{"id":560,"date":"2013-01-16T07:58:20","date_gmt":"2013-01-16T15:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugscout.com\/?p=560"},"modified":"2013-01-16T09:39:24","modified_gmt":"2013-01-16T17:39:24","slug":"smug-farmers-market-find-113","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/smugscout.com\/?p=560","title":{"rendered":"Smug Farmers’ Market Find: 1\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lion's<\/a>Smug Scout is back from her\u00a0winter\u00a0vacation. Smug Scout\u00a0slightly<\/em> regrets\u00a0that she has been so busy scouting in recent weeks that she has taken no time to write, but now that she is back at work, she can return to her writing duties. On Sunday she was feeling glum about being stuck in bright, sunny Los Angeles when she would rather be in grim, gray, dismal, rainy France, Germany, or Belgium, but a trip to the Mar Vista FM was helpful in distracting her from this preposterous\u00a0longing. The market was\u00a0offering greens at virtually every stand, so she of course bought\u00a0assorted varieties of kale and chard as well as some fascinating skinny-leafed speckled lettuce that\u00a0was almost the subject of this post.<\/p>\n

However, when she saw the sign for lion’s mane mushrooms (along with its name in Latin, surely a\u00a0necessary reference for\u00a0all the\u00a0customers who may otherwise only know it as Japanese yamabushitake<\/em> or pom pom blanc<\/em>), she knew she had found her winner. Smug Scout was attracted by the sign’s promise: “rare – delicious – nutricious [sic].” Now we already know that all mushrooms are delicious and nutritious, and it seems like this one delivers on both counts: it can taste like\u00a0lobster, it is\u00a020% protein, and it\u00a0has been\u00a0proven to reduce anxiety, improve memory, and even\u00a0regenerate dead or dying nerves (or something like that, but you are not reading Smug Scout for scientific accuracy).<\/p>\n

\"Lion's<\/a>So that is all fascinating, but what makes this mushroom so Smug is the fact that it is rare and thus unknown to most people, even other mushroom\u00a0cognoscenti. It also seems like\u00a0it will stay that way because not many people are even able to buy these mushrooms from Tanya the backyard farmer from Thailand (previously introduced in “Smug Farmers’ Market Find: 10\/7”).\u00a0In fact, when Smug Scout says “not many\u00a0people,” she means “one.” Yes, Tanya showed up to the FM with a table full of oyster mushrooms and one single lion’s mane. She offered to sell this solitary specimen\u00a0to Smug Scout. As Smug Scout was photographing her prized bounty, she found herself mixed up in an unfriendly exchange with a disgruntled rare mushroom seeker.<\/p>\n