Thursday, September 16, 2010

We just had some kind of mushroom

Mixt Salads recipe #2: Noodle

Last night, I was going to make Heaven (chanterelles and duck eggs) but Isabel was so aghast I put it off and made Noodle instead.

Andrew Swallow gives all his recipes names and the reason for this one is obvious. Noodle consists of cool Japanese soba noodles tossed with a miso dressing and lots of vegetables: sprouts, cucumber, red bell peppers, enoki mushrooms. "It looks like the compost!" Owen said, not unkindly. We all liked and ate the salad.

All fungi are freaky. Usually I can handle it. I do think, though, that the enoki is freakier than most because it's skinny and albino and has a pinhead. Plus, it travels in a pack, so you're faced with hundreds of skinny albino pinheads.

The enokis came from Korea and I told myself I really liked them as I snacked on them while I was making the salad and later as I ate them in the salad. They're sweet, bland, and refreshing. But, of course, flavor isn't everything. We had to go to Isabel's back-to-school night and as I sat there listening to the cute algebra teacher talk about study groups my mind kept wandering back to those sickly, spidery mushrooms that had traveled from Korea in a plastic pouch. I thought about this Haruki Murakami story called "Crabs." It's an amazing story, but I can't recommend that you read it because every time you feel irrationally uneasy about something you ate, you'll remember "Crabs" and feel even uneasier.

My aversion to enokis is not Andrew Swallow's fault. Noodle was a modest success, and we enjoyed it a lot more than Mashup. May the upward trend continue.
Meanwhile, a new cache discovered in the garden today contained 18 filthy eggs.

I think this might just be the most unappetizing food post on the entire internet today.

5 comments:

  1. As the photo indicates, Stella was EXTREMELY proud of finding those eggs. She talked about it all night.

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  2. Stella is a beautiful young lady, just gorgeous, in fact.

    ReplyDelete
  3. May we have news on the goats? And photos, too, please?

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  4. The goats are alive and, well, um, active. They still think they're human and would like to be living inside the house. The glass doors downstairs are smeared with effluvia from their pressing their faces against the glass. I know I just used the word glass, but am on a smart phone and don't want to go back and alter.

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