October 2024 – Felicia Denise, Author

National Mushroom Day banner

I love mushrooms and I love holidays, so obviously I’m more than happy to celebrate National Mushroom Day! While its origins are hazy, credit for starting the yearly celebration on October 15th goes to Australia.

Ancient cultures used mushrooms for medicinal, spiritual, and recreational purposes, and they have always been on the periphery of the drug culture because of the hallucinogenic effects of their active ingredient, psilocybin. However, in modern times, research is revealing that ingesting small doses of psilocybin can have positive effects on mental health issues like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction.

Hm, yeah… okay. But how about just cooking with them because they’re tasty? Works for me! Grilled, fried, sauteed, as a topping, or incorporated into burgers/loaves, I’ve never met a mushroom I didn’t like… or wouldn’t eat!

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, mushrooms were considered a pizza topping for weirdoes and something only vegetarians (then still a tiny portion of the population) purchased from the supermarket. However, my dad maintained a family garden for most of my childhood that sometimes included mushrooms. Yet, even then, mushrooms were used in soups and to make vegetable stocks for cooking.

Mushrooms came into their own, however, when steakhouses like Ponderosa and Sizzler served up mushrooms in a buttery sauce over steaks, and fast food businesses pushed mushroom and Swiss burgers to the top of their menus.

And I couldn’t have been happier.

I married a man who enjoyed mushrooms… or not. It didn’t matter to him. I could add mushrooms with wild abandon to pastas and casseroles and he’d eat them. Life was good.

Then they arrived. The children. The mushroom haters.

To be fair, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, and mushrooms are foods most children grow to enjoy as they mature. As did my three. Almost.

To this day, my now forty-year-old son still believes tomatoes in any form (except tomato sauce) are evil tools of the Dark Side. He and his younger sibs also believe no one should ever willingly eat “fungus,” and my daughter insists there’s a direct correlation between mushrooms and bad credit!

See what I had to deal with.

Making a bad situation worse, my eat-anything husband side-eyed dishes I prepared with mushrooms. Of course, this garnered him nothing but praise and accolades from our children. Bad Mom was torturing her family with fungus!

While I contemplated running away from home, I decided it was easier to prepare meals sans mushrooms and make them a side item for myself.

The sacrifices we make for our families!

Living alone now, I admit to perhaps an overindulgence in mushrooms, but refuse to admit how many packages are currently in my fridge.

My children are still not fungus fans. When discussing meals I plan to prepare, one of them will always respond with, “You’re going to ruin it with mushrooms, aren’t you?”

And yes, I am!

I’ve shared some of my favorite mushroom recipes from my Mushroom Mania board on Pinterest below, but my go-to mushroom meal is six to eight ounces of ANY type mushrooms sauteed in butter with minced garlic and three to five ounces of red wine until the liquid reduces by half. I pile them on lightly toasted sourdough bread with some smoked Gouda cheese, salt and pepper t taste and WOO HOO! It’s a party!

Enjoy National Mushroom Day by indulging in your favorite fungus!

From Pinch of Yum.com