Interesting things?
Lol I'm actually rather set in my ways as far as eating habits go.
black olive&pepperoni pizza, olive and meatball/cheese subs, roast chicken, cold and covered in chilli sauce, calamari...chinese food, fish, and my homemade morel/shiitake/chickpea/kidney bean&steak chilli are my favorites, although many people either make a fuss about fungi included as spices that are toxic unless prepared right, or find it too hot. Plenty of pepper, tabasco/habanero sauce, along with those tiny, but bloody lethal little birdseye peppers are great for making chilli.
Not a happy bunny, table-wise right now. I just discovered that 2 large tubs full of fresh shiitake had gone mouldy, thanks to my havig no appetite whatsoever, courtesy of that paki doc that screwed me last week over my meds
And they are one of my absolute favourite kinds of mushrooms, with some medicinal properties also. I really like their meaty, very savoury type flavor, what the orientals often umami, the fifth basic taste detected by tastebuds on the tongue rather than requiring olfaction also, that detects protein-rich foods on the whole, and the amino acid glutamate (hence use of MSG in a lot of processed shite).
Shiitake are great in chilli, in soups, or as a simple snack, fried in butter and served with some fried bacon. Quick, easy and very, very moreish.
I keep quite a few packs of dried mushrooms about in my kitchen- several packs of dehydrated shiitake, cep (Boletus edulis/the cep, porcini or penny bun), morels, although I've eaten them all and need to buy or grow more. Usually Morchella elata, the black morel. Lovely smoky flavour those have, although fuckoff pricy to buy. Was lucky enough to have a garden invasion at the old house I used to live in, the spores must have come with the batch of woodchips put down as mulch. I am really kicking myself, so to speak, for not taking extensive spore samples for culture :/
I really should have done, heck, even commercial production...might have to look at trying to obtain spore syringes, that way I could make a one-off investment. All i'd need are some spore samples and more agar. ( confess, I do have some agar, somewhere. But I've never made it from powder, and wherever this is, it was just sold as a plastic bag of powder. Probably not sterile either. Always bought my agar an bottles of pre-made stuff that could be warmed and poured; lol probably not much demand for the likes of sheeps's blood agar, chocolate agar maybe, but not sheep/bovine blood, or spiked with fetal calf serum, or loaded with streptomycin/penicillins (although the latter are potentially lethally toxic to me), chloramphenicol, tetracyclines, etc, as selection agents to screen out resistant spp. from tesco baking supplies isle
)
I already have access to an autoclave, as well as UV sterilizing equipment, and if truly needed could obtain a radioisotope gamma source, although neither cheaply, nor without effort to my part for nuking substrates to make sure they are not going to get moldy while trying to culture something specific. And a good quality microscope, with a high-powered oil immersion lens, petri dishes, inoculation loops etc. in the lab.
I'd love to be able to just go off and grab some freshly picked morels from the woodchip beds I could easily simply keep in trays on the outside of the flat roof over the bathroom downstairs. That would be lovely. Dried ones are nice, but they don't beat fresh, in anything but storage and utility. Great spongy type texture for chilli too. They have a lovely smoky flavor, nice and chewy, and they suck up hot sauce, etc. like a man dying of dehydration would suck up powerade.
Good for creating a 'surprise fireball' kind of effect, for that I use the water to rehydrate dried morel to form the basis of the gravy/or additional H2O added throughout the long, slow cook over a low heat I use, once I already precooked the steak to the 'well done' stage, squeeze out much of the water, and replace it with a big slug of a mixture of different sauces, including lots of both regular red and habanero type tabasco (I love these on most food, heck, I can go through 1/3 to a half a bottle of each if I have in front of me, the 1/3 of a roast chicken...and love it even more dripped into the holes in pickled olives. I'll pour it on pepperoni pizza, bring some with me to takeaways and restaurants, lol, I'll even just take a mouthful if the mood takes me, or my nose is congested and needs a quick, but thorough sinus-reaming
Bite into the morels, and they squirt out hot sauce like tofu, filling the mouth with tasty blazing for fire
They are really complimented by fly agaric powder, the ultimate umami spice IMO-both medicinal, if used right, thats the one that people object to. My dad has said several times when he has helped lend a second pair of hands and eyes, words to the effect of 'you aren't going to fucking put THAT in there, are you? you will ruin it! although he did have a bowlful of the result.
Nobody DIES from Amanita muscaria poisoning, cases of fatality are so, so, SO incredibly rare, there might be a bare handful of documented cases every century to a century and a half, each and every one of them involving either a bad ident, leading the fly agaric to be consumed
en-mass. They are a good edible when first parboiled, then boiled a second time in a fresh pan of water. That leaches out both the tiny traces of a peripherally selective muscarinic acetylcholine receptor agonist neurotoxin, which is only even present in raw mushroom in fractions of a percentage point, enough to cause sweating, frequent urination, diarrheoea, cramps and tearing. And also the poison ibotenic acid, not wanted in cooking:P but by heat-drying over a long, low oven heat, it loses CO2 in a decarboxylation rxn to form muscimol, a far more desirable compound, having sleep/trance inducing properties, muscle relaxant abilities to a degree, antianxiety effects, or a bona fide deep, deep sleep, with intensely vivid dreams. Unlike benzos and the like, it doesn't to the best of my knowledge disrupt sleep phase architecture.
I also keep peppery boletes (Chalciporus piperatus), a hot, spicy poroid mushroom with taste all of its own, I use it like black pepper, or chillies, somwhere in the middle of black pepper and a moderate-light end of high test-chillies (like habaneros for ex.) and others that supplies come and go of, as they are unavailable cultivated (or can't be), when I'm lucky enough to find a delicacy that dries well and can't be reliably harvested wild every year.
Fresh mushrooms though, my other favourites are, over and above all others, two kings among wild foods, the parasol (Macrolepiota procera) and giant puffballs, the former fried in butter, the latter dipped in batter and turned into fritters, plain shallow-fried or turned into breaded cutlets. sadly an uncommon spp. though, I haven't been lucky enough to find one in years (although growing up to a meter in diameter one cannot mistake them for anything else, save perhaps, from a distance in the fields and meadows they grow in, a sheep!)
I can't resist slippery jack, or larch boletes either, once the layer of slime is removed from the caps. I like sulfur polypore, beefsteak fungus, chanterelles, lawyer's wig/shaggy ink cap (these MUST be taken home rapidly, to be cooked within hours, or they will dissolve before your very eyes, into a black slime containing the spore mass, via an autoliquifaction process known as deliquescence. Do NOT consume alcohol with any member of the genus Coprinus, the inkcaps
as some contain a toxin called coprine. Totally harmless, and the common ink cap is full of coprine, and is a good edible-but it blocks metabolic degradation of acetaldehyde by inhibiting aldehyde dehydrogenase in the liver, just like the (IMO cruel) aversive treatment for intractable pissheads, disulfiram/antabuse.
Highly unlikely to ever kill, but reportedly quite enough to make a person wish themselves dead a hundred times over if EtOH be consumed with, just before, or for days after such a meal. What else.....fresh cep, or its rarer, but equally delicious relative, Boletus aereus, fresh wild oyster mushrooms are delish, as are several Agaricus spp., although toxic ones do exist, most turn yellow within seconds of bruising or cutting into the fruitbody, such as A.xanthodermus, the yellow stainer. Almost all these poisonous spp. also have a distinct smell of phenol (carbolic acid), some say of some old types of ink. Only one spp. I know of, A.aurantioviolaceus, is deadly poisonous, don't know if it changes color, or smells funky, but since it only occurs in africa, I do not worry about that.
Horse mushrooms from that family, are good, smelling powerfully of aniseed, although this weakens in cooking, but still leaving them scented and aniseed tasting, as are several similar Agaricus species.
Surprisingly, I do not much like ordinary, average, shop-bought button mushrooms. They are so insipid compared to all the wild treats to be had, I only ever eat them as basically cheap padding in a chilli that absorbs the heat and flavour of everything else. Grown for yield and ease of growth, NOT for being good to eat.
Had a can of rice pudding too.
Last thing I ate was...more liquorice, this time, those 'flyer' tubes of sherbet. Bought 2 packets of them, new , they are usually sold loose. 10 pence a stick. These packs do not say how may are in there. but 8 for £1.50-do not buy them in packets people, it means less for your money.
Before that, a portion of king prawns in black pepper sauce. My new thing at the local chinese. Although my other favourites there, crispy shredded
and savory pancakes, as well as tofu in black bean sauce I still get. And two banana fritters from there for breakfast, in banana syrup, eaten cold. Washed down with a cup of petrushka vodka (1/3 of a bottle...my excuse? couldn't find a shot glass, at least one that wasn't being used as a crystallization dish for the final cleansing of a batch of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylphenyl-beta-nitrostyrene) itself chased down with a big gulp of cold coke.
And a cup of cold milk before a bit ago, think I'll have another now.
