The best stuff in the world?
With my younger son home for the day, I’m cooking a lunch of mushrooms on toast. Is there any better food than mushrooms on toast? These days I use a lot of olive oil in cooking, like gallons of the stuff, and hardly any butter. But to do the mushrooms justice, you just can’t beat a knob of really good butter. I feel so lucky that my nearest grocery store carries not one but two brands of French butter. I think the Beurre President, pictured below, may be the best butter on the planet, or even in the universe – definitely worth its weight in gold.
The best stuff in the world
Cooking mushrooms with a little onion, a little bacon, just the right amount of butter, and plenty of black pepper takes me right back to holidays at my Uncle’s farmhouse in Cornwall. When the Summer weather was just right, warm and damp as it often is in that part of the world, we would get up very early and go out to certain favored fields and hedges to pick the wild mushrooms, still soaking wet with the dew. As a child, it seemed like a kind of magic how they would just appear overnight, where the day before there had apparently been nothing.
Wet with the dew
These days I get my mushrooms at the farmers market or the grocery store – I don’t know enough about California’s wild mushrooms to dare eating them, not even the ones sprouting today on my lawn. But mushrooms on toast is still one of my absolute favorite foods.
