The winter skies are stormy. Look up and clouds swirl about like drunken sailors. Lie on the ground for an hour and watch as grand opera unfolds above the trees. Giants battling. Swords clashing. You can feel their breath on your ears. The epic tales of Homer performed by dancing clouds on a stage that spans the heavens. La Scala has nothing on this. No pesky crowds to deal with either. Every seat a private box. Over there are the Sirens, singing from the rocky shores, luring sailors to their doom. Here comes Orpheus and the Argonauts, doomed to die like countless other hapless sailors … or are they? You see them, don’t you?

Enough with the winter sky. Too much drama for me. Instead, I’m lured by whispering mushroom, shiitake 椎茸 to be exact. Just bumps on a lump of sawdust a week ago, today some are too big to resist plucking. We’ll have a feast tonight. It boggles the mind how fungi turn sawdust into delicacy. Beat this freshness Wholefoods.

A week ago I started a shiitake mushroom growing kit by soaking it in water overnight. A few days later bumps appeared on the surface of the block, a pressed block of hardwood sawdust. Seven days on, the bumps have transformed into baby mushrooms over an inch across. A few more days, maybe a week and it looks like we’ll be eating fresh shiitake mushrooms.

It’s always fun watching my food grow. Seeing all the stages it goes through enhances the flavor. I can bite into the food, close my eyes, and appreciate all the work the food went through so I could eat it.