The Red Dragon risks her life for gastronomical science

I have a feeling most of the northwest of Europe is actually meant to be a temperate rain forest. You know the longest Belgium has ever gone without rain was 36 days? The weather here is massively shitty, just massively shitty. Like, Vancouver-shitty. But in Vancouver it's much easier to take, because they have things like Stanley Park (a bit of rain forest right there in the city) and the sea and the mountains - most of all, they have trees. Massive amounts of trees. Here they only have a few trees, corraled into a few paltry reserves, like nomadic Great Plains natives all stuck in a shitty neighborhood of Regina. But give this city ten years without human attention - give it a Chernobyl, a Khmer Rouge - and just like Vancouver it would completely disappear under the weight of its own vegetation.

(Having quite a nice red dragon ride, as you can tell - not much personal angst, and only a touch of city-by-city apocalyptic ideation. In view of my job and the fact that I live in a shithole that should be a beautiful temperate rainforest, I'm feeling a bit indignant for the trees.)

But the area around Brussels has a few of the tree reserves. Yesterday, I was going for a little constitutional in one of them when I saw a huge tree that had come down onto the forest floor since the last time I'd been there. Something compelled me to walk up the trunk, checking out this massive fallen giant. It was still growing, still putting out leaves, I was shocked and enchanted to see. Then I saw it had fallen down crosswise on two other logs that had been there much longer. And one of them looked like this:

Now, you know what those are, right? I don't want to type it out in case some fuck googles 'o-ster m-shrooms Brussels' and manages to locate my secret stash. Initially I found it hard to believe, as in Ontario my father normally doesn't expect them until the autumn. But I've checked, and there are no poisonous lookalikes in the area as far as I can tell; also it's been autumnal, as we had that week-and-a-half of fucking gorgeous weather, followed by mighty buckets of rain. To make sure, I sent the photo above to Daddy, and this one of them picked and washed:

He was quite sure they were what we thought they were, but suggested I feed some to the F-word and see how he copes. Ever the gentleman, however, I've just eaten a few of them myself, prepared rather blandly in a breakfast dish. No ill effects so far, though now that I think about it if I do get any I'm liable to confuse them with the normal turbulence of my red dragon ride.

Anyhoo. The real point of this story is that I didn't pick the things above until I'd gone back home, tried to find out from the Internet if they were dangerous, went to a Quaker meeting, spent nearly the entire hour of worhsip wondering if some other fuck had came along and picked them, and then ran home as fast as I could, praying wildly and proprietarily that no one had taken my fucking o-ster m-shrooms. I don't know when the last time I cared about something that wasn't a person so much - my master's thesis, maybe? And for the first time, I really understood Daddy's absolute fury with Mummy when she told one of his brothers about one of his hotspots. Funny, I felt so close to him when I was panicking yesterday, even an ocean away. Even closer when we finally talked that night; one of my graduations aside, I'm not sure he's ever been so proud of me.