I was stocking up on chocolate-coated goji berries at the supermarketarium this afternoon, when mine fungophile eye fell upon a box of button mushrooms. Four kilos of button mushrooms. For $11. Though personally I'm all for the re- or ongoing- or heretofore-unknown- socialisation of the banks, and the telephones, and the schools, and the medicines, and the scientific researches, and the forests, and the rivers, and the law-making, and the universities, and the redistributions of the wealths, I am descended from a long line of practising capitalists, so I know a good deal when I see one. My forebears didn't trade in mushrooms, specifically, but what holds good for the exchange of air valve patents and dry cleaning services applies also to boxes of fungus.
Trouble was, four kilos of mushrooms exceed even my fine figger of a belly, especially when I am also beholden to a packet of chocolate-coated goji berries. I was humming and hawing in the vegetable aisle, mentally distributing a lifetime's supply of 'shrooms into pots of mushroom soup, basins of mushroom tart, bowls of fricaseed mushroom lightly drizzled with mushroom and served with a sizeable pile of mushrooms. I was wondering whether Beatrice and Harriet could be induced to eat mushroom, about the palatibility of frozen Tofu avec Mushroom Stroganoff, and whether the gal next door would respond favourably to an offering of mushrooms sporting cocktail umbrellas - when, suddenly!, the lass beside me in the veg aisle asked if I'd like to go halfsies on a box.
"Good Dog!" I said. "You're brilliant! Where did you come up with an idea like that?" Whereupon it occurred to me that this is what I should have been doing for years. How have I reached the advanced age of ---, I asked myself, without joining a mushroom procuration co-operative?
So that's my plan. Agaricus bisporus for all, not just the rich.
* Caveat plagiaratoris: my sister's pardner, Cecil, intones "there's not mushroom left" every time we're within four kilometres of a fungus. Bless him.
5 comments:
Ha! Baron von Harlot, well done! You may be friends with said shroom-sharer for a long time henceforth.
A couple of years ago, by virtue of using a friend's Oyster card for public transport in London, I was eligible for a two-for-the-price-of-one ticket on the London Eye. I was alone in the queue, so asked the complete stranger behind me if she was similarly alone, and if so, would she like to go halvsies (I go for the v-spelling)and share my discount... A year later she tracked me down on Facebook, and the rest is: unwritten history.
CHOCOLATE covered Goji berries! Must get...
For a second there Karen I thought you had suggested to someone that you take half of the ride, up to the top, then hop off and give the rest of the ride to the other person.
Which would be inadvisable, considering the gravity of the situation, and also slightly impossible.
Then I re-read your post and thought it odd, considering that you were alone, that you should be speaking to someone else - it seemed a proposition in the vein of 'One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight', & co & co.
Then I re-read a second time and realised what you actually meant.
Yes, I do this with almost everything I read.
Mushroom pasta sauce on spuds, rice or tofu (and pasta). My staple diet due to laziness and only shopping for fresh once a fortnight.
Don't forget mushroom pasties either.
I think there is some shroom for improvement in those usage strategies, and would like to recommend this important information
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