It’s Soup Season!
Comfort food and reciprocity to calm election anxiety
Ever since September of last year, when my husband and I found 30 pounds of immaculate porcini mushrooms while backpacking in the Wallowa Mountains, my husband has become . . . how shall I say this? Mushroom obsessed. He’s read, from cover to cover—multiple times—the iconic All That the Rain Promises and More by David Arora (that mushroom book with the sneaky-looking guy and the trombone). Last Halloween, my husband dressed as a fly agaric, the mushroomiest mushroom of all mushrooms. Through partnership osmosis, I’ve absorbed some of my husband’s mushroom wisdom. This season alone, we’ve gathered hedgehog mushrooms, king boletes, birch boletes, aspen boletes, lobster mushrooms, shrimp mushrooms, chanterelles, candy caps, reishi, saffron milk caps, and matsutakes. We’ve made soups and quiche and pasta and risotto. We’ve gifted our surplus bounty to family and friends. Our mushroom fortune has felt so abundant that, when we went foraging a few weekends ago, I began to think about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and the idea of mutual exchange. We’d taken so much from the forest, but what had we given back?