Monster Shitake

Year three and the shitake logs are going strong.  I pulled a 10" mushroom still fresh off one of our hickory logs.  Commercial shitakes are grown on oak, which wind up with the strong tannic taste characteristic in Oriental recipes.  The hickory produces a mild nutty taste, perfect for the venison pot pie they found themselves in.

After yesterday's haul, the next batch should be ready in a couple days.

Understanding Mushrooms

Thank you everyone for attending the presentation on mushrooms last night.  It was great to see all of the interest and there were a lot of fantastic questions.  I had a lot of fun pulling the material together and presenting it.

Here's the slide deck that I went through.  I have this saved as a PowerPoint 2010 show, which supports the animations with the pictures.  For those that don't use PowerPoint, the second link is for a PDF, but there are some pictures missing from this version.

PowerPoint
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwHk9FK0lKJ3dmt3RDFaN0JnWDg

PDF:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwHk9FK0lKJ3blBublhwY1BDdE0