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I cooked a Vegetable Madras curry today and made naan breads to go with it. A tasty mix of onions, potato, tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower and mushrooms went into the curry. Mr L has a thing about potatoes in curry and swears that they don’t cook properly, no matter what you do. I set out to prove him wrong, which I did… kind of. Not only did my potatoes cook but they cooked too far and disappeared into a mush. Oh, well.

Today’s featured image is a shot that I took of the mushrooms on my chopping board.

I am passionate about mushrooms. I love everything about them, the taste, the texture of cooked mushrooms, the smell of them raw and their velvety feel.  Such an adaptable foodstuff. I buy them in quantity, in t he 750 gm box from the supermarket and I happily throw them into just about anything that I make, and often use them as the central element of a dish: mushroom curry, mushroom risotto, mushroom soup, sweet and sour mushrooms, mushroom sauce for pasta, mushroom pizza. I love them raw in salads but most of all I like them fried in bacon fat and eaten with the  bacon. It’s a formative, childhood thing.

Mushrooms were in short supply when I was small and were definitely a luxury, not the cheap and commonly available food that they are now. They turned up occasionally on the Sunday breakfast table. Mum bought them by the quarter pound, wrapped in a white paper bag and always peeled them before cooking (I never take the skin from a mushroom, ever). They were simmered in a little milk, as this stopped the mushroom from shrinking and made them go further, according to Mum. The 4 ounce bounty was spread across five plates, the milk making the toast or fried slice that was supplied to cushion the mushrooms grey and soggy. Sounds awful, I know, but it was such a treat at a time when luxuries were few and far between. On the rare occasion that the mushrooms were fried, they were fried to a shrivelled leathery-looking thing, but were still the most delicious thing that I could ever envisage at that time. I recall swearing that when I grew up and was rich, I was going to dine on mushrooms every day.

I never made it to being rich, but mushrooms ceased to be a luxury and I pretty much eat them 4 or 5 days a week – not far from that childhood ambition.

As for my chopping board, that has been with me for 40 years. I’ll tell you about that another day.

Published by Scattered Thinker

The Scattered Thinker is somewhat past her prime, but not yet in any danger of giving up. In the Inter-world, she is often known as plumbum, or sometimes as ulygan. In the Real Life, she goes by the name of Beth. Beth is a roamer. She lives in a motorhome and has a backup static caravan that serves as a bolthole if needed. Bricks and mortar are very much a thing of the past. Contact Beth if you would like to correspond with paper and pen.