Saturday, April 16, 2011

4-16-2011



We're not so good at finding morel mushrooms, but we're great at hiking...so I'm going to say that we just went out to hike today. I supposed I could say we went out hunting for snails because we had good luck finding these guys, but false morels are the closest we got. All the conditions were right and we even found indicator species like this may apple and these fiddle heads. We should have found mushrooms growing out of mushrooms, but all we found were flowers and some alien thing that I have no idea what it is. This ravine salamander helped us look, but was confused as to which type of mushrooms we were looking for. We weren't looking for puffballs either, but these are kind of cool. They're hollow inside and full of spores. If you step on one they blast spores everywhere (including into your lungs if you're stupid enough to get super super close to take a picture while Nicole steps on one). Personally I think the mushrooms were climbing trees to hide from us. So yeah, we just went on a (long) hike today, but it was fun exploring places I've never been and driving around "roads" like this. We found this goat jaywalking on said road.

We aren't doing Cheeseburger Tour this weekend because Food Network related obsession sent us to Belgrade Gardens instead (and it looks like this). There's a sub genre of fried chicken called Barberton Chicken which is a bit of a local legend and has gotten a lot of press. People brave decor that looks a bit like a retirement home and go crazy over their coleslaw, "hot sauce" (it was really rice with some stewed tomatoes), and of course chicken. Now keep in mind, I've recently been the worst vegetarian ever, but for an entire year I made a mental list of forbidden foods that I really wanted to eat. Bacon took the number one spot by a long shot, but fried chicken was also very very high on the list. So the idea of a locally unique version of chicken deep fried in lard was something I lost a bit of sleep over last year. So I don't know if it was all the mental hype leading up to it, or the fact that I think I've lost my taste for chicken, but meh. I mean it wasn't bad, but for all the Food Feuds and food blog internet nerds building a religion around it...I liked the coleslaw pretty well. Sorry, Barberton.