8/15/22

Alaska 2022 - A Shortcut to Mushrooms

On Sunday (yesterday) everybody went to F Street Station downtown for brunch.  This place wasn't on my radar but the current establishment and previous ones under different ownership have been around since the 1940s.

The bar is reminiscent of a city pub that you may find in the UK and their food menu is...impressive.  They're known for their weekend Eggs Benedict but I enjoyed the chicken fried steak for breakfast.  Hans jealously observed many customers ordering up hefty plates of seafood.

Sitting at one of the corners of the bar is a 40-pound block of Tillamook cheddar.  A sign overhead says "For display only do not eat", the joke being that patrons are welcome to grab the nearby slicer and hack of chunks to snack on.  I will admit that even in the age of COVID a gigantic block of communal cheese was too much temptation to pass up for me and Hans' sister.  Foreshadowing...

The young waitress who served our table was wearing company merch and the back of her hoodie had the same slogan as the cheese.

After our meal we did a little bit of downtown shopping.  The rest of the day was pretty quiet (I think we were still a bit jet lagged).

Downtown has many public gardens and the dahlias were in full bloom 

Today we were quite a bit more productive!  Hans and I forgot to pack our disc golf stuff for this trip so we headed over to a used sports equipment store and bought way too many discs (I got a cool one with spooky holographic Jack-o-lanterns all over it).

Hans' sister had an appointment so Hans and I had brunch at a popular restaurant, South.  It was still kind of rainy so we drove around the east side of town before heading over to the Campbell Creek Science Center to go for a walk.  Our mini hike turned into an attempt at mushroom foraging.  We saw a guy with a textbook perfect cluster of local shrooms that are like morels but the only ones that we found had been already partially eaten or were past their prime.  One thing that we could say about all of the rainy weather is that the forests were absolutely covered in different kind of fungi.

We finished our afternoon with some beer at King Street Brewing's new location.

Campbell Creek was very full but still beautifully clear
 
 
 I'm not an expert but I believe that this is some kind of crown-tipped coral fungus
 
 
 


 If you want an interesting history lesson about the origins of Santa Claus 
and his flying reindeer do an internet search of Christmas fly agaric mushrooms!

 

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment