Lip Smacking

My dad went out in the woods with a paper bag and came back loaded with morels which my mother fried in a cast iron frying pan with big chunks of butter. My five-year-old self thought the mushrooms were delectable beyond human description.

Years later, I saw morels in a deluxe grocery store for several dollars a pound and so I bought some, hoping to relive my childhood delight but as I was washing one of the morels under the kitchen faucet, a tiny worm awoke and looked out at me from one of the morel’s tiny portholes. So, I threw the entire tray in the trash and have since eschewed morels when I see them in the same deluxe store, my childhood joy having been erased.

My brother caught frogs at the fish hatchery. And somehow, I’m not sure how, their legs ended up in the same cast iron frying pan where they jumped around while frying. This was so disconcerting to me, at the time, being still five years old, that I couldn’t eat one even though everyone at the table said the frog legs tasted just like chicken. I was glad my mother never made me eat things.

We never discussed the frogs or the process that resulted in their legs being in the frying pan and it is too late now to ask my brother since he died two years ago.I never really wanted to know or we would’ve cleared it all up much sooner.

I don’t eat a lot of wild food, do not forage or compare found things to pictures on my phone to make sure they’re not poisonous. I haven’t eaten a fish I’ve caught or, rather, caught a fish that I would later eat in probably fifty years. Which is, in my view, just as well.

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Photo by Josie Weiss on Unsplash