Mushroom Bloom

I had an epiphany this morning (why it never hit me earlier, I do not know). Here it goes:

I AM A CATERPILLAR. THIS BLOG IS MY COCOON! Duh, Shu.

Now there's a slight chance I'll never take flight and instead be a tasty snack to a big bird or something. But otherwise, I hope I'm slowly morphing into something better than when I first started out. Also, since butterflies have no time to blog, I'll try to remain in this cozy cocoon for as long as I can, eating as much chocolate cake as I can find and keeping myself amused with my blogs.

Metamorphosis, as we learnt in school

There's a story I remembered as I made some portobello mushrooms for dinner. BTW, mushrooms are amazing things to cook. They give out so much flavour and character to the main dish even when sautéed simply with salt and pepper.

So yeah, somewhere during our ages of 7 and 10 years, we experienced an unforgettable day while living in a housing scheme near my dad's workplace. It was the rainy season. Almost instinctively, we knew that after a rain like that, there were usually patches of freshly bloomed (edible) mushrooms in our lawn and hunting for these was an enjoyable thing we kids used to love doing. These mushrooms died almost as quickly as they bloomed and there were no traces of them after a day or two.

This day, however, we were pleasantly surprised to see a humongous area of our lawn covered in a thick blanket of mushrooms!! It was a such pretty sight to see. We went INSANE with mushroom-bloom-post-rain joy, followed by a frenzy of mushroom-picking for dinner. Even my mother was very hyped about the phenomenon and she cheered us on. We fills bags upon bags of mushrooms and went on to collecting them even in spare pots and saucepans. We distributed big bags of mushrooms to all our neighbours, as it is a common practice to exchange food with neighbours back home. We also ate that memorable batch of mushrooms for many, many consecutive delicious meals (luckily, suffering no toxicities).

Warning: It is not advisable to eat wild mushrooms, unless you are confident they are edible

In the years that passed, we never once saw another mushroom bloom of that magnitude ever again.

But D, as you turn 29 today, I wish you a wonderful life to come, filled with everything you need plus many more mad days of joy, much like our good old mushroom days! *big hug*