And now for something completely different!

Since I have set this blog up for basically educational purposes...mostly about baking... I thought I might add this interesting festival I attended today...not only educational but tasty too!
Of course only a very small portion will be about baked goods... one cookie to be exact...but! I got wonderful photos and ate great tasting food at the... get this... FUNGUS FAIR! Yes, Fungus!

Every year our town has this event and it keeps getting bigger and bigger... I am posting pictures of the ones I could get with the name tags because I could never in my wildest dreams remember most of these names. The really cool thing is the labels tell  you whether they are edible, toxic or poisonous...

We ate mushroom lasagna, Matsutake mushroom soup, cheese infused with White Truffle oil from Oregon, shortbread cookies ( Hey here is the mention of a baked good!) with candy cap mushrooms and salmon cakes with Shitake mushroom duxelle and white truffle aoli....

and I bought some dried porchini mushroom and a box of porchini mushroom bullion cubes from Italy.

They had these very neat boxes where you grow your own mushrooms right in the box... they said you can get 4-5 crops in the one box and they had three varieties too... but I couldn't think where I could leave this box without critters getting into it and also I would have to cook a lot at home which to be honest... I teach night classes and I don't do a bunch of cooking at home during the week... so I didn't get it but I really wanted to!

Some of these mushrooms were very much like things you might see growing under the ocean waters...

And some looked like they came from outer space...

My friend said to me as we were watching a cooking demo with mushrooms that she thought "these fungus people are kinda like a cult with the mushroom clothing, mushroom arts and crafts, mushroom hunters and chefs" I laughed and then looked around the room to see people in mushroom pants and a guy with a mushroom cap on his head passing out samples of food with mushrooms and started getting scared... is she right? We were surrounded by fungus! Is that weird or what??? But ya know... they are very interesting things...fungus...not plant, not animal... grow from spores... very sci-fi when you think about it... look around your area and see if you have something like this and don't miss it! We know so little about the world around us and this is a great opportunity to learn about this strange ... thing... that grows all around us. Hey, have I been brained washed?