Back in May, we went to the Mushroom Festival in Boyne City, east of Traverse City in the northern part of the state. This place is famous for morel mushrooms which are considered a delicacy and known to have more flavor than normal white button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) commonly found in the grocery store.
People in Illinois and Michigan go on mushroom hunts to find morels and are very secretive about their location. We tried to eat some for lunch, but because this years season was not very good, they did not have any to serve. In fact, we attempted to have lunch a the local hotel at 12 noon, but after enquiring about whether the mushrooms were on the menu, they said that there were closed for lunch and shooed us out of the restaurant. Highly suspect don't you think?
Anyway, we went to check out the tents and found some dried morels from Illinois which we bought to take home and cook to find out what the big deal was about.
We finally got around to eating the morels with steak, cooking the steak on the BBQ and the mushrooms in a pan with butter. As you can see, the mushrooms look like coral, are hollow on the inside, and look spongy.
Morel Mushrooms
Conclusion? Give me Chinese mushrooms any day. The morels do have a stronger flavor than white mushrooms, but are nothing to really get excited about compared to Chinese mushrooms. We have some left, so will try cooking them in a different way to get more familiar with the taste and may change our minds about them.
Boyne Mushroom Festival
Boyne is a ski resort town during the winter (the mountain is all of 350 m in height) and has a nice bay at the edge of the town. They hung these morel mushrooms on a pole so you can see what they look like.
It is lobster time! Fresh from the cool waters of Nova Scotia were these two poor lobsters who thought they were being rescued from the lobster tank at the supermarket only to find themselves being taken out of the bag into a hot steaming pot of water and then turing red in embarrassment at being seen naked. They were then cut in half, baked for a while in lime butter (a la "Bills Open Kitchen"), and then served with salad. They tasted pretty good and will be remembered as bringing satisfaction to their rescuers' tummies!
Lobster from Nova Scotia
Yum! Yum!
It has come time for one family from our small group of Pacific friends to head back home to Thailand. They have been very hospitable and helped us to settle into life here in Midland. They will be missed by all of us, but we know we will meet up with them again when we return to the Pacific.
Goodbye Dinner for the Sermchaiwong Family - Ton Liew, Ton Fai (with mum), Sue and Phisanu.
We bought a couple of bikes last week and went to the rail trail (an old rail line that they have paved) that starts near the Tridge (a bridge in downtown Midland) and rode 8 miles to Sanford Lake. I was a nice sunny day with some cloud cover and cool tempuratures.
Riding around Midland on our new bikes.
We took our time and stopped off for ice cream along the way.
Mmm...ice cream.
Cookie dough ice cream and a waffle cone.
On the way back we got caught in the rain, but it was good to get outside and get some exercise.
