What's Popping Up This Season?

The fall and winter season, which signals the start of the cold and rain, is a miserable time. I'm not a big fan of the cold. But the soggy, wet environment is great for the fungi. (That's fungus, not a fun guy. :) Today I dropped by the weekend Fungus Festival at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. The festival turned out to be a bust. There weren't much activity, except for a few mushroom promotions by a few of the stores. Still, I saw some great mushrooms in the cultivation exhibit and it inspired me to make a mushroom fettuccine for dinner. The recipe below is your basic mushroom pasta with a cream sauce. What I did to make it special was used some interesting mushrooms. I used baby shittake mushrooms and what I found in the mushroom market at the Ferry Building. They were these soft, furry mushrooms that looked like puppies. OK, I'm not promoting eating puppies, but the fungus looked so cute. They were called lion's mane because the mushroom's furriness looks like the lion's mane. The guy said it has the same texture of crab when cooked, so that inspired me to use another great food in season--Dungeness crab! So throw in some spinach and you have a tasty, colorful dish that takes less than 20 minutes to prepare. Now go out and get yourself some shrooms!