A Day Like Today is what Makes Living in the Mountains Excellent!

This has been a most perfect nearing the end of June day!  Reasonably low humidity, temp starting in the upper 50's, reaching a peak in the upper 70's and decreasing to the 70's as the sun is setting...better yet, the sky has been blue with nary a cloud in the sky, and the mountain breeze has been gently brushing my chimes all day.  Excellence!!!  This is our place today, it's a crooked picture, I know, but I have been wanting to update the picture on the header on front page of my blog, but that takes so much time, and I just want you to see where we are today, so forgive the crookedness, if you don't mind...it is not a reflection of the land or any recent earthquake activity (there has been some around here actually, nothing major, 1.7 or something, but there has been some)...anyway, our place, today, a day filled with excellence!

The day has been filled with finding new growth in the garden (woo hoo) and discovering my sunflowers are sprouting (another woo hoo and even happy dancing), working in the woods to cut down overgrown brush with our new battery powered Ryobi weed eater (my new best friend, don't tell Mountain Man), finding new mushrooms in that process and eating them (more to share in a bit), moving wood from the chopped stack downstairs to the wood holder near our back door, baking a new desert creation (no recipe, just my ideas) that I will say was an excellent learning experience (not a disaster, but like Einstein, takes lots of tries before getting it right) so I am not sharing much about it today, discovering a new caterpillar climbing the walls, floors and beams that will soon become a Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly...so many things to share...sorry, I do believe this is a ruuuuun on sentence!

I think of most interest to you will be the lobster mushroom we discovered and ate this evening, along with our Roasted Tomato and Goat Cheese Portobello Mushroom dinner, a recipe I got from my cousin Mitch's Pinterest pins, a delicious, fulfilling vegetarian meal I would highly recommend.

As for the lobster mushroom, it lives up to its name...

 ...ha ha, not pretty, I know, the first time we came across this thing we thought ick!!!  But notice the red shell, and keep in mind it has not been cleaned yet...

...this shows you how big this mushroom is...

...this is once we cut it open, look how it resembles a piece of lobster now!...

...sliced up for cooking...

...and dinner is served!  It was actually very good, meaty, tasty, looked like lobster.  I told Mountain Man we should be dipping it in butter and lemon:) 

It is amazing to me how many mushrooms grow in our backyard, and though much care and caution must be used prior to eating a wild mushroom, we get great pleasure out of enjoying what we find and can eat!  Wild mushrooms only grow for a certain period of time, so we just keep eating mushrooms...

PS, we are no experts, so you are on your own with eating wild mushrooms, look to those who know before ingesting!!!

Thank you for reading my blog, you are the best f/f/r/s/f's, see you tomorrow,
Lise