed in past posts, Huan and I have been desperately searching for morels in the hills around
Seattle, with really no success at all.

However, the beauty of the global economy is that if you can't find it in the wild, you should probably just look at your local grocery store. Or, brave the crowds and flying fish and go to Pike Place Market.

So rather than waiting until next weekend (there was a lot of rain today, hopefully foreshadowing good fungus growing weather), we bought some at the Market. It must be high season, because prices have dropped from $50/lb on Monday to $30/lb on Friday to $20/lb today.

Anyhoo, Huan sauteed them with garlic and butter. Wow. Fantastic. They definitely don't taste like mushrooms as much as they taste like meat... specifically, bacon. Now, obviously some of that taste is due to the butter, but there's clearly something meaty going on. All my life I've been waiting for something like this to come along: pork that grows from the ground. Is there anything better? Maybe doughnuts that grow in the ground, but I still think that gets the silver medal.


So I wholeheartedly suggest that you go to your local grocer, pick up a half pound of morels, and get on the pork fungus train. Great stuff.

Easy as bagged lettuce

I'm not sure what started me thinking about this (it was probably being at the grocery store), but I wonder what my generation's "As easy as sliced bread" metaphor will be.* I thought about this while walking home with seedless grapes, bagged and washed lettuce, and peeled baby carrots. None of these are particularly sexy sounding, but in terms of making food preparation remarkably easy I think they are amongst the big players. I mean, who buys a head of lettuce these days?** When is the last time you peeled a carrot? Every now and then I see a real carrot in the grocery store and I wonder what kind of growth hormones it must be on to get that big.

Anyways, the real genesis of this post was my newfound love: butter lettuce. How did I not know about this until two months ago? The trick with bag lettuce was always finding a kind that would last more than two hours after being opened, which wasn't terribly difficult if you didn't mind eating lettuce that tasted like shoes. But this butter lettuce stuff (BTW, just fabulous branding... if more vegetables had butter in their name we might not have an obesity problem in the US. Butter broccoli, I'm looking in your direction) is just fantastic. It lasts a full week, it has a nice taste, and, I can't believe I'm writing this, a very velvety texture. Who knew lettuce had texture. Props to butter lettuce.

On the downside, I can't get decent yogurt out here. I became very attached to Stonyfield Farms (or Stonybrook, or Stonysomethingorother) yogurt during the past year. It had a nice mix of fruit and yogurt, a decent texture, and it was never cloyingly sweet. It was also organic, which I'm a big fan of. I can't find an organic yogurt out here that is any good, and that's very disappointing.

Update: Yup, I was right. I don't know how to ID a metaphor. Saying that simile was my 2nd guess probably isn't very believable, but it was my 2nd guess.

* Please let me know if this isn't a metaphor. I know Mrs. Lange hates that I got a 5 on the AP Comp exam without knowing this.

** I do know two people who actually cook who buy real lettuce, but I'm not sure they read the blog.