Mushroom Love Quotes

I'm glad mushrooms are against the law, because I took them one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, "My God! I love everything." Yeah, now if that isn't a hazard to our country … how are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realize that we're all one?

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together...

As I shut the door and started to walk away, I heard him say, "Hey. Sydney." "Yeah?" "You had on a shirt with mushrooms on it, and your hair was pulled back. Silver earrings. Pepperoni slice. No lollipop." I just looked at him, confused. Layla was walking toward us now. "The first time you came into Seaside," he said. "You weren't invisible, not to me. Just so you know.

What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?

Ever since third grade you make mushroom clouds out of mushroom soup.

What shall we do? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, and watermelon hearts?

I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!

Because love isn’t something that needs to be said out loud!” Her face flushes with passion. “It’s something you just know. It’s an unspoken thing. It’s humble and quiet and constant…” She goes back to slaughtering the mushrooms, but lowers her tone a bit. “I mean, you can’t just say you love someone and make it true. That’s not how it works. Real love doesn’t need to be declared or confessed. Real love just… is. You know?

At least, the moment Lu Feng put his gun into An Zhe's backpack, within the eons, there was once such second—in that second, the Arbiter left his pistol to a xenogenic, forsaking his lifelong beliefs to love him.

Dear Nintendo, We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s ‘damaged goods’, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom ‘do you still love me?’ you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

Are you okay with what we ordered?” Angeline asked him. “You didn’t pipe up with any requests.” Neil shook his head, face stoic. He kept his dark hair in a painfully short and efficient haircut. It was the kind of no-nonsense thing the Alchemists would’ve loved. “I can’t waste time quibbling over trivial things like pepperoni and mushrooms. If you’d gone to my school in Devonshire, you’d understand. For one of my sophomore classes, they left us alone on the moors to fend for ourselves and learn survival skills. Spend three days eating twigs and heather, and you’ll learn not to argue about any food coming your way.” Angeline and Jill cooed as though that was the most rugged, manly thing they’d ever heard. Eddie wore an expression that reflected what I felt, puzzling over whether this guy was as serious as he seemed or just some genius with swoon-worthy lines.

Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.

The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

It does not matter where I am. The sky is always mine. Windows, ideas, air, love, earth, all mine. Why does it matter if sometimes, the mushrooms of nostalgia grow?

Clothes I wear for mushroom hunting are rarely sent to the cleaner. They constitute a collection of odors I produce and gather while rambling in the woods. I notice not only dogs (cats, too) are delighted (they love to smell me).

We all, like Frodo, carry a Quest, a Task: our daily duties. They come to us, not from us. We are free only to accept or refuse our task- and, implicitly, our Taskmaster. None of us is a free creator or designer of his own life. "None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself" (Rom 14:7). Either God, or fate, or meaningless chance has laid upon each of us a Task, a Quest, which we would not have chosen for ourselves. We are all Hobbits who love our Shire, or security, our creature comforts, whether these are pipeweed, mushrooms, five meals a day, and local gossip, or Starbucks coffees, recreational sex, and politics. But something, some authority not named in The Lord of the Rings (but named in the Silmarillion), has decreed that a Quest should interrupt this delightful Epicurean garden and send us on an odyssey. We are plucked out of our Hobbit holes and plunked down onto a Road.

Cats don’t have dark sides. That’s all a shadow is—and though you might be prejudiced against the dark, you ought to remember that that’s where stars live, and the moon and raccoons and owls and fireflies and mushrooms and cats and enchantments and a rather lot of good, necessary things. Thieving, too, and conspiracies, sneaking, secrets, and desire so strong you might faint dead away with the punch of it. But your light side isn’t a perfectly pretty picture, either, I promise you. You couldn’t dream without the dark. You couldn’t rest. You couldn’t even meet a lover on a balcony by moonlight. And what would the world be worth without that? You need your dark side, because without it, you’re half gone. Cats, on the other hand, have a more sensible setup. We just have the one side, and it’s mostly the sneaking and sleeping side anyway. So the other Iago and I feel very companionable toward each other. Whereas I expect my drowsy mistress Above would loathe this version of herself, who is kind and quiet and lonely and rather dear, all the things the original is not. My love stands for both. This one pets me more; that one let me pounce on anything I wanted.

Deer love mushrooms.

I used to be an angry, lonely prick. Then I met a guy with four amazing kids and more issues than the Sports Illustrated back catalog and boom—happiness.” “Boom, happiness?” “Okay, boom. Boom. More booms. A mushroom cloud. Then happiness.

Ghouls love their eldritch mysterious stairwells descending infinitely into fucking shit-and-mushroom town.

Alice reminded me of the woods: vast and beautiful and dark, but overgrown with defence mechanisms; thistles and hogweed, poisonous mushrooms and gnarled roots. Talking to her was like grabbing a fistful of nettles.

So many of our sins begin with fear—fear of disappointment, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of obscurity. Cynicism may seem a mild transgression, but it is a patient predator that suffocates hope, slowly, over many years, like the honey mushroom which forces itself between the bark and sapwood of a tree and over decades is strangled to death.

I'm going to be a person who writes stories. I never told mom and dad how much I loved them. I wanna be someone who can tell a lot of people how much I love them.

Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend—it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down.

Draco swore and kicked an innocent mushroom which had led a blameless life and did not deserve it.

Winkie? Flesh flute? Tallywhacker? Baby maker? Quiver bone? Joystick? Fun stick? Lap rocket? Love muscle? Wedding tackle? One-eyed wonder weasel? Helmet head? Wang? Trouser snake? Giggle stick? Schlong? Mushroom head? Love rod? Pecker? Thundersw—” “Enough!” Lucian barked, and when Bricker paused and glanced to him questioningly, he said, “I do not know what alarms me more, that you have so many names for cock or what it means in regard to how much time you spend thinking about cock.

And immediately, mixed with a sizzling sound, there came to Shasta a simply delightful smell. It was one he had never smelled in his life before, but I hope you have. It was, in fact, the smell of bacon and eggs and mushrooms all frying in a pan.

People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.

If we address frankly what is evoked by cheese, I think it becomes clear why so little is said. So what does cheese evoke? Damp dark cellars, molds, mildews and mushrooms galore, dirty laundry and high school locker rooms, digestive processes and visceral fermentations, he-goats which do not remind of Chanel … In sum, cheese reminds of dubious, even unsavory places, both in nature and in our own organisms. And yet we love it.

When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in the dirt until she felt China through her skin.

Once, at the dacha, years ago,” she said, “we all decided to go mushroom picking, and our neighbor Vera—she was at least eighty at the time—dashed over to the mirror and started painting her lips. My mother said to her, ‘Aunt Vera, we are going to the woods; who’s the lipstick for?’ And Vera replied—I’ll never forget it—‘Who knows? Maybe that’s where it will happen!

Haven admits. “Like, how did you get him? No offense. I just thought you were the non-dating type.” I frown. The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

Is it - I'm not certain - possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn't the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle - sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial, human: the difference between that and truly using another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters.

non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

. . . a meadow which David had known before the coming of the motorway, where he had searched for mushrooms in previous autumns, in lost quiet golden hazes.

Do you think magic mushrooms growing atop cow shit was an accident? Where do you think the phrase, ‘that’s good shit’ came from? Why do you think Hindus think cows are holy? Holy shit!

Everything is going to be alright' doesn't mean stubbing your toe won't hurt anymore, but it reinforces that what takes place today, good or bad, is just a small piece of the larger puzzle

Why was he doing this? So that life could continue in the metro? Right. So that they could grow mushrooms and pigs at VDNKh in the future, and so that his stepfather and Zhenkina’s family lived there in peace, so that people unknown to him could settle at Alekseevskaya and at Rizhskaya, and so that the uneasy bustle of trade at Byelorusskaya didn’t die away. So that the Brahmins could stroll about Polis in their robes and rustle the pages of books, grasping the ancient knowledge and passing it on to subsequent generations. So that the fascists could build their Reich, capturing racial enemies and torturing them to death, and so that the Worm people could spirit away strangers’ children and eat adults, and so that the woman at Mayakovskaya could bargain with her young son in the future, earning herself and him some bread. So that the rat races at Paveletskaya didn’t end, and the fighters of the revolutionary brigade could continue their assaults on fascists and their funny dialectical arguments. And so that thousands of people throughout the whole metro could breathe, eat, love one another, give life to their children, defecate and sleep, dream, fight, kill, be ravished and betrayed, philosophize and hate, and so that each could believe in his own paradise and his own hell . . . So that life in the metro, senseless and useless, exalted and filled with light, dirty and seething, endlessly diverse, so miraculous and fine could continue.

Faced with a choice between “a dead father, cold in the ground, and a living woman, warm and willing in his arms, the boy showed surprising sense for one so highborn, and chose love over honor,” says Mushroom.

The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.

So Laura is placed for us: mushrooms, crushed flowers, country matters. In London she will miss the greenhouse with its glossy tank, the appleroom, everything “earthy and warm.” Laura is an anomaly in the world of easy literary symbolism: she is a spinster, completely uninterested in men. Nevertheless she belongs irrevocably to the sources of life: to earth, seeds, bulbs.

I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man--he is a mushroom!

If we didn’t have bodies, we couldn’t feel the sun on our faces or smell the earthy, mushroom-y rich smell of the ground right after the rain. If we didn’t have bodies, we couldn’t wrap our arms around the people we love or taste a perfect tomato right at the height of summer. I’m so thankful to live in this physical, messy, blood-and-guts world. I don’t want to live in a world that’s all dry ideas and theorems. Food is one of the ways we acknowledge our humanity, our appetites, our need for nourishment. And so it may seem trivial or peripheral to some people, but to me, when I’m telling a story, the part about what we ate really does matter.

Thick boughs of white oak shaded the ground, sheltering riches of sage, red clover, sometimes mushrooms. Harriet breathed in the scents of the fecund earth as she crouched beside a patch of nettles to begin her morning's work. It was a good day for her labors. She found a lovely bit of mugwort beside the nettles, and deeper in the woods she spotted burdock, which could be elusive. There was amaranth, too, the herb the shepherds called pigweed.

I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. I love Wales (what is left of it, when mines, and the even more ghastly sea-side resorts, have done their worst), and especially the Welsh language.

Let us pause and drink to that. To a radically, perpetually unnecessary world; to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind; to wine, because it is a gift we never expected; to mushroom and artichoke, for they are incredible legacies; to improbable acids and high alcohols, since we would hardly have thought of them ourselves; and to all being, because it is superfluous: to the hairs on Harry’s ear, and to the seven hundred and sixty-eighth cell from the upper attachment of the right gluteus maximus in the last girl on the chorus line. Prosit, Dear Hearts. Cheers, Men and Brethren. We are free: nothing is needful, everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets; it is the tippler who sees the untipped Hand. God is eccentric; He has loves, not reasons. Salute!

i dreamt i crawled on top of you and kissed your hips, one at a time, my lips a smolder. i straddled your waist and pressed both shaking hands against your torso. spongy, like an old tree on the forest floor. i push and your flesh sinks inwardly, collapsing with decay, a soft shushing sound. a yawning hole where your organs should be. maggots used to live here until your own poison killed them off. i laid my cheek into the loam and three little mushrooms brushed over my eyelid. peat, decomposing matter, all of it, whatever you wish to call it, rested in the cavity of your chest. and there i planted seeds in the hopes something good would come out of you.

The more love you put off to the world in all aspects, the more it will return to you.

In love, if you can say things that give the magical air and the beauty of the forest mushrooms, then what you say will definitely fascinate the person you love!

Speech blossoms from anxiety… words were fermented from the uncertainty of existence, like poisonous red mushrooms sprout from the rotting earth. It’s true we have words of joy and pleasure, but aren’t those the most unnatural and contrived of them all? Apparently, human beings experience anxiety even in the midst of joy. But in a place without anxiety, there’s no need for such ignoble contrivances.

Even though he’d never been on the receiving end of love, he felt it deeply for the world around him. His mushrooms were his companions. His books, his family. His tea, his passion. His job, his purpose.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

I mean to give the smallfolk peace and food and justice. If that will not suffice to win their love, let Mushroom make a progress. Or perhaps we might send a dancing bear. Someone once told me that the commons love nothing half so much as dancing bears. You may call a halt to this feast tonight as well. Send the lords home to their own keeps and give the food to the hungry. Full bellies and dancing bears shall be my policy. - Aegon III

They had dismounted, laughing, amorous, and Katherine on finding a fairy ring of mushrooms in the grove had cried that by means of this enchantment on Midsummer Eve she would bind her love to her for ever, so that he might never once leave her side.

Do you know what a honey mushroom is?" she blurted out, plucking at the hairs on his arm, which was wrapped around her. He was silent for a moment before letting out a husky laugh "No. Why?" "It's the largest living thing on earth. Larger than trees, elephants, whales-this one living thing takes up over three square miles in Oregon." She could almost feel him turning that random fact over in his brain. She was glad she wasn't facing him. This would be so much harder if she had to look into his eyes instead of at the wall. "Like the mushroom cap is over three miles across?" he asked. Harper shook her head. "No, no. That's the amazing part. When you look at it-the part you see aboveground-it's this tiny little mushroom head. It looks so insignificant. They just pop up here and there" she gestures with her fingertips as though she could draw them in the air. "But it creates this root-like system called hyphae. And the hyphae-it spreads and grows and, kind of... takes over underground. One living thing, every cell genetically identical, spreading below the surface to take up this enormous amount of space." Dan was quiet for a moment. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked, placing a kiss into her neck. Harper swallowed and fiddled with the edge of the sheet. "Because thats' what my anxiety feels like-a honey mushroom." She felt Dan tense behind her, but she pushed on." A lot of times, someone on the outside, like you, maybe, sees these clues to it-my fidgeting, my mind seeming a million miles away, panic attacks. But inside" -she tapped her chest- "it's this intricate network of sharp pain and fear that's constantly growing and pulsing through me. It's always there, right beneath my skin, huge and controlling, but no one can see it. I just feel it. And it hurts. So badly. It makes me want to curl up into a ball or sprint out of my skeleton. This huge, inescapable thing inside me that controls me." she paused, picking aggressively at her nails; "It feels cruel to have your own body do that to you".

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can't imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year's festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's "Monolith." The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan. He smiled. That's good stuff, he said. Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat. It's nothing I've ever heard before, he replied, but I like it. He pulled his elbows in tight and shimmied, moving his head gravely from side to side, transfixed by pleasure. The priest, swaying his own ass to the beat—he was nearly eighty, but on mushrooms he was a jaguar-said, I was thinking about you, believe it or not; look at this.

I would love, though, to be able to forage---to pick the rosemary that grows near my mum's house, the dandelion flowers and their leaves that I've seen on the little patch of grass outside the studios---and to be able to eat the foods the artists in this building are growing, the mushrooms, tomatoes, herbs... I'd love, also, to be able to just go to a normal shop and buy my food, to peel back an aluminum and plastic lid on a polystyrene box and tuck into my dinner in the way a human can with instant ramen.

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird – white dove – which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood. But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. Little Red-Cap

Miss you so much it hurts. Seconds later, she texts back, The feeling is mushrooms, followed by a second text reading, Yes, autocorrect, I meant to say mushrooms, not mutual. Good catch. Life without you does feel a little bit like fungus, I reply. But definitely less tasty.

Imagine if you will—and you will—a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers—human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you’ve ever done quickly becomes all that you’ll ever do.

Cheeseburger-Stuffed Twice-Baked Potatoes • MAKES 8 SERVINGS • THIS RECIPE IS THE LUSCIOUS love-child of a stuffed potato skin and a cheeseburger, where Russet potatoes are scooped out and twice-baked to make crispy carriers for a generous helping of beefy filling that’s smothered in melted cheddar cheese. It tastes as decadent as it sounds, but it is actually quite healthy, because hollowing out the potatoes keeps carbs in check (and gives you the makings of mashed potatoes for the next day) and amping up lean beef with chopped mushrooms, broccoli, and tomatoes gives you a big portion with a sensible amount of meat.

Social contract theory is based on the autonomous individual, apart from any natural relationships. The atomistic creature running around under the trees appears to be an independent, fully developed adult—say, a twenty-one-year-old male. But this Robinson Crusoe image is not true of anyone. Contrary to Hobbes, we do not pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain. Each of us begins life as a dependent, helpless baby, born into a pre-existing family, clan, church, town, and nation. We grow into mature adults only because other people, especially our parents, commit to us sacrificially—to love, teach, and care for us.

We passed the Irish club, and the florist’s with its small stiff pink-and-white carnations in a bucket, and the drapers called ‘Elvina’s’, which displayed in its window Bear Brand stockings and knife-pleated skirts like cloth concertinas and pasty-shaped hats on false heads. We passed the confectioner’s – or failed to pass it; the window attracted Karina. She balled her hands into her pockets, and leant back, her feet apart; she looked rooted, immovable. The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. There were vanilla slices, their airy tiers of pastry glued together with confectioners’ custard, fat and lolling like a yellow tongue. There were bubbling jam puffs and ballooning Eccles cakes, slashed to show their plump currant insides. There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood. ‘Look at them buns,’ Karina would say. ‘Look.’ I would turn sideways and see her intent face. Sometimes the tip of her tongue would appear, and slide slowly upwards towards her flat nose. There were sponge buns shaped like fat mushrooms, topped with pink icing and half a glace cherry. There were coconut pyramids, and low square house-shaped chocolate buns, finished with a big roll of chocolate-wrapped marzipan which was solid as the barrel of a cannon.

I'm surrounded by five or six fly agaric mushrooms. Like them, I have burst open. I feel more resilient, more powerful. [...] I can't just love the natural world. I have to raise my voice even louder to help it. It is my duty, the duty of all of us, to support and protect nature. Our life support system, our interconnectedness, our interdependence.

I know a planet inhabited by a red - faced gentleman. He's never smelled a flower. He's never looked at a star. He's never loved anyone. He's never done anything except add up numbers. And all day long he says over and over, just like you, "I'm a serious man!I'm a serious man!" And that puffs him up with pride. But he's not a man at all- he's a mushroom!

The lake was unexceptional, lovely and green-blue, but the forest was a peculiar thing. Among the needles carpeting the floor were clusters of mushrooms and strange white flowers, lantern-shaped, their cupped petals like small orbs. The trees themselves were taller and healthier than such flora had cause to be a high altitude--- indeed, they were quite fat, as if overfed.

The candy cap was a revelation to me: redolent with the smell of maple, marvelously silky and spongy in texture, earth and meaty and sweet. When you eat a candy cap, your skin smells like maple sugar. When you exercise after eating a candy cap, your sweat smells like maple sugar. When you make love after eating a candy cap . . . well, I leave that to your imagination, but . . . yes.

the last little orb winks behind our mountain Venus peeking one eye over her shoulder I boil water, you dice mushrooms for the sauce remember all the poems we wrote when we were young, I say always about that thin crack between day and night I write you another one right there in the kitchen for old times sake and butter melts on the table old witches know what that means out in the middle of nowhere

The patient, genderless, bodiless, will tell me of its anguish: I feel like an old, opaque secret. I keep asking to be renewed. I suck on every fad, like mushrooms on a cemetery slab. Everyone’s better than I am; I’m the imprisoned best. No one loves another except as a mirror to a musty guest, to take stingy control. We are all failing, masterfully, because we desire it. Want to see civilizations ruined, want to see our species’ death, our psychic embroidery unraveled. We want to find out who’s left, the impossible perceiver of our demise. I’m hungry, I’m sick, I’m wounded. No shirt. So tired. I want to go home. They’re killing us; can’t remember childhood. The animal, bloodied, fails to hunt again. Our genocides are a cliché, repeated, but there’s no satiety, and further horror is willed. Who will save you? Who wants to be saved . . . I didn’t mean to say . . . I didn’t mean to be born.

When she was younger, Ellie used to believe that her invisibility was a metaphor for something else, assuming it was her awkwardness, her fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. She had thought as she grew older, more confident, wiser, she would outgrow this not being noticed. But lately, Ellie really felt like a ghost. She would be in a place, but not really there. People looked through her, past her. Her invisibility had taken on a life of its own. It wasn't a metaphor anymore, or a defense mechanism or eccentric little tic. She was actually invisible. At least, that was how it felt to her. Ellie wondered whether her parents were to blame. They were, after all, children of the sixties who had met at a love-in or lie-down or something of that sort, about which Ellie knew little except that a lot of drugs had been involved. Could Ellie's lack of physical presence be a genetic mutation caused by acid or mushrooms? Ellie grew up on their hippie commune among the highest, densest redwoods, where they dug their hands deep into the soil and grew their own food, made their own clothes. So perhaps it is there that the mystery is solved. Ellie indeed was a child of the earth, a baby of beiges and taupes and browns and muted greens. Nature doesn't scream and shout, demanding constant attention, and neither did Ellie. Maybe her invisibility was just her blending right in.

Tatiana thought Deda was the smartest man on earth. Ever since Poland was trampled over in 1939, Deda had been saying that Hitler was coming to the Soviet Union. A few months ago in the spring, he suddenly started bringing home canned goods. Too many canned goods for Babushka’s liking. Babushka had no interest in spending part of Deda’s monthly pay on an intangible such as just in case. She would scoff at him. What are you talking about, war? she would say, glaring at the canned ham. Who is going to eat this, ever? I will never eat this garbage, why do you spend good money on garbage? Why can’t you get marinated mushrooms, or tomatoes? And Deda, who loved Babushka more than a woman deserved to be loved by a man, would bow his head, let her vent her feelings, say nothing, but the following month be back carrying more cans of ham. He also bought sugar and he bought coffee and he bought tobacco, and he bought some vodka, too. He had less luck with keeping these items stocked because for every birthday, anniversary, May Day, the vodka was broken open and the tobacco smoked and the coffee drunk and the sugar put into bread and pie dough and tea. Deda was a man unable to deny his family anything, but he denied himself. So on his own birthday he refused to open the vodka. But Babushka still opened the bag of sugar to make him blueberry pie. The one thing that remained constant and grew by a can or two each month was the ham, which everyone hated and no one ate.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

Tatiasha, my wife, I got cookies from you and Janie, anxious medical advice from Gordon Pasha (tell him you gave me a gallon of silver nitrate), some sharp sticks from Harry (nearly cried). I’m saddling up, I’m good to go. From you I got a letter that I could tell you wrote very late at night. It was filled with the sorts of things a wife of twenty-seven years should not write to her far-away and desperate husband, though this husband was glad and grateful to read and re-read them. Tom Richter saw the care package you sent with the preacher cookies and said, “Wow, man. You must still be doing something right.” I leveled a long look at him and said, “It’s good to know nothing’s changed in the army in twenty years.” Imagine what he might have said had he been privy to the fervent sentiments in your letter. No, I have not eaten any poison berries, or poison mushrooms, or poison anything. The U.S. Army feeds its men. Have you seen a C-ration? Franks and beans, beefsteak, crackers, fruit, cheese, peanut butter, coffee, cocoa, sacks of sugar(!). It’s enough to make a Soviet blockade girl cry. We’re going out on a little scoping mission early tomorrow morning. I’ll call when I come back. I tried to call you today, but the phone lines were jammed. It’s unbelievable. No wonder Ant only called once a year. I would’ve liked to hear your voice though: you know, one word from you before battle, that sort of thing . . . Preacher cookies, by the way, BIG success among war-weary soldiers. Say hi to the kids. Stop teaching Janie back flip dives. Do you remember what you’re supposed to do now? Kiss the palm of your hand and press it against your heart.   Alexander   P.S. I’m getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It’s six and you’re not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you’re tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you’re running after him. You’re wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory. I love you, babe.

Ideally, I wanted to become a vegetable. The vegetables were not afraid of anything. The carrots were fucking the earth. The carrots and onions were having better sex than me. Zucchini made scandalous love to paneer, mushrooms, garlic and tomatoes. Basil coated the deep interiors of fully swollen pasta, with names sexier than shapes. R-i-g-a-t-o-n-i! F-u-s-i-l-i! C-o-n-c-h-i-g-l-i-e! Gulmarg salad licked walnut chutney in public. Even brinjal (that humble eggplant), swimming in a pot of morkozhambu, insisted on having more pleasure than me.

Luckily, there are much faster ways to kill off your loved ones,” she continued, walking to her easel, where a selection of mushroom drawings was on display, “and mushrooms are an excellent place to start. If it were me, I’d opt for the Amanita phalloides,” she said, tapping one of the drawings, “also known as the death cap mushroom. Not only does its poison withstand high heat, making it a go-to ingredient for a benign-looking casserole, but it very much resembles its nontoxic cousin, the straw mushroom. So if someone dies and there’s an inquiry, you can easily play the dumb housewife and plead mistaken mushroom identity.

In Memory of My Feelings" My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses, in the desert taste of chilled anisette. At times, withdrawn, I rise into the cool skies and gaze on at the imponderable world with the simple identification of my colleagues, the mountains. Manfred climbs to my nape, speaks, but I do not hear him, I'm too blue. An elephant takes up his trumpet, money flutters from the windows of cries, silk stretching its mirror across shoulder blades. A gun is "fired." One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes, and underneath their hooves as they round the last turn my lips are scarred and brown, brushed by tails, masked in dirt's lust, definition, open mouths gasping for the cries of the bettors for the lungs of earth. So many of my transparencies could not resist the race! Terror in earth, dried mushrooms, pink feathers, tickets, a flaking moon drifting across the muddied teeth, the imperceptible moan of covered breathing, love of the serpent! I am underneath its leaves as the hunter crackles and pants and bursts, as the barrage balloon drifts behind a cloud and animal death whips out its flashlight, whistling and slipping the glove off the trigger hand. The serpent's eyes redden at sight of those thorny fingernails, he is so smooth! My transparent selves flail about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic, with a certain justice of response and presently the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.

Those are the moments I’m proud of. The times I saw through them. The times I made them work to break me, even though I knew they would. The times I questioned the lies being fed to me, though everyone around me believed. I learned early that if everyone around you has their head bowed, their eyes shut tight—keep your eyes open and look around. I’m reflexively suspicious of anyone who stands on a soapbox. Tell me you have the answers and I’ll know you’re trying to sell me something. I’m as wary of certainty as I am of good vibes and positive thinking. They’re delusions that allow you to ignore reality and lay the blame at the feet of those suffering. They just didn’t follow the rules, or think positively enough. They brought it on themselves. I don’t have the answers. Maybe depression’s the natural reaction to a world full of cruelty and pain. But the thing I know about depression is if you want to survive it, you have to train yourself to hold on; when you can see no reason to keep going, you cannot imagine a future worth seeing, you keep moving anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s hope. It’s a muscle you exercise so it’s strong when you need it. You feed it with books and art and dogs who rest their head on your leg, and human connection with people who are genuinely interested and excited; you feed it with growing a tomato and baking sourdough and making a baby laugh and standing at the edge of oceans and feeling a horse’s whiskers on your palm and bear hugs and late-night talks over whiskey and a warm happy sigh on your neck and the unexpected perfect song on the radio, and mushroom trips with a friend who giggles at the way the trees aren’t acting right, and jumping in creeks, and lying in the grass under the stars, and driving with the windows down on a swirly two-lane road. You stock up like a fucking prepper buying tubs of chipped beef and powdered milk and ammo. You stock up so some part of you knows and remembers, even in the dark, all that’s worth saving in this world. It’s comforting to know what happens next. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that no one fucking knows. And it’s terrifying. I don’t dream of a home and a family, a career and financial stability. I dream of living. And my inner voice, defective though it may be, still tells me happiness and peace, belonging and love, all lie just around the next corner, the next city, the next country. Just keep moving and hope the next place will be better. It has to be. Just around the next bend, everything is beautiful. And it breaks my heart.

Finns have a deep and abiding love of their country’s forests and lakes. In July Finland is one of the world’s most relaxing, joyful places to be – a reason Finns traditionally have not been big travellers. After the long winter, why miss the best their country has to offer? Finns head en masse for the mökki (summer cottage) from midsummer until the end of the July holidays. Most Finns of any age could forage in a forest for an hour at the right time of year and emerge with a feast of fresh berries, wild mushrooms and probably a fish or two. City-dwelling Finns are far more in touch with nature than most of their European equivalents.

To write about that now, when only ten years have gone by. Write about it? I think it's senseless. You can't explain it, you can't understand it. We’ll still try to imagine something that looks like our own lives now. I've tried it and it doesn’t work. The Chernobyl explosion gave us the mythology of Chernobyl. The papers and magazines compete to see who can write the most frightening article. People who weren't there love to be frightened. Everyone read about mushrooms the size of human heads, but no one actually found them. So instead of writing, you should record. Document. Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl—there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

Driven by heartache, she beat the eggs even more vigorously until the glossy meringue quickly formed into stiff, bird's beak peaks. "Philippe, do you have any orange liqueur?" Marie asked, rummaging through her brother's pantry. "Here it is," Philippe said, handing a corked bottle to her. "What are you making?" "A bûche de Noël," Danielle said, concentrating on her task. Carefully measuring each rationed ingredient, she combined sugar and flour in another bowl, grated orange zest, added the liqueur, and folded the meringue into the mixture. "It's not Christmas without a traditional Yuletide log." Marie ran a finger down a page of an old recipe book, reading directions for the sponge cake, or biscuit. "'Spread into a shallow pan and bake for ten minutes.'" "I wouldn't know about that," Philippe said. "I don't celebrate your husband's holiday," he said pointedly to Marie. "Let's not dredge up that old argument, mon frère," Marie said, softening her words with a smile. "I converted for love." A knock sounded at the front door. Danielle threw a look of concern toward Philippe, who hurried to answer it. "Then we'll cool it," Danielle said, trying to stay calm. "And brush the surface with coffee liqueur and butter cream frosting, roll it like a log, and decorate." She thought about the meringue mushrooms she had made with Nicky last year, and how he had helped score the frosting to mimic wood grains.

At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dying there.

At some point, Sabine began spending most of her weekends in Arklow, and they started going to the farmers’ market together on Saturday mornings. She didn’t seem to mind the expense and bought freely: loaves of sourdough bread, organic fruits and vegetables, plaice and sole and mussels off the fish van, which came up from Kilmore Quay. Once, he’d seen her pay three euros for an ordinary-looking head of cabbage. In August, she went out along the back roads with the colander, picking blackberries off the hedges. Then, in September, a local farmer told her that she could gather the wild mushrooms from his fields. She made blackberry jam, mushroom soup. Almost everything she brought home she cooked with apparent light-handedness and ease, with what Cathal took to be love.

What sort of pasta are you making?" "Pasta con funghi." He watched as she took a bowl of strange, round, reddish brown mushrooms out of the larder. The air immediately filled with their rich, earthy scent. Ripe as a well-cellared cheese, but tinged with the odors of leaf mold and decay, it reminded him a little of the smell of offal in his native Roman dishes. "How many kinds of funghi do you cook with?" he asked. "Oh, hundreds. It just depends on what I find in the woods." "You pick these yourself?" "Of course." As the smell of funghi combined with the scent of hot butter and garlic in the frying pan, Bruno felt his nostrils flare. And not just his nostrils. The smell was stirring up his blood, awakening sensation in a part of him that had been quiescent for a long time.

How is my English?” Tatiana asked Alexander in English. “It’s good,” Alexander replied in English. It was late morning. They were walking through the dense deciduous riverbank woods a few kilometers from home, with two buckets for blueberries, and they were supposed to be talking only in English, but Tatiana backtracked and said in Russian, “I’m reading much better than I’m talking, I think. John Stuart Mill is simply unreadable now instead of unintelligible.” Alexander smiled. “That’s a fine distinction.” He yanked up a couple of mushrooms. “Tania, can we eat these?” Taking them out of his hands and throwing them back on the ground, Tatiana said, “Yes. But we will only be able to eat them once.” Alexander laughed. She said, “I have to teach you how to pick mushrooms, Shura. You can’t just rip them out of the ground like that.” “I have to teach you how to speak English, Tania,” said Alexander. In English, Tatiana continued, “This is my new husband, Alexander Barrington.” And in English, Alexander replied with a smile of pleasure on his face, “And this is my young wife, Tatiana Metanova.” He kissed the top of her braided head and in Russian said, “Tatiana, now say the other words I taught you.” She turned the color of a tomato. “No,” she stated firmly, in English. “I am not saying them.” “Please.” “No. Look for blueberries.” Still in English. She saw that Alexander couldn’t have been less interested in blueberries. “What about later? Will you say them later?” he asked. “Not now, not later,” Tatiana replied bravely. But she was not looking at him. Alexander drew her to him. “Later,” he continued in English, “I will insist that you please me by using your English-speaking tongue in bed with me.” Struggling slightly against him, Tatiana said in English, “It is good I am not understand what you say to me.” “I will show you what I mean,” said Alexander, putting down his bucket. “Later, later,” she acquiesced. “Now, pick up your backet. Collect blueberries.” “All right,” he said in English, not letting go of her. “And it’s bucket. Come on, Tania. Say the other words.” He held her. “Your shyness is an aphrodisiac to me. Say them.” Tatiana, breathless inside and out, said, “All right,” in English. “Pick up your bucket. Let us go house. I will practice love with you.” Alexander laughed. “Make love to you, Tania. Make love to you.

The house was squashed like a mushroom by a thatched roof that hung far out over the walls. A pair of windows sparkled on either side of a rounded, heavy wooden door. There was nothing particularly creepy or witch-ish about it at all, except for maybe some leeks that grew on the roof around the higgledy-piggledy chimney (out of which wafted a lovely, homey-smelling smoke). Next to the cottage was a small fenced-in kitchen garden, and even in the low light Rapunzel could see it wasn't given over just to herbs and vegetables. Tall rockets of flowers and pretty, feathery foliage shot colorfully out of the corners. There was even a neat flagstone path that led up to the front door. "Witch?" Flynn asked, skeptical. "Or, like... crunchy earth mother type who drinks herbal teas and pretends the goddess speaks to her?

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn't abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

I do not need a ring. I tried marriage before, as many know. Let me state here that Tom Dennis was a good, decent man who treated me gently and, when I asked, he let me go. I do believe he loved me. But my fiancé was no easy roommate, leaving glasses on wood tables (wood tables, dear reader!) and dropping socks and candy wrappers whenever they ceased being of immediate use; he became like those beachgoers who assume their litter will go out with the tide. I should have known from this that my relationship was in some trouble. But I knew all couples had these fights, and I assumed they were not a detour from love but its bumpy path. So imagine my surprise when (Tom Dennis far in the rearview mirror) I moved into the Shack with Less and this new roommate began to exhibit the same tendencies—socks on the floor, underwear behind the bathroom door, unwashed plates—and, reader, I didn’t care at all! I remember making the bed and finding underneath his pillow a mushroom-like profusion of tissues (for his morning nose-blow) and being filled with…not rage, but tenderness! With Tom Dennis, it was a chore I was willing to bear. With Less—I did not care at all. I stared at those tissues, stupefied. I did not care at all. The difference, you see, dear reader, is that I love him. How do I put it? He is not the best, God knows. He is not the best. But he is the best I ever had. Because to love someone ridiculous is to understand something deep and true about the world. That up close it makes no sense. Those of you who choose sensible people may feel secure, but I think you water your wine; the wonder of life is in its small absurdities, so easily overlooked. And if you have not shared somebody’s tilted view of the horizon (which is the actual world), tell me: what have you really seen?

As she’s scrolling through her feed, a picture from the ski trip pops up. Haven’s in the Charlottesville Youth Orchestra, so she knows people from a lot of different schools, including mine. I can’t help but sigh a little when I see it--a picture of a bunch of us on the bus the last morning. Peter has his arm around me, he’s whispering something in my ear. I wish I remembered what. All surprised, Haven looks up and says, “Oh, hey, that’s you, Lara Jean. What’s this from?” “The school ski trip.” “Is that your boyfriend?” Haven asks me, and I can tell she’s impressed and trying not to show it. I wish I could say yes. But-- Kitty scampers over to us and looks over our shoulders. “Yes, and he’s the hottest guy you’ve ever seen in your life, Haven.” She says it like a challenge. Margot, who was scrolling on her phone, looks up and giggles. “Well, that’s not exactly true,” I hedge. I mean, he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen in my life, but I don’t know what kind of people Haven goes to school with. “No, Kitty’s right, he’s hot,” Haven admits. “Like, how did you get him? No offense. I just thought you were the non-dating type.” I frown. The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

HEJ HEJ! CAFÉ MENU RULLEKEBAB Original (Rullekebab)----shaved seasoned beef, fresh flatbread, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, kebab sauce Blue Kebab (Rullekebab med blåmögelost)----Original Rullekebab with blue cheese Shroom Kebab (Rullekebab med champinjoner)----Original Rullekebab with mushrooms Hej Hej! Special Rullekebab----Original Rullekebab with pineapple, blue cheese, jalapeños HAMBURGARE Hand-patted, local grass-fed beef, homemade buns The Classic----beef, choice of cheese, bun The Gettysburg----caramelized shallots, mushrooms, blue cheese, bacon, balsamic glaze The Farfar----two patties, four slices of American cheese, four pieces of bacon The Gruff Burger----goat cheese, fries (on top!), caramelized shallots, poutine gravy to dip The Valedictorian----pepper-jack cheese, bacon, guacamole (from Rosa's) POMMES FRITES Fresh-cut fries Plain----with cheese or gravy to dip Loaded Kebab Fries----fresh-cut fries, chopped kebab meat, red and white kebab sauces, crumbled feta, diced jalapeños and tomatoes Goat Cheese Poutine----fresh-cut fries, house-made gravy, goat cheese crumbles MUNKAR Äpple Munk----fresh donut, cinnamon sugar, filled w/ apple and sweet cream Bär Munk----fresh donut, sugar, seasonal berry jam, sweet cream Munkhål----baby donuts (holes), cinnamon sugar Special Munk----daily and seasonal specials CUPCAKES Vanilla Wedding Cake, Devil's Food, Lemon, Strawberry Cheesecake, Weekly Specials SEASONAL TREATS Homemade Apple Crisp à la Mode Apple Fritters Pumpamunk Saffron Buns

, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused. By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms. Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer. — Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony—perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped—might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out windowpanes. What did he value? Music, his family, love. Love, his family, music. The order of importance was liable to change. Could irony protect his music? In so far as music remained a secret language which allowed you to smuggle things past the wrong ears. But it could not exist only as a code: sometimes you ached to say things straightforwardly. Could irony protect his children? Maxim, at school, aged ten, had been obliged publicly to vilify his father in the course of a music exam. In such circumstances, what use was irony to Galya and Maxim? As for love—not his own awkward, stumbling, blurting, annoying expressions of it, but love in general: he had always believed that love, as a force of nature, was indestructible; and that, when threatened, it could be protected, blanketed, swaddled in irony. Now he was less convinced. Tyranny had become so expert at destroying that why should it not destroy love as well, intentionally or not? Tyranny demanded that you love the Party, the State, the Great Leader and Helmsman, the People. But individual love—bourgeois and particularist—distracted from such grand, noble, meaningless, unthinking “loves.” And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love’s last days had come.

Matt takes some time to settle himself before he speaks. When he does, he shares an anecdote about how Julie had written a book for him to have after she was gone, and she titled it, The Shortest Longest Romance: An Epic Love and Loss Story. He loses it here, then slowly composes himself and keeps going. He explains that in the book, he was surprised to find that near the end of the story—their story—Julie had included a chapter on how she hoped Matt would always have love in his life. She encouraged him to be honest and kind to what she called his “grief girlfriends”—the rebound girlfriends, the women he’ll date as he heals. Don’t mislead them, she wrote. Maybe you can get something from each other. She followed this with a charming and hilarious dating profile that Matt could use to find his grief girlfriends, and then she got more serious. She wrote the most achingly beautiful love letter in the form of another dating profile that Matt could use to find the person he’d end up with for good. She talked about his quirks, his devotion, their steamy sex life, the incredible family she inherited (and that, presumably, this new woman would inherit), and what an amazing father he’d be. She knew this, she wrote, because they got to be parents together—though in utero and for only a matter of months. The people in the crowd are simultaneously crying and laughing by the time Matt finishes reading. Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives, Julie concluded. Ours was that for me. If we’re lucky, we might get two. I wish you another epic love story. We all think it ends there, but then Matt says that he feels it’s only fair that Julie have love wherever she is too. So in that spirit, he says, he’s written her a dating profile for heaven. There are a few chuckles, although they’re hesitant at first. Is this too morbid? But no, it’s exactly what Julie would have wanted, I think. It’s out-there and uncomfortable and funny and sad, and soon everyone is laugh-sobbing with abandon. She hates mushrooms, Matt has written to her heavenly beau, don’t serve her anything with mushrooms. And If there’s a Trader Joe’s, and she says that she wants to work there, be supportive. You’ll also get great discounts. He goes on to talk about how Julie rebelled against death in many ways, but primarily by what Matt liked to call “doing kindnesses” for others, leaving the world a better place than she found it. He doesn’t enumerate them, but I know what they are—and the recipients of her kindnesses all speak about them anyway.

Caretaking in a relationship is not flowers or date night—necessary as these are, they are the equivalent of a new color painted on your walls. Delightful, but not structural. Structural is unloading the dishwasher when it’s your partner’s turn, or making sure whoever gets home last from work is greeted with dinner. It’s learning about mushroom hunting or musical theater or rugby because your spouse loves it. It is talking about the best of your partner in public, not the worst. It’s listening to stories we have heard a hundred times before as if they are new. Often, it is just listening, period. My father always washed the car by hand before he took my mother out on a date, even after they were married. He would say he wanted it clean “for his girl.” That is the part she remembered, not where they went or what they did. As psychologist John Gottman, who has studied countless married couples, will tell you, it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.

James sniffed at the soup. “I love porcini to bits,” he said. “They’re the only mushroom I’d go out of my way for.” “What about chanterelles?” said Matthew. “Porcini are delicious, but so are chanterelles.

The Paul Bunyan outfit from the bachelor party suited him perfectly. Butthole. “What did you just say?” He has more of my mushrooms poised at his lips, about to be shoved into his mouth. “’Cause it sounded like you called me a butthole.” “I most certainly did not,” I huff, though I guess I said it out loud.

I fell in love with a North African flatbread," he says of the m'smen baked at Hot Bread Kitchen, a thriving bakery incubator in East Harlem. "It lit our imaginations up." The savory, hand-stretched bread is like a blank canvas, one that Michael and his kitchen crew top in countless ways, from clam, celery root, and salsa verde to corn, green tomatoes, and lamb sausage to pickled peppers and mushrooms.

I first tried a cheesesteak spring roll ten years ago at my cousin's wedding at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, and though I wasn't as unconvinced as Shauna, I had my doubts. That Philadelphians could bastardize a menu item didn't surprise me- this is, after all, the city that invented The Schmitter, a sandwich made of sliced beef, cheese, grilled salami, more cheese, tomatoes, fried onions, more cheese, and some sort of Thousand Island sauce- but the fact that the Four Seasons found it worthy of their fancy-pants menu intrigued me. One bite and I knew I'd struck gold. The cheesy meat and onion filling oozed out of the crisp, fried wonton wrapper, enhancing the celebrated cheesesteak flavor with a sophisticated crunch. This weekend, I'm doing a similar riff, but instead of spring rolls, I'm using arancini, the Sicilian fried risotto balls that are usually stuffed with mozzarella and meat ragu. Instead, I will stuff mine with sautéed chopped beef, provolone, and fried onions and mushrooms. The crispy, saffron-scented rice balls will ooze with unctuous cheesesteak flavor, and I will secure my place among the culinary legends.

I love endermite sandwiches and mushroom stew.

a main theme for many of the participants in these trials is realizing how important their relationships are, how their response to their illness is negatively affecting the people they love, and that they want to spend the last chapter of their lives enjoying the presence of others.45 “It helps people live until they die,” Richards tells me, “not just lie in their beds, feeling sorry for themselves and preoccupied with pain. It could transform palliative and hospice care dramatically in the next few years. It’s a very exciting frontier.

there are some objectively decent people who don’t love mushrooms, though I don’t claim to be able to reconcile those two facts.

Chicks are baby birds,” Mushroom said, not even lifting his eyes from his food. “Not women.

I also love mushrooms! I think they are truly magical, and I have had some delightful weird experiences of perceiving the world’s aliveness while tripping on mushrooms on multiple continents.6 In general, the role that fungi play in nature is wonderful—they are communicators, they process toxins, they break down dead material and make it serve life.

He's made her a chicken Florentine crepe. The crepe itself is thin and crisp, a beautiful golden-brown blanket around its savory filling. The rotisserie chicken is mixed in with bits of juicy mushrooms, chopped up spinach, and a very healthy helping of Italian blend cheese. Eden can smell the roasted garlic and the hint of nutmeg he threw in. The first bite is like taking a bite out of heaven. She almost inhales the whole damn thing. It's rich, it's buttery, it's perfect.

But I can't love him, and he can't love me," An Zhe murmured. "Unless—unless the day comes when humankind falls. But I hope that day will never come." In that moment, an assured tranquility enveloped him.

My fingers trail through the thick forest of sweaty pubes before I reach his magnificent man meat. His thick, hard love sword is heavy in my hand, and so hot, it nearly sears my palm. He hisses as I wrap my fingers around him, feeling his foreskin shift as I begin stroking him. “That’s it,” I murmur, smiling up at him. “You like when Mommy milks your big shaft, don’t you, pookie bear?”  My grip tightens, and his head lifts off the pillow, his body tightening. Leaning down, I nibble at his dark red mushroom head, making little snacking sounds. “Nom nom nom,” I mumble around him. “So yummy. Mommy could just eat you right up.

Oh, Adonis, sweet baby lord on his throne. My gash is trembling, waiting for your lover's lance to enter. My cavern is hungry, nay, starving for a fraction of what only you can give. Pump me hard, as hard as you can, before pulling your bulbous mushroom out and splattering me with your love.

The expensive wine coated my throat with warm notes of fig and vanilla. Mozzarella melted like cream on my tongue and a jumble of lacy and tubular wild mushrooms lent an earthy heartiness to a glistening plate of homemade pappardelle.The dessert- my litmus test for any restaurant, of course- was a flourless chocolate cake so dense and rich that most people would have put down their forks, happily satiated, after a few bites. But Jake knew to untangle his hand from mine when the waiter set the two plates down on the table. Within minutes, I'd finished my entire slice. 'Be still,' I thought, 'o heart of mine,' when I looked up to see that Jake had also scraped his plate clean. 'Finally,' I thought, grinning at him, not caring that my teeth were probably stained a lovely shade of dark chocolate. 'A real man.

Steve about this… ever!   I got home just before Steve and had enough time to put Charlie back into his pen, and the saddle back in Steve’s chest. Over dinner, I told Steve I had a present for him -- his very own donkey to ride. I said I found it in the woods by our place while looking for mushrooms for soup.   He seemed to love the present. He said he could use the donkey to carry loads to and from the mines. I hadn’t even thought of that, but I said that was exactly why I brought him the donkey. He just had to comment, though, that a horse would have been better. Why can’t he just be nice and grateful?   6:15pm Steve is lazy. He didn’t even collect and restack the bowls from dinner.  I wish I lived with anyone else.   8:00pm The house is finally clean. I went around and picked up everything and put it back in its place and it took forever. Steve didn’t even say thank you. He just corrected me when I tried to put things in the “wrong” chests. I can’t wait for tomorrow.   10:30pm I can’t sleep. I’m too excited. I guess I’ll spend the night practicing my donkey laugh.

To begin with, she would focus on tried-and-true dishes that she loved to make and which she knew would turn a profit. She had a petite filet mignon planned, which she would rotate with different sauces, but she would keep lobster and lump crabmeat confined to supporting roles with fresh pasta, in ravioli and in sauces, rather than serving up whole Maine lobsters at "market price." Her Chicken Cacciatore de Provence was an upscale twist on a farmhouse classic that paired her love of exotic mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh herbs with imminently affordable cuts of chicken. She wanted to serve a Spiral Stuffed Pork Loin in a savory reduction with yam patties and fresh garden peas, in season, which lent itself to a marvelous visual presentation and tasted like Thanksgiving dinner all on one plate.

Bok Choy Seitan Pho (Vietnamese Noodle Soup) After sampling pho at a Vietnamese noodle shop in Los Angeles, I was on a mission to create a simple plant-based version of this aromatic, festive noodle dish in my own kitchen. My recipe features seitan, a wonderful plant-based protein found in many natural food stores. My whole family loves the interactive style in which this soup is served. In fact, you can plan a dinner party around this traditional meal. Simply dish up the noodles and bubbling broth into large soup bowls, set out a variety of vegetable toppings, and let your guests serve it up their way. MAKES 4 SERVINGS BROTH 4 cups reduced-sodium vegetable broth ½ medium yellow onion, chopped ½ cup sliced shiitake mushrooms 1 medium carrot, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced 8 thin slices peeled fresh ginger root 1 tablespoon reduced-sodium soy sauce 1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar 1 tablespoon agave syrup ¼ teaspoon ground black pepper 2 cinnamon sticks 2 star anise pods ½ teaspoon whole coriander 6 sprigs of fresh basil 6 sprigs of fresh cilantro NOODLES One 8-ounce package flat rice noodles TOPPINGS One 8-ounce package seitan (wheat gluten) strips, thinly sliced 2 small bunches of fresh bok choy, sliced thinly 1 cup fresh bean sprouts ½ cup coarsely chopped cilantro ½ cup coarsely chopped basil 1 small lime, cut into wedges 1 small jalapeño pepper, seeded and diced 4 green onions, sliced TO PREPARE THE BROTH: 1. Combine all the broth ingredients in a large pot, cover, and bring to a low boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain the broth, discarding the vegetables and seasonings. Return the strained broth to the pot, cover, and keep warm (broth should be bubbling right before serving time). While broth is cooking, prepare noodles and toppings. TO PREPARE THE NOODLES: 1. Bring a medium pot of water to a boil. Add the rice noodles, cover, and cook until just tender, about 5 minutes, or according to package directions. Drain the noodles immediately and rinse with cold water. Return the drained noodles to the pot and cover. TO PREPARE THE TOPPINGS: 1. Arrange the toppings on a large platter. 2. To serve the soup, divide the noodles among four very large soup bowls. Either garnish the noodles with desired toppings or let your guests do their own. Ladle boiling broth over the noodles and toppings, and serve immediately. Allow hot broth to wilt vegetables and cool slightly before eating it. PER SERVING (ABOUT 2 OUNCES NOODLES, 2 OUNCES SEITAN, 1 CUP VEGETABLE TOPPINGS, AND 1 CUP BROTH): Calories: 310 • Carbohydrates: 55 g • Fiber: 4 g • Protein: 17 g • Total fat: 2 g • Saturated fat: 0 g • Sodium: 427 mg • Star nutrients: Vitamin A (39% DV), vitamin C (23% DV), iron (11% DV), selenium (13% DV)

As the milky early morning sun slips in through her kitchen windows, Cosima plucks the blossoms off her yellow squash and begins to make her way through today's menu: courgette blossom and artichoke pizza, wild mushroom and tomato bruschetta, lemon and pistachio cake, vanilla and orange oil cannoli, espresso and hazelnut tart... And into each bowl she sprinkles a generous pinch of paternal love, protection, and devotion.

I was thinking omelets today. Maybe broccoli and cheese?” Sean’s head slumped over his coffee cup and Emma knew she had to say something…without telling her grandmother she’d fed her own fiancé a food he hated her first night home. “Um…how about mushrooms instead?” Gram rummaged in the fridge. “I don’t see any mushrooms. We still have broccoli, though.” “Sean only eats broccoli once in a while, like for special occasions,” Emma said in a rush. “He loves it, but it…it makes him gassy.” Since Gram still had her head over the crisper door, Sean was free to give her a what-the-hell look and she gave him an apologetic smile. After three weeks of living a lie—or two different lies—she should have been better at thinking on her feet. “We can’t have that,” Gram said. “”We still have some leftover ham. How do ham-and-cheese omelets sound?” “That sounds wonderful,” Sean said, still glaring at Emma.

Love is like a mushroom—when you harvest mushrooms you shouldn’t pull them out of the ground but carefully cut them with a small knife. So they will keep growing.

THE TALKING CURE K. J. Zimring | 3996 words Kim Zimring recently moved from Georgia to Seattle. Her poignant story about an old man's memories of a perilous childhood, however, was written in New Mexico, at Walter Jon Williams's "indisputably fine Rio Hondo workshop." Kim is a graduate of Clarion 2005 and her previous stories have appeared in Asimov's, Analog, and the Writers of the Future anthology. My first memory is of my dead mother. I'm crouched by her face, mouth close enough to kiss, waiting for a breath that never comes. An open jar of mushrooms sits beside her, spoon embedded in its boggy heart. Botulism is the cause of death, I presume, though why I selected that for the image I couldn't say. Some warning about home-canned goods wrapped together in my childish brain with the classic Oedipal love/fear complex: Mother, bringing food and death.

And this is Kimmie Elias.” Kimmie inhaled a loud breath. “I had a dream you were the love child of Bugs Bunny and the abominable snowman, but in my dream that was a good thing, and you lived in a mushroom that had secret passages into outer space,” she said. And here he thought he’d already heard it all.

By the time they had reached the woods, it was starting to get light. She led him to where, in the long, lush grass at the edge of the trees, a darker green circle twenty feet across stained the lighter green of the pasture. "Gambe secche. A fairy ring. This one is quite old---it gets a little bigger each year as the mycelium spreads out." "It's edible?" "No, but once the fairy ring's established, the prugnolo comes and shares the circle." As she spoke, she was rummaging in the wet grass, pushing it apart gently with her fingers. "See? This is the prugnolo---what the people here call San Giorgio." "Why's that?" "Because it first appears on the feast day of San Giorgio, of course." She twisted the mushroom deftly off its stalk and put it into her basket. "There'll be more, if you take a look.

Ooh, look." Birdie swerved out of line to a bushy plant full of purple flowers. She plucked a few delightedly. "Lilacs." She thrust them toward Leeda's face, and Leeda smiled, sniffing. Birdie could make something exciting out of anything on the orchard. She knew all the flowers, the species of birds, how much rainfall they could expect, where moss was likely to grow, which mushrooms were edible, and how long many of the trees had been in the ground. To walk across the property with Birdie was never just to walk through unnoticed space.

Old angers are mostly faded now. Guilt still remains. That's something that refuses to be shorter than eternity. I think part of eternity will be my father playing a mushroom trumpet while my mother watches him, the refrigerator door open until the milk sours. [...] I think between the two of them they could have been pretty good at love. Too bad grief made myths of everything.

When I was growing up, the taste of pancakes meant the kind that my great-uncle made for me from Bisquick. If condensed cream of mushroom soup was the Great Assimilator, then this "instant" baking mix was the American Dream. With it, we could do anything. Biscuits, waffles, coffee cakes, muffins, dumplings, and the list continues to grow even now in a brightly lit test kitchen full of optimism. My great-uncle used Bisquick for only one purpose, which was to make pancakes, but he liked knowing that the possibilities, the sweet and the savory, were all in that cheery yellow box. Baby Harper wasn't a fat man, but he ate like a fat man. His idea of an afternoon snack was a stack of pancakes, piled three high. After dancing together, Baby Harper and I would go into his kitchen, where he would make the dream happen. He ate his pancakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup, and I ate my one pancake plain, each bite a fluffy amalgam of dried milk and vanillin. A chemical stand-in for vanilla extract, vanillin was the cheap perfume of all the instant, industrialized baked goods of my childhood. I recognized its signature note in all the cookies that DeAnne brought home from the supermarket: Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy!, Lorna Doones. I loved them all. They belonged, it seemed to me, to the same family, baked by the same faceless mother or grandmother in the back of our local Piggly Wiggly supermarket. The first time that I tasted pancakes made from scratch was in 1990, when Leo, a.k.a. the parsnip, made them for me. We had just begun dating, and homemade pancakes was the ace up his sleeve. He shook buttermilk. He melted butter. He grated lemon zest. There was even a spoonful of pure vanilla extract. I couldn't bring myself to call what he made for us "pancakes." There were no similarities between those delicate disks and what my great-uncle and I had shared so often in the middle of the afternoon.

I've come to realize my market gig is like therapy for me. I've always loved being surrounded by food, but what I have come to cherish most at these markets is the sense of community. I know Frank the cheese guy and Barbara the mushroom lady. I swap muffins for raspberry jam with Josie at Jefferson Family Farms and ciabatta for apples with Maggie and Drew at Broad Tree Orchards. They've started to accept me as one of their own, at a time when I could use the company.

In short, until the Second World War broke out, the world seemed to me to have a range of different gradations of morality and behaviour, not opposites but placed alongside each other. At one extreme was the stern anti-Fascist or even pre-Fascist rigour which was incarnated by my mother with her moralistic, secular, scientific, humanitarian, pacifist, animal-loving austerity (my father was another response on his own: a solitary walker, he lived more in the woods with his dogs than among other humans: hunting in season, and looking for mushrooms or snails in the other months). After that one gradually moved through various levels of indulgence towards human weakness, approximation and corruption which became more and more marked and cloying as one went through the Catholic, military, conformist and bourgeois vanity fairs, until you reached the opposite extreme of total vulgarity, ignorance and bluster which was Fascism in its smug sense of triumph, devoid of scruples and sure of itself.

6 large eggs 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves 1/2 cup crumbled goat cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 cups sliced baby bella mushrooms 1 small yellow onion, peeled and diced 1 cup water 1 In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, basil, goat cheese, salt, and pepper. Set aside. 2 Press the Sauté button on the Instant Pot®. Heat oil 30 seconds and stir-fry mushrooms and onions 5 minutes until onions are translucent. 3 Transfer cooked mushroom mixture to a 7-cup glass bowl greased with either oil or cooking spray and set aside to cool 5 minutes. Pour

Farfar had the Wii already fired up when I stepped out of the bathroom from my shower, the menu music from Mario Kart blaring from the living room TV. Koopa---the cat, not the character---was curled up on Farfar's lap in his spot at the end of the couch. One hand held his beer on top of his stomach, the other ran through Koopa's gray fur, both of their eyes closed in bliss. I sank into the other end of the couch and grabbed my controller. "All cleaned up and ready for your whooping?" he asked, pronouncing it, like always, with long OOs, like the crane. He raised his beer to his lips with his eyes still closed. This was probably number two already. "Not tonight, old man. I'm in the zone, and you're looking tired." His eyes were open then, a smirk on his face, and he produced his special blue remote---the best Lillajul gifts I'd ever gotten him---from the cushion beside him. "Do you need to ease in with Mushroom Gorge, or are you ready to play for real?" "I'm ready for any course you want," I said, smirking back. He just chuckled---without the jollity he gave the guys outside C of C, I noticed---went straight to Rainbow Road, and promptly destroyed me. Afterward, sinking back into the couch with a third beer and a number of victories under his belt, he let out a long sigh. "You did good today, Gubben." I smiled. "I'm picking a new character.

Okay, Gubben, this time you have to pick your least-favorite character with your least-favorite vehicle." I picked Peach, to which he raised his eyebrows. "You hate Peach, Gubben? Seems a little...misogynistic." "What are you talking about? Princess Peach is a horrible representation of women---how many times does she wait for Mario to save her?" I realized I sounded a little like Lou. You know, if Lou's rants ever extended into classic Nintendo characters. Farfar picked Toad. "Seems a little... mycogynistic, doesn't it?" He just chuckled. "Stupid mushrooms." I picked the Super Blooper for Peach, Farfar picked the Booster Seat for Toad, and we spent the next hour laughing and yelling disparaging things at the screen.

Many people have something they love passionately. It could be collecting old farm implements, cross country skiing, foraging for mushrooms, or playing the harmonium. They devote themselves to their interests—obsessively practicing, learning, researching, and talking with those who share their passion. But when it comes to the person we love most in our lives, we don’t do any of this. And then wonder how it all went wrong.

It all comes back to remembering what you always knew. You have to learn to love yourself. Face your shit. You are not broken, you have faltered, as all do. Own up to it. Carry on with your head high. For you are doing your best.

On this planet, we will always lose if our sights are too far. For here, for now, we can love, serve, be, and that is enough.

And they were in love in spite of the ban on reading-even better. They were in love in spite of Mom and Dad, math homework, a French essay, a bedroom that needed tidying. They were too in love to go down for supper, they loved each other more than desert. They were too heads over heels to join in the soccer game or go mushroom picking. They had chosen each other and preferred each other to anyone else. My God, how beautiful love is. And how short that novel was.

I stopped worrying about the precise amounts of tiny caviar pearls that went atop each pillow of cheese, and started looking around me to see what the other chefs were doing. As I knew, Vanilla Joe on my left was handing out his homemade pigs in a blanket, his hand-ground sausages wrapped in what looked like hand-rolled pastry, all served with a variety of dipping sauces he must also have made himself (including vanilla aioli, obviously). The judges were at his station now. From the big, cheesy grin on Vanilla Joe's mustached mouth and the rhapsodizing tones of Charles Weston's and Maz's voices that floated my way, they loved it. I scowled. On my other side, Kaitlyn looked to be handing out arancini balls atop a bed of crisp greens and pickled vegetables. Probably tasty, but hard to eat in one bite---the judges always took that into account. She was laughing and talking with each guest, assembling her dishes in a way that looked totally effortless; was she even sweating at all? Guests wandered by with charred meat on a skewer, alternating with ripe chunks of watermelon and tomato. In the distance I could see Kel cooking up spoon bread with what looked like mushrooms. Megan was frying dumplings, which made my mouth water thinking about the inner mixture of pork and cabbage and water chestnuts. When I saw somebody eating takoyaki balls, I assumed that was Bald Joe's work----after all, the tender balls of fried dough and octopus were a traditional Japanese street food. Somebody else had soup shooters.

Mushroom sauce . . . my new love potion. Abracadabra. Jameson Miles just blew my fucking mind.

Evangeline,” Lisa said. “I like you better like this.” “You would,” Daphne scoffed. “Where is Uncle Jack tonight?” “He's got a date,” Evangeline said. “He asked me to watch Ruby till y'all came home. I was about to start supper, but I’m going to have to rethink what we are going to eat. I've only got six pork chops.” “Don't worry, Evangeline. There's plenty to eat. We just need to adjust a little,” Jen said. She walked down a short hallway that led to the laundry room and disappeared into a closet that had been turned into a pantry. She emerged a moment later carrying an arm full of ingredients. She put two bags of noodles on the counter, along with four cans of tuna and two cans of cream of mushroom soup. Then went back to get a box of breadcrumbs. “Tuna noodle casserole?” Charlie asked. “Yep,” Jen said. “Quick, easy, and a crowd pleaser.” “Yeah, my thighs are going to be real pleased,” Lisa quipped. “Oh hush,” Jen said. “You can run it off tomorrow.” “I love tuna noodle casserole,” Daphne smiled. “Honestly though, I can't remember the last time I had it.” “That's because you eat too much take out, sweetie,” Evangeline said. “So, anything I can do to help?” “Could you check the fridge for sour cream and Parmesan cheese, please? And there should be a bag of frozen peas in the freezer,” Jen said, inclining her head in that direction. Charlie handed one of the three journals from Edwina’s box to Lisa and the other one to Daphne. “Come on, let's start looking through these while they’re making dinner.” Charlie sat at the end of the table with Lisa and Daphne flanking her, and they each began to flip through the pages of Edwina’s most private thoughts. Ruby walked into the kitchen and placed herself between Charlie and Lisa. Ruby glanced up at the clock. “Aunt Lisa, will you come upstairs and read me a story?” Jen ripped open the packages of noodles and poured them into a pot of hot water. “Ruby Ellen, you've already had a story. Why are you out of bed?” “I can't sleep, Mama,” Ruby said. Lisa

All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?

There are many gifts of grief that I would gladly give back in exchange for what I've lost. Still, one gift of grief is the opportunity to explore places within ourselves we might never see otherwise. Just as there are beautiful things that can flourish in dark places, like mushrooms and beetles and shade-loving flowers, there are parts of our souls that flourish only in the darkest times. Since we're here, we might as well look at those flourishing parts of ourselves, the beautiful things thriving in difficult times.

Now the pillars of dust were about a mile from the multitude. They rose till they were about a mile above the hilltop. Then they gradually formed themselves into the shape of a huge mushroom. It remained stationary for an hour, and then it gradually descended toward the hill-top. The eagle-hawk jumped down from his place on the rock, and joined the multitude. The stem gradually came down until it touched the spot on the rock where the eagle-hawk had stood. Suddenly the mushroom-like cloud began to take the shape of a water-spout, curving over and over the top, and dropping spray-like water earthward, and dwindling in length until it measured only about twenty feet. Then a thunderbolt shot out of the clear sky down into the centre of the spout, causing a flame of fire. Within this flame of fire there became visible the perfect form of man as he is to-day. The flame gradually faded away, and left the figure standing in all its perfection, crowned with the glory of intelligence. The Sun Goddess remained for one day midway between the zenith and the western horizon, gazing with a satisfied smile upon her work of conception. This was the only occasion on which the Sun Goddess rested on her journey through the sky. She did this in order to shed a smiling beam of love and approval upon her work, and to show that man should rule the earth and all that remained upon the earth and sea. Then man stepped down from the rock and mingled with the creatures, and conversed with the kangaroo, the emu, the goanna, the eagle-hawk, and that most

Chicken Cacciatore I am a lover of braised meats, whether it’s pot roast or short ribs or beef brisket…or this beautiful stewed chicken dish. Just give me some meat, a pot with a lid, and some combination of liquid ingredients, and I’ll be eating out of your hand…as long as your hand is holding braised meat. That might have been the weirdest introductory sentence of any recipe I’ve ever written. Chicken cacciatore generally involves browning chicken pieces in a pot over high heat, then sautéing a mix of vegetables--onions, peppers, mushrooms, tomatoes--in the same pot. Spices are added, followed by a little wine and broth, and the chicken and veggies are allowed to cook together in the oven long enough for magic to happen… And magic does happen. I use chicken thighs for this recipe because I happen to love chicken thighs. But you can use a cut-up whole chicken or a mix of your favorite pieces. Just be sure to leave the skin on or you’ll regret it the rest of your life. Not that I’m dramatic or anything.

The most prominent chanterelle in Europe and central and eastern North America is the golden chanterelle, Cantharellus cibarius. Cantharellus is a name derived from the Greek kantharos, meaning goblet or drinking cup, and refers to the funnel or vase shape of the fruiting body of members of this family.3 The specific epithet cibarius is Latin for edible.

Emily? Those mushrooms aren’t real mushrooms. I mean, yeah, they’re real but they’re hallucinogenic mushrooms. I was storing them in the cupboard because I didn’t want to lose them the next time I tripped out. So… unless you want to see fantastic colors and feel just as amazing, I would suggest ordering pizza.

I hate to disappoint you, but if you’re considering Miss Harding for that position, I hear she’s practically engaged to some professor back home.” Oliver grimaced. “You just found something that turns my stomach more than mushrooms.” Oliver clutched his midriff, feigning gastric distress. Then a smile split his face. “You said ‘practically,’ didn’t you?” When Ethan nodded, Oliver’s smile widened. “That means there’s hope. If the man was foolish enough to let Miss Harding come all this way without him, he can’t love her as much as I do.” “You haven’t even met her.” Oliver would not be discouraged. “The moment I saw her, I knew she was the woman for me. Now all I need to do is figure out a way to afford a wife. Miss Harding deserves more than a second lieutenant’s pay.” Oliver leaned back and closed his eyes, as if the lack of visual distractions would improve his cogitation. “There’s got to be a way.

No, you're not passing up on A good glorious kitchen gadget. You're passing up on THE glorious kitchen appliance. The key is to get one which has 3 knobs: temperature, mode (bake/toast/broil), and time. Instead of easily making toast, I love to butter the bakery first and obtain it properly caramelized under the broiler. Merely today I warmed up some leftover biscuits and waffles; instead of coming out just a little soggy and rubbery in the microwave they turn out just simply because crisp and very good as if they were new. Pizza tastes 100x better rewarmed in a toaster oven than a microwave; cheese is definitely nice and melty rather than scorching warm and rubbery (like in a microwave). We generate garlic bread all the time; utilize it on bake for some minutes then zap it on broil until stuff are browned. Jalapeno poppers happen to be another prevalent thing I take advantage of it for when simply producing them for a 1-2 people. Roasted garlic, quesadillas, baked broccoli, stuffed mushrooms... all sorts of things that work effectively in it. We guess it creates more impression for smaller sized households, but we use ours many times a day time (family of 3). It's easily our most-applied counter top appliance. In 15 years I've never needed a normal toaster, and I take in an unhealthy volume of toast. Overall, just super versatile and significantly better for reheating anything baked, or doing little baking batches and never have to heat the oven.

The nest is made of butter-poached mushrooms," Hampus was saying. Henry had been so busy fuming he'd missed Chef Martinet's first bite of Hampus's dish: creamy scrambled eggs spilling out of eggshells inside a nest that was, apparently made of butter-poached foraged mushrooms. It looked so much like a real bird's nest Henry could hardly believe it was mushrooms. "In Sweden, we like our scrambled eggs very, very creamy," Hampus continued. "I have added a simple salad of foraged dandelion greens to offset the richness of the dish." "This is inspired," Chef Martinet said. "You have made the mushroom the star.

It was lovely to be cooking with actual food. There’s something so grounding about it. It’s not that I was doing any magic, beyond the magic it is to take big flat mushrooms and raw potatoes and turn them into something totally delicious. I was just making dinner. But I wonder how much of cooking for someone else is magic anyway, more than I know about. I think it might all be.

I take the roasting pan of braised chicken thighs with shallots and tomatoes and mushrooms in a white wine Dijon sauce out of the fridge and pop it in the oven to reheat. I dump the celery root potato puree out of its tub and into my slow cooker to gently warm, then grab the asparagus that I steamed yesterday and set it on the counter to take the chill off. I pull the butter lettuce I bought at Whole Foods out and separate the leaves into a bowl, filling it with cool water as I go, and when they are clean, I pop them into my salad spinner and whizz the crap out of them. They go into the big wooden salad bowl I got in Morocco. When dinnertime comes I'll chop the asparagus and add it to the salad along with some tiny baby marinated artichokes, no bigger than olives, toss with a peppery vinaigrette. The sourdough baguette I picked up goes into the table intact; I love to just let guests tear pieces off at the table. The three cheeses I snagged at the cheese counter get set to the side so that they will be appropriately room temp by the time I serve them after dinner. I might not be French, but all those years there have stuck, and I simply cannot have dinner without some cheese after.

Taking Mayur to the market is a little bit like taking a foot fetishist shoe shopping. He gets this look in his eyes, and he likes to pet the vegetables. I had discovered a new market, open Wednesdays and Saturdays, just on the other side of the boulevard de Belleville. This one was more expensive than my regular market- there were smaller producers, more wicker baskets and baby zucchini. Like most American foodies when they come to France, Mayur was in ecstasy over the variety of mushrooms, the comparatively low cost of oysters, foie gras, and, of course, champagne. I thought he was going to cheer when he saw the scallops. "They sell them live," he said, loading us up with three kilos. They offered to shell them for us. "Non, non," he insisted with a defiant wave. "We'll do it ourselves.

Like, how did you get him? No offense. I just thought you were the non-dating type.” I frown. The non-dating type? What kind of type is that? A little mushroom who sits at home in a semidark room growing moss?

Kale Kohlrabi Leeks Lettuce Mushrooms Mustard greens Onions Parsley Pumpkin Radicchio Radishes Shallots Spinach Squash (acorn, butternut, spaghetti, summer, winter) Swiss chard Tomatoes Turnips Turnip greens Watercress Zucchini

From time to time she tasted his food. The sausage was delicious, seasoned with ginger and spices. His sides were all buttery and rich- the mushrooms sautéed in butter, the tattie scones cooked in butter. She tried the black pudding with trepidation. It wasn't her favorite item, but it wasn't awful. It tasted a bit like liverwurst mixed with oatmeal. All of his dishes were rich and heavy. She had to lighten up their menu. Her vegetables looked beautiful- red and yellow tomatoes, grilled Portobello mushrooms, purple potatoes. Colorful, bright, bursting with flavor. She prepared an orange marmalade, another Scottish specialty, and paired it with crispy challah toast. Cady and Em would have loved that part. The fruit salad was all citrus and lemon basil. The sauce fruity and tart.

Home Cooking: The Comforts of Old Family Favorites." Easy. Baked macaroni and cheese with crunchy bread crumbs on top; simple mashed potatoes with no garlic and lots of cream and butter; meatloaf with sage and a sweet tomato sauce topping. Not that I experienced these things in my house growing up, but these are the foods everyone thinks of as old family favorites, only improved. If nothing else, my job is to create a dreamlike state for readers in which they feel that everything will be all right if only they find just the right recipe to bring their kids back to the table, seduce their husbands into loving them again, making their friends and neighbors envious. I'm tapping my keyboard, thinking, what else?, when it hits me like a soft thud in the chest. I want to write about my family's favorites, the strange foods that comforted us in tense moments around the dinner table. Mom's Midwestern "hot dish": layers of browned hamburger, canned vegetable soup, canned sliced potatoes, topped with canned cream of mushroom soup. I haven't tasted it in years. Her lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, walnuts, and canned pineapple, her potato salad with French dressing instead of mayo. I have a craving, too, for Dad's grilling marinade. "Shecret Shauce" he called it in those rare moments of levity when he'd perform the one culinary task he was willing to do. I'd lean shyly against the counter and watch as he poured ingredients into a rectangular cake pan. Vegetable oil, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper, and then he'd finish it off with the secret ingredient: a can of fruit cocktail. Somehow the sweetness of the syrup was perfect against the salty soy and the biting garlic. Everything he cooked on the grill, save hamburgers and hot dogs, first bathed in this marinade overnight in the refrigerator. Rump roasts, pork chops, chicken legs all seemed more exotic this way, and dinner guests raved at Dad's genius on the grill. They were never the wiser to the secret of his sauce because the fruit bits had been safely washed into the garbage disposal.

At first, I planned to do just a big pot of son-of-a-bitch stew with coleslaw and cornbread, but when I thought about dogs running around the house and thirteen people trying to deal with bowls of soupy stew sloshing all over the place, I realized the idea was stupid. Then I remembered an extra turkey breast in the fridge I'd roasted as backup for a bank cocktail buffet but didn't need, as well as half a baked ham shank I'd kept to make sandwiches and nibble on. Wham! It dawned on me: a sumptuous turkey and ham casserole with mushrooms and cheese and water chestnuts and sherry. The perfect bereavement dish. And with that I could do my baked cheese grits, and my congealed pickled peach and pecan salad, and some buttermilk biscuits, and maybe a simple bowl of ambrosia and some cookies. Everything but the grits and biscuits done in advance, easy to serve and eat, no mess, and who doesn't love a great casserole and grits and congealed salad?

Laid out before him were dishes detailed in gold inscription: Tourte de Faisan aux Truffes, Blanquette de Veau, Barbue aux Huîtres, Tripes à la mode de Caen. Simon explained the preparation of each dish so lovingly that it would have suited Zod to not eat at all and simply listen to this man as he translated the truffled pheasant in pastry, the creamy veal stew with pearl onions and mushrooms, the poached brill with oysters in brown butter, the baked tripe with calvados, and the wine they must order to accompany it,

I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them. Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face. I don’t know. But if those dried-up little scraps of fungus taught me anything, it is that there are other, stranger forms of consciousness available to us, and, whatever they mean, their very existence, to quote William James again, “forbid[s] a premature closing of our accounts with reality.” Open-minded. And bemushroomed. That was me, now, ready to reopen my own accounts with reality.

We have pretzels and mustard. We have doughnuts. And if we really, really like you, we have chips and dip. This is fun food. It isn't stuffy. It isn't going to make anyone nervous. The days of the waiter as a snob, the days of the menu as an exam/ the guest has to pass are over. But at the same time, we're not talking about cellophane bags here, are we? These are hand-cut potato chips with crème fraîche and a dollop of beluga caviar. This is the gift we send out. It's better than Christmas." He offered the plate to Adrienne and she helped herself to a long, golden chip. She scooped up a tiny amount of the glistening black caviar. Just tasting it made her feel like a person of distinction. Adrienne hoped the menu meeting might continue in this vein- with the staff tasting each ambrosial dish. But there wasn't time; service started in thirty minutes. Thatcher wanted to get through the menu. "The corn chowder and the shrimp bisque are cream soups, but neither of these soups is heavy. The Caesar is served with pumpernickel croutons and white anchovies. The chèvre salad is your basic mixed baby greens with a round of breaded goat cheese, and the candy-striped beets are grown locally at Bartlett Farm. Ditto the rest of the vegetables, except for the portobello mushrooms that go into the ravioli- those are flown in from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. So when you're talking about vegetables, you're talking about produce that's grown in Nantucket soil, okay? It's not sitting for thirty-six hours on the back of a truck. Fee selects them herself before any of you people are even awake in the morning. It's all very Alice Waters, what we do here with our vegetables." Thatcher clapped his hands. He was revving up, getting ready for the big game. In the article in Bon Appétit, Thatcher had mentioned that the only thing he loved more than his restaurant was college football. "Okay, okay!" he shouted. It wasn't a menu meeting; it was a pep rally! "The most popular item on the menu is the steak frites. It is twelve ounces of aged New York strip grilled to order- and please note you need a temperature on that- served with a mound of garlic fries. The duck, the sword, the lamb lollipops- see, we're having fun here- are all served at the chef's temperature. If you have a guest who wants the lamb killed- by which I mean well done- you're going to have to take it up with Fiona. The sushi plate is spelled out for you- it's bluefin tuna caught forty miles off the shore, and the sword is harpooned in case you get a guest who has just seen a Nova special about how the Canadian coast is being overfished.

Frydah finished off the rest of the honey and the lid of wine. Lily had taken the open bottle with her. Feeling giddy, she drunkenly found the nearest mushroom and curled up underneath it.

Congratulations! Your penis is a Tentacruel! With bulging pink glans and glittering dark blue veins, your penis is filled with quiet menace. When that mushroom tip glows red, you know he’s about to attack! As both a water and poison type, your penis is passionate but prone to jealousy, easily seeing slights where no harm was intended. He needs lots of coddling and gentle licks. His primary weaknesses are psychic and electric types, so stay away from redheaded witches with stars in their eyes! Your Tentacruel’s special moves are Ooze Attack (extremely potent pre-cum, watch out for accidental pregnancies), Clear Body (in which your penis completely disappears, which can happen when it’s cold out or if you hear your mother’s voice), and Poison Prison (in which you ask a girl for so many reassurances that she loves you that she stops loving you, completely understandable and luckily avoidable!). Tentacruel is your penis’s fully evolved form, and he has an HP of 120. I rate it a 10/10, tantalizing Tentacruel.

Mitchell’s never known grief before. Oh, he’s seen others grieving, but he’s never experienced it himself. That’s the curse of the 22nd century. Medical advances have banished most diseases. Aging has been slowed but not stopped. When it comes to the end-of-life experience, most people go out on psilocybin. Magic mushrooms make death a psychedelic trip complete with hallucinations—a voyage of discovery into the unknown. Joy has replaced sorrow. Oh, relatives still miss their loved ones, but death has been sterilized. Death has been scheduled. Death is now seen as a last rite of passage. It completes a life. None of that is true, but it makes the existential fear palatable. Accidents, though, still claim lives.

We have choices! We have her grandmother’s green curry chicken, a spicy lamb with red chilies and Thai basil, crab-stuffed prawns with bucatini pasta and blistered Marzano tomatoes, whatever ‘blistered’ means. She also did a porcini-mushroom-and-Gruyère-stuffed pork tenderloin with a spinach-and-Parmesan risotto, a curried ginger-and-carrot soup with seared scallops, and those green beans with crispy lardons that you love.

As she climbed, Rosemary noticed a set of thin stained glass windows letting in light. But these were unlike the ones in the main hall. Each pane joined together to show a gathering of fairies, dancing around red cap mushrooms in a forest glade. "Who made these?" she asked Mrs. Fairfax, who was behind Ellis on the stairs. "The windows? Strangely enough, we don't know. They must have been commissioned when the house was built, but there's no trace of them in the records." "It's odd to see fairies on a window like this, I thought you'd normally expect to see something religious," Ellis added. "Indeed. Though it's said that the woods between Hallowvale and Osprey House--- the other smaller Georgian mansion nearby--- used to be teeming with the fair folk. So perhaps it's not that strange at all," Mrs. Fairfax said in a wistful tone.

To me, love for your country and identification with your country feels suspect. Although I know that nationalism does not have to mushroom into what happened in Germany, I feel the potential of danger when the American national anthem is played and people rise with their hands above their hearts. I flinch when I see the unquestioning pride that many American children take in their country.