So this year it is April 9. I checked my favorite spot just last evening and found nothing. But returning at 2 p.m., there stood two of the still-tiny beauties. They are small, probably just "sprouted" and I certainly didn't pick them. I'll give them a day or two to work their fungal magic.
This is the Yellow Morel - Morchella esculenta - and the prize of anyone's hunt. There is no taste so succulent and so earthy as this mushroom (I have never had a truffle so perhaps I am no judge). But I know what I like and a morel fried in olive oil, else chopped and placed within the folds of an omelet, can't be beat.
This shot (above) is cropped from the one below. I wanted you to see the clearer detail.
Finally, a second morel comes to life through the leaf litter and gets its first look at daylight.
It was a "warm" night (though cooling rapidly with the passage of a cold front) and a full inch of rain fell. There were two rounds of heavy rain: the first washed across the shingles at midnight, the second a mere hour later and this with lightning and thunder. I lay awake and listened to the rain pour over the rain gutters.
It's a cool Miami Valley day (49 at 3 p.m.) but apparently the morels find it to their liking.
And what the morels like, I like, too.
