Tag: mushrooms

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Shroomlicious Meals

Daishu McGriff (Photo: Michael Donahue)

Consider the mushroom.

Daishu McGriff did. She’s owner of Shroomlicious Meals, where she sells her strictly-made-with-mushrooms cuisine.

Her love of cooking began in her hometown of Gordon, Alabama. Her dad, mom, and grandmother, who helped raise her, cooked.

“I grew up in a neighborhood full of kids all the same age as me,” says McGriff, 32. “All my family. All my cousins. Probably 15 of us lived on the same street. My summers were amazing growing up. We would have a moment where we’d all go back home and we’d cook. Make it and bring it under the tree and sit and eat it.”

She often made ramen dishes. “We would put cheese in our ramen with sliced ham and broccoli and stuff like that.”

McGriff majored in business management — and also worked in the cafeteria — at Auburn University at Montgomery. She became the full-time marketing manager at the university after she graduated.

After she took a marketing manager job in Florence, Alabama, McGriff learned that her father, with whom she was very close, had leukemia. He died in 2018.

That same year, McGriff moved to Memphis to be marketing director for the University of Memphis dining services.

McGriff was making money with her new career, but she still “felt a void.” She began going to a therapist, who told her she needed to “pour” her emotions into something. “So, I started cooking.”

She began documenting her journey to become more health conscious in her cooking. “I decided to leave meat alone. Eat more plants.”

McGriff shared her e-book, Plant Forward Living, in which she encouraged people to “eat more plant-based food or plants,” online. “I was sharing on TikTok when I realized I was really into plant-based food, but I didn’t like tofu or tempeh or seitan. I didn’t like having it as a meat option.”

She discovered oyster mushrooms online. “Whenever you’re frying it, it reminds you of meat. I started looking up how people were cooking with them. Looking up recipes and making up my own. One day I made a collard greens wrap with oyster mushrooms.”

She posted the dish on TikTok. “I woke up the next day with a ton of followers.”

McGriff began learning about other mushrooms. She began buying different varieties, including lion’s mane, golden oysters, and maitake, from a local mushroom farm.

She made videos of her mushroom dishes. “I kept growing on social media. Like crazy. And I started getting the opportunity to do meals.”

And, she adds, “People on Instagram started referring to me as ‘The Mushroom Queen.’”

McGriff began a meal prep service after her physical trainer asked her to cook for her and her clients.

Cynthia Daniels then asked her to participate in the first Memphis Vegan Festival. Daniels also promoted McGriff on her own social media pages.

McGriff’s business began to, well, mushroom. She cooked burgers, tacos, and Philly cheesesteaks — all made with mushrooms — at the festival. McGriff then moved into OtherFoods Kitchen to do her meal prep.

She began selling her mushroom fare at various festivals in and out of Memphis, as well as her mushroom drinks, including lion’s mane dragon fruit lemonade and chaga peach tea.

Last year, she held her first dinner, A Night in Shroomtopia, in Memphis. “It’s a seven-course meal. And every course focuses on mushrooms.”

People traveled from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D. C., to attend the $175-a-ticket event, she says.

McGriff took the event on the road. Last year, in addition to Memphis, they traveled to Chicago, Brooklyn, and Atlanta. “We did different menus.” And she’s already booked cities for her 2024 Shroomlicious dinners.

Steve Cantor, who, along with his wife Karen Lebovitz, owns OtherFoods Kitchen, asked her to be the first to open a restaurant at their recently-opened second OtherFoods Kitchen location at 394 North Watkins Street. McGriff is now open Wednesdays through Sundays at the new location. “Long term, the idea is to franchise, but more so farm to table. We want to be able to grow our mushrooms on site.”

And McGriff wants to one day provide mushroom-growing kits, which she’ll call “Grow Mushrooms With Me.”

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Fun Stuff News of the Weird

News of the Weird: Week of 04/06/23

Size Matters

Momo the lar gibbon, who lives at the Kujukushima Zoo and Botanical Garden Mori Kirara in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, delivered a baby in February 2021, which surprised zookeepers, since Momo lived in her own enclosure with no males around. She was very protective of the offspring, United Press International reported, so it wasn’t until two years later that handlers were able to collect DNA from the youngster to determine who the father was. As it turned out, a 34-year-old agile gibbon, Itou, was the baby daddy. Zookeepers found that a partition between Momo’s exhibit and Itou’s off-display area had a perforated board with holes about 9 mm in diameter, and they believe the two were able to mate through one of those holes. The perforated board was replaced with a steel plate, but Momo and Itou will be introduced properly to each other so that they may live as a family. [UPI, 2/3/2023]

Great Art!

Marcelo “B-boy” De Souza Ribeiro of Sao Paolo, Brazil, is known as the most modified man in the world, with 1,500 tattoos covering his skin and now, a new transformation: a “devil hand.” The Daily Star reported that Ribeiro did a lot of research before undergoing the procedure, which split his hand between the middle and ring fingers. “I began to see the possibility of making an opening … through the middle where you can have opening and closing movements and a firmer folding of the hand,” he said. Over the years, he’s spent about $35,000 on his modifications, which also include a split tongue. Ribeiro said he thinks of his body as an “art exhibition.” [The Daily Star, 2/9/2023]

Wait, What?

The Exmoor Squirrel Project, a conservation endeavor in the United Kingdom aimed at saving the native red squirrel, has proposed that people set live traps for the non-native grey squirrel and that restaurants serve its meat, the BBC reported on Feb. 28. “Our woodlands, landscape, and the biodiversity isn’t set up to deal with the behaviors of the grey,” said the group’s manager Kerry Hosegood. “We’re going to introduce them to restaurants in the Exmoor area because they actually make for good eating,” she added. “This isn’t something that we like to do … just target greys. … It’s a very serious project.” She said the grey squirrels have caused about 40 million pounds’ worth of damage to trees annually. [BBC, 2/28/2023]

Suspicions Confirmed

Madison County (Illinois) coroner Steve Nonn solved a nearly year-old mystery on March 2 when he released the results of an autopsy on Richard Maedge of Troy, Illinois. Maedge’s wife, Jennifer, had reported him missing in late April last year after he failed to come home from work, KTVI-TV reported. His car, wallet, and keys were at the house, but she couldn’t find him. Police searched the house, which they described as a “hoarder home,” but did not locate him. In fact, they searched twice, as Jennifer was also looking for the source of a “sewerlike” odor in the dwelling. Finally, on Dec. 11, as Jennifer pulled out Christmas decorations from a concealed storage space, she discovered Richard’s mummified body. The coroner ruled that Maedge hanged himself and that there was no foul play in his death. [KTVI, 3/6/2023]

News You Can Use

Mushrooms have been in the news a lot lately, but you probably didn’t know that Texas has a state mushroom: the Devil’s Cigar or Texas Star. KXAN-TV reported that the Lone Star State’s designated fungus is ultra-rare, growing only on decomposing cedar elm or oak tree stumps and roots in the U.S. and Japan. It comes out of the earth in a cylindrical shape, then “will open up into a three- to eight-pointed star,” said Angel Schatz of the Central Texas Mycological Society. That’s when it releases its spores and sometimes hisses. “It is a very cool mushroom to have as our state mushroom,” Schatz said. [KXAN, 3/7/2023]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD

© 2023 Andrews McMeel Syndication.

Reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Shroomin’: Wanna Learn Some Fungi Facts?

CREDIT: Facebook/Memphis Mushroom Festival

Here’s something useful. Learn all about the science of mycology. Sounds boring. What is mycology and why do you want to know about it? Mycology is a branch of biology dealing with fungi. Still confused? It’s all about the ‘shrooms, man.

A friend who goes faithfully to the Memphis Farmers Market every Saturday and buys from the Bluff City Fungi vendor says she has a theory: that mushrooms are not really poisonous, they just tell you that because some are psychedelic. She tells me this as she picks a little umbrella-looking mushroom off the ground and pops it in her mouth. “Now we just wait and see if it’s one of those poisonous mushrooms,” she says.

Facebook/Memphis Mushroom Festival

Looking to learn some fungi facts?

Meanwhile, I feverishly start googling mushroom identification websites with 911 on standby. My friend is (sometimes hazardously) obsessed with mushrooms for cooking as well as medicinal uses. Wouldn’t it be great to know the facts about mushrooms? Why yes, it would. Take a trip to the grassy park on the Vollintine-Evergreen Greenline at N. Auburndale this Sunday and listen to the experts with facts, not theories. Connect with like-minded people and learn about the ecosystem.

The class will explore two fungi that are in season and growing in our region. Learn the common name, the Latin name, identifying characteristics, how to forage, harvest, or grow, medicinal qualities, recipes, and more.

Mycology Class, Vollintine-Evergreen Greenline at N. Auburndale, 673 N. Auburndale, Sunday, Oct. 25, 2 p.m., free.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Greatest Beer Ever … I Think

CREDIT: Richard Murff

I was dancing with some gal who, remarkably, kept getting shorter — or maybe I was getting taller. It was hard to tell. Normally it takes a great deal of social pressure to get me to dance, but I was celebrating the creation of the greatest batch of beer in the drink’s long, illustrious history — and I was only a sophomore. Murffbrau, usually a bit on this side of awful, had joined the greats.

For this batch, I’d pulled out all the stops, including getting a big stove-top pot, as opposed to trying to make the stuff in a bathtub.

While I worked, my roommate — we’ll call him Alex — walked in with a bag of not-quite-fine brown powder and tried to sell it to me as cocaine. This was a little weird because I was never much of a drug guy. Although there was a lot of the stuff whirling around Tuscaloosa in those days, so I knew what it looked like and, if we’re going to be honest, what it smelled like.

Richard Murff

headier times.

“It’s brown,” I said. “It looks like you crushed up a few Ritalin tablets from that bottle on your dresser?”

“Naw man. This is the real shit.”

Alex was one of those people who acted and sounded reasonably normal until he got high. Actually, he didn’t have to be high — the mere subject of drugs would do it. Mention the word marijuana and he’d sound like the pothead in some campy teen flick and develop a passable Keith Richards stagger. Then his mother would call and he’d sound like he’d just come back from the library.

I passed on the “cocaine” and went back to beer-making.

I’d bottled the wort and waited a few weeks for the Murffbrau to reach its regrettable potential, so I was ready to dive in. Which was about the time that Alex showed up. He called me “Bra” and managed to drag it out across two syllables, so he was full of drugs — or full of something, at any rate. As his sleepy-looking girlfriend drifted back to his room to take a nap with the lava lamp, Alex performed the obligatory head check to make sure there weren’t any narcs hiding in the sofa, and dropped his voice. “We got a lot of ‘shrooms. You shoulda come with. Wanna buy some?” He threw a suspiciously clean bag on the Goodwill coffee table between us.

Now, having a roommate who is a small-time drug dealer has its pitfalls, but at least it’s bohemian and vaguely dangerous. Having a roommate who is a small-time pretend drug dealer is just stupid. I was sure the goon had gone to the farmer’s market, bought a pillowcase of shiitake mushrooms for $1.40, and was now attempting to sell them for $80 a baggie. Which he swore was the “street value.” Tuscaloosa had paved roads and internal plumbing back then, but nothing the urban vernacular would define as “street.”

I’d had enough. “So,” I said, opening the bag, “you wouldn’t want me to do this?” I crammed several handfuls of mushrooms into my maw and washed it all down with a cold, chewy homebrew. Alex was still yelling about how much money I owed him, as I left for a mid-afternoon stroll.

I have a friend who still makes fun of the way I was dancing some nine hours later. I had reason to celebrate, though, for I’d just made the greatest batch of beer I’d ever made; that anyone ever had, for that matter. My technique surpassed those of German brewmasters in their lederhosen, Belgian monks in their cowls, and the English brewers in their tweed. The girl with whom I was dancing (who by this point was only three apples high) left me for some fellow who had not perfected the art of brewing that summer. But the great ones are always abandoned on the verge of triumph.

It was worth it — if only for the beer. I only wish I could remember how I’d done it.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Meet the Mushroom Man: Bluff City Fungi

CREDIT: Scott Lisenby

Bluff City Fungi, an indoor Certified Naturally Grown mushroom farm, has been providing fresh mushrooms to local and regional grocers, restaurants, and farmers markets for nearly five years.

Chances are that if you recently dined out at a place like 117 Prime, Sweet Grass, or Interim, you’ve already tasted Bluff City Fungi’s buttons and portabellas — but most people wouldn’t know that these delicacies were grown right here in the middle of our city.

Scott Lisenby, the mushroom mastermind behind Bluff City Fungi, first started growing mushrooms as a hobby while running a produce and flower farm full-time. “I tried to do mushrooms on the side because I was just fascinated with it,” he says. “I didn’t really know anything about mushrooms — I just loved the process.”

But he quickly realized that this hobby of his could be the best way to differentiate himself from other local farmers. “At first I was focused on flowers and vegetables, but that’s really hard work, and there’s a ton of competition here,” Lisenby says.

Scott Lisenby

Bluff City Fungi

“We saw that there was this huge need for mushrooms that nobody was filling and just sort of switched tracks and reinvested everything into mushrooms to see if it would work. From then on, it’s literally just been small iterations of building and putting everything back into the mushroom business.”

It seems that decision has paid off. Bluff City Fungi has experienced rapid growth in recent years, but with that, there have also been some minor growing pains. To account for their increased production, they’ve needed to move into a larger space; but with a staff of just three people and a packed calendar, that was no easy feat.

“The expansion has been insane because we haven’t been able to take a couple weeks or a month off, and then move, and then restart,” Lisenby says. “We’ve been running our old farmers market route from Oxford to Nashville to Memphis and Little Rock — and we’ve been doing all that while we’re building this, too. So it’s been like doing a regular day and then coming here and doing a whole second work day on top of that, almost every day for three months. But it’s been super worth it.”

One of the best things about Bluff City Fungi is the sheer variety of mushrooms they offer. “We grow probably five or six set varieties, but I’ve got like 30 to 50 species in my actual cultural library,” says Lisenby. “So we’ll bring out some specialty stuff every now and then, just to keep from getting bored.”

Whether you’re seeking out oyster, shiitake, or chestnut mushrooms — or something more exotic — there’s a lot to choose from. And the farm produces about 400 pounds of mushrooms per week, which is both exciting and chaotic for the people growing them.

“Farming takes a level of dedication and gluttony for punishment as it is. But with mushroom farming, you’re trying to create such a controlled system in an absolutely impossible-to-control world,” Lisenby explains, adding that finding a day off can be rare. “Just this year, I’ve finally been able to take some Sundays off. This is definitely more of a lifestyle than a job.”

What makes Lisenby’s dedication to growing mushrooms even more endearing is that he wasn’t especially a fan of them from the start. “What’s really funny — and I probably shouldn’t tell people this — is that I didn’t like eating mushrooms when I started doing this,” he says.

“I just found the blend of science and agriculture fascinating. But over time, working with so many great chefs, they taught me the right way to eat them. Since I got a couple tips and tricks on how to cook them, I eat them almost every other day now. Plus it’s, you know, right here. Easy to grab,” he says with a laugh.

You can grab some fungi for yourself at their next farmers market appearance or through their website at bluffcityfungi.com.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

The morel is the story.

CREDIT: Olexa | Dreamstime.com

Morel mushrooms are the stuff of legend and fantasy. Scattered upon the ground, they look like a little tribe of forest gnomes with magical powers, like beings from a game of Dungeons and Dragons. They taste like an earthy distillation of fungal flavors and aroma, and command respect from cooks and eaters alike, who speak of them with reverence. For pickers who hear the call, they are a beckon to adventure and profit.

This year’s flush of so-called “natural” morel mushrooms has begun to wane across North America. Naturals come up year after year in the same spots, zealously guarded by those who know them (unless they are in Michigan, the government of which publishes online maps so locals can go find them). But the majority of gathered morels, including virtually all of the ones available for purchase, were harvested in the fire-scarred mountains of the West. While a handful of naturals would be considered a decent harvest for a day’s foray, the fire-following varieties can be astoundingly prolific in spots that were burned the previous summer. Sometimes they grow in such density that it takes effort not to step on them. With buyers paying as much as $20 a pound (they can retail for more than $50/lb), good pickers can easily earn more than a thousand bucks a day for their efforts.

Wait, did I say “easily?” Scratch that.

Even if you live in the mountains, you’ll probably have to drive a few hours and bump along dusty dirt roads to a spot that may or may not have had morels, and may or may not have already been picked. Simply arriving at a burned forest is a good first step, but hardly a guarantee of success. Within burns, mushrooms are finicky as to where they will pop up. They prefer burnt fir stands to pine, but not too burnt — some blazes are so hot they sterilize the soil to the point where nothing will grow. To find these fleeting fungi with regularity requires thinking like a morel. They only appear where there is the correct balance of soil humidity and temperature, which means south-facing slopes will “pop” first, north-facing slopes last.

Getting reliable information is tricky in morel country, and those you ask would sooner lend you their ATM cards and tell you their PINs than steer you in the right direction. Thus the expression: “Anyone foolish enough to ask a picker where he found his will be foolish enough to believe the answer.”

But all the pain, frustration and expense of getting to the goods will quickly evaporate at the sight of a little fun-guy poking through the black duff. You quickly scan the area for others, pull out your knife, drop to your knees, and start picking. The endorphins and adrenaline surge with the primal thrill of the hunt as you fill your bucket, and every time you eat them you relive this feeling and the sublime connection to the landscape that it embodies. If you dry them for later use, the feelings and flavors can be accessed whenever you rehydrate a few.

So if you have to pay more than you wish at the market for them, think about the work, risk, gas, and other expenses that the harvester went through. Prices are always high at the start of the season, and will start to ease as the season wears on. So frugal morel purchasers might want to sit tight. Another way to get more fungal mouthfuls for your dollar is to combine morels with your standard button mushrooms. The flavor of the wild ones is so strong that it will augment the relatively mild flavor of the buttons.

Morels should be cooked; eaten raw they can cause gastrointestinal distress. They respond well to being combined with butter and cream, as in the following recipe that is as good as it gets.

Ingredients

1 cup morels, either whole or sliced

¼ cup heavy cream

1 T butter

Zest and juice of one quarter lime

½ medium yellow onion, minced

Pinch Nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

Button mushrooms if you’re cheap

¼ cup dry sherry

Melt the butter in a heavy bottom pan. Add onion and morels (and buttons if using). Cook together until onions are translucent and the morels give up their moisture — about 10 minutes. Add sherry, and let it cook off. Add nutmeg, lime zest, and juice. Cook a moment and add the cream. Cook five more minutes, season with salt and pepper, and serve.