The Morel of This Story Is.....

Nope, I didn't spell "morel" wrong...   Bill & I were at an Anderson's Store in Columbus yesterday.   An Anderson's store is something like a Walmart only fancier.  When I first found the Anderson's store it was more like an all-purpose store with emphasis on farm supplies.  Birds would be flying overhead in the store going after whatever loose bird or critter feed they could find in the aisles.  They sold everything from chicken feed to chicken brooders....  milking supplies....  horse tack...  that kind of thing.  But even back then the store had a wonderful wine and beer department along with gourmet grocery items I'd never even heard of.  However...  they've come a long way from loose bird seed....

So...  when I saw this item in the produce department, I guess I wasn't too surprised.... 

These Morel Mushrooms were packaged up...  labeled and ready to buy.

Morel mushrooms are kinda the king of the fungi ....  the truffle without the geese finding them...  the cream of the crop.  They are the prize of every mushroom hunter.  No one who ever finds a patch of morels will ever tell where they find them.  Everyone has their ideas of the ideal breeding grounds for morels and they'll take those secrets to the grave.

Look close at that package...  WoooHooo....  costs $28.20 for...  

less than half a pound!

Yes...  they really do cost $59.99 a pound!!!!!

If you've never seen a morel...

This is what they look like.

And these aren't even really clean (look at the stem)....  so you're paying for a little dirt here as well.

I looked the packages over...  some of them looked kind of old and dried up.  

Being a morel person myself, I know a good morel when I see it.  Yes, they can be dried and reconstituted later, but it's the fresh, plump, right from the woods to the skillet taste that is best.

I suppose you can buy the spores, insert those in the proper kind of woodsy stuff and grow your own.  You can do this with other kinds of mushrooms, so why not?  But it's a process that takes a year or so, so if these were "commercially" grown, it took some time.

They had about a half dozen packages...  I wonder how many will sell?

No, I didn't buy any.  I do think mushroom season is over down here in my neck of the woods, and it wasn't a very good year here for them anyway.  It was at least 25 years ago that I had my big year... found them by the basketsful!  Huge...  as big as a large hyacinth...  dense...  moist....  tasty!  And we had so many I sold them to a restaurant in town every day.  But not at $59.99 a pound...  more like $10.00 a basketful.

And the moral to my morel story...

Heck, do I really have to have one?

That's All For Today!