Surviving the puffball mushroom!

I'm still here blogging having survived the puffball cooking adventure.

My friend and next-door neighbor, Megan, left a giant puffball with a lovely, hand-written note about how to fix the puffball.  Read about it here Notes.

I adore a challenge in the kitchen, so I viewed cooking a puffball, as a culinary equivalent to scaling Mount Everest.

I didn't have much time. The mushroom was starting to put out an "off odor" and Prince Charming was demanding to know when dinner would be ready. I found this site, http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/puffballs.html, contains a lot of useful information for cooking puffballs.

It recommends removing the tough outer layer as that layer can cause "intestinal distress" in some folks.  Yes, that's right, "intestinal distress".  I paused wondering if, in the balance of life, learning to cook and eat a puffball mushroom added significant meaning to life. 

Deciding for adventure and against complacency, I forged on.

This, gentle reader, is when I should have stopped.  You can see in this picture that the interior of the puffball mushroom is NOT white, like this

Tempted to try this in your own kitchen?  Remember these two pictures.  White go forward, brown throw away!

Once again I opted to cast my lot with the fates and continue.

This is when things got really interesting.  The aroma of past it's prime puffball mushroom sauteing in butter, is similar to inviting the whole barn yard into your home, leaving for a few days and returning to the smelly result.....awfully pungent.

The smell might have been another clue that conditions were not auspicious and one should retreat.  But sensing a heroic end just around the bend, I stayed the course.

Which raised another question, when is the puffball mushroom "done"?  The instructions said "when the edges are a golden brown". Which makes sense if you start out with a white puffball, but since my puffball was already a "golden" color to start with, how much more browning is required?

I decided this was enough browning. At this point the smell was almost overwhelming, but I, gentle reader, am not easily discouraged from a plan of action decided upon.  

A tiny piece of saueteed puffball mushroom with a bourbon chaser.

It tasted exactly like the floor of the barnyard it smelled like.

Which is when the whole mess ended up here.  

What you can't see in this picture is the red-faced Prince Charming demanding to know what I plan to do about dinner and the terrible smell which now permeates our home.

I'm not going to show you that picture. It isn't pretty.  

This story ends the way that all heroic stories and fairy tales end:

•  The couple lives happily ever after 
• and the hero learns an important and life altering lesson: Don't cook brown puffballs!