I don’t like eating mushrooms. Sure, I’ll take them fried and occasionally tolerate their presence on a pizza. But aside from my qualms about their taste and texture (no lectures, please), I’m irrationally weirded out by their whole… thing. Like, I’m not convinced that they’re not sentient. I’m also not convinced that they’re not essentially just… skeletons. Ghosts. Weird woodland spirits that will haunt my soul for 1,000 years if I dare eat them.
This is irrational. I’m comfortable with that.
But while I avoid eating them (for the most part), I do enjoy the look and concept of mushrooms. Quirky little forest fellows, those.
So each year, I get really excited for – and then promptly forget to attend – the Mountain Mushroom Festival in nearby (ish) Irvine, Kentucky. It’s time with the harvest of wild morels from the damp, leaf-strewn spring hills, so it falls in late April (making it one of the first festivals on the yearly schedule for my state, and thus so, so easy to forget about.)
One of the most interesting tidbits to come out of the festival each year is the price of the goods. This year, one report (from the driving force behind The Goldenrod) said that…
Foraging for morels isn’t easy work by any means. You find them reaching up through the wet, decomposing plant matter left over from the winter. They grow well in abandoned apple orchards, but also around oak, elm and ash trees in Kentucky, at least (more hunting tips here) on hills. They generally grow to about six inches in height, and you harvest by pinching at the base of the stem. It’s hard on the back and the knees. They generally need to be eaten, dried or sold fairly quickly, as they start to decay at around two weeks.
I can definitely understand the hefty price tag. For people who aren’t likely to pony up $100 for mush mush, the festival food trucks and booths offer tons of mushroom dishes to sample at a price point that’s a little easier to swallow (god help me.)
If you need proof beyond the whole quaint mushroom theme that this is a festival designed for me, specifically, there are agate hunts early in the week. Come on! Anyway, I just really love a festival that has a strong theme.
If you happen to be one of my local readers, the festivities end at 4pm on Sunday, April 24th. So run (and bring a lot of cash, apparently.)