During the Dark Days dinner challenge, I wrote a post called Morel Madness. It included some of last year’s mushroom harvest. If you’re not familiar with them, morels are highly prized mushrooms. Although I recently saw a half pint of fresh morels at the grocery store for $15, dried morels online range from $10-$20 an ounce. Around here, morels are a pretty big deal. Traverse City might be the Cherry Capital, but Mesick is the Mushroom Capital.
We usually start looking for the elusive fungi around Mr. Hippie’s birthday, April 21st. The weather has been strange so I checked a few spots early but didn’t have any luck. I came home from work this afternoon to find these:
First 'shrooms of the season.
Mr. Hippie beat me to the punch! I’m not complaining; where there’s one, there are more. Plus, I get to help eat them. 
Some people will tell you not to soak your mushrooms, but take my advice: soak your mushrooms. Last year I didn’t soak some of my mushrooms right away and the bugs that were in them consumed a good portion of the mushrooms. I didn’t spend all that time finding them so that the bugs could eat them.
I put the mushrooms in a bowl, salt them liberally and fill the bowl with water. It chases the bugs out. Let them soak an hour or so, drain them and cook them or dry them to use in the future.
they look awfully small, us old guys cant see them little ones. I need this rain too bloom the big whites.
I’m working on a post with pics of the new ones. We went out again yesterday and found about 60 more.