Geoff Bait

My last day in Seattle, my friend Geoff and his lovely wife Katie took me to their local community market.

From what I gather, it's a bit of a mainstay in Seattle. Every neighborhood has one. People gather on the weekends in the street to buy little bits of perfection for their upcoming cooking.

They took me to a stall called "Foraged and Found", run by a woman that specializes in foraging for wild mushrooms.

My first thought was that I was assuredly going to die.

Everything I've ever heard or read has spoken at length about the tremendous dangers involved in eating wild mushrooms. Absent an expert, a foraging expedition is frequently an immediate trip to...well, dying pretty much. Wild mushrooms are not to be played around with.

And yet, here was this stall. As it turns out, it's Geoff's favorite place in the universe to shop. Every week he descends to buy a maddening array of fungi that he may or may not ever find a use for.

And yet! He's not dead! Not yet anyways! To me, this says something wonderful about the free market. This stall would not have any sort of market whatsoever were they not able to to provide the necessary expertise to protect their gastronomically inclined consumers. The very second someone turns up sick via a mis-identified mushroom; things are over for them.

Geoff and Katie were kind enough to grant me the use of their enormous chantrelle stash for the pizza I made that night for the Steelers/Saints game.

Here are other things one can do with a mushroom...