Here are two truths that I have come to realize. 1) There are people out there with a natural affinity for finding mushrooms. You will know these people when you happen upon them, because at some point in the conversation, they will not be able to control themselves, and they will tell you about the massive morel supply they scored the previous day. When they go hiking, they practically trip over puffballs and hen-of-the-woods. If physics allowed for the sparkle in their eye to be mushroom-shaped, it would be. 2) I am not one of these people.

To explain how I learned this, we need to back up a step, to my birthday last month. My friend Mignon gave me a mushroom box from Back to the Roots, out of which you can grow your own delicious fungi. It was a lovely gift, and one that filled me with trepidation, since Jason and I had bungled a similar gift a couple years ago. Twice. But this one did feature smiling children, oohing and aahing over their mushrooms, on the back of the box, which boosted my confidence. I can do most, if not all, of the things a four-year-old can do. And yet, when I found myself balancing cat food cans in order to anchor a wobbly and submerged bag of peat, I had little hope that this experiment would actually work.

Enter my brush with some mushroom folk at Bonnaroo. Josh Birkebak, an ecology grad student at UT with an impressive mustache and disarmingly even teeth, offered a free workshop on foraging for mushrooms. Josh was full of interesting tidbits, like how iceman Ötzi had been carrying medicinal mushrooms in his bag when he perished over five thousand years ago and how squirrels are total shroom fans, eating even the ones that can poison a human. Of course, it was hard for Josh to get a word in edgewise since other hardcore mushroomers were crowded around his elbows, barely able to suppress their fungal love. If they could do it, couldn’t I? Maybe if I was crap at growing mushrooms, I could redeem myself by learning to hunt them.

Armed with some advice from Josh, I headed into the wilds of Prospect Park in Brooklyn to see what I could find, dragging the accommodating Mignon along with me. Scrabbling about in what we thought were remote areas of the park, we found giant wood chip piles, several rotting animal carcasses, approximately eighty-four used condoms, and a Ring-Ding wrapper. We also found at least ten different varieties of fungi, which seemed like a pretty solid haul for our first time out. But identification is another beast. You do have to be careful of poisonous ones, but, as Josh pointed out, there are far more poisonous plants than poisonous mushrooms, and it doesn’t keep us from eating plants. The bigger problem, I realized when I consulted a mushroom field guide, was that our finds, while pretty clearly not poisonous, didn’t resemble anything that would actually taste good. Despite some poetic names, like Mica Inky Cap and Turkey-Tail Polypore, our mushrooms were not destined for the plate. In the end, our biggest victory was probably managing not to get poison ivy.

A few days later, I was accepting the fact that I am not a mushroom person, when I decided to check the mushroom box, which I had left to sun on my windowsill. Holy moly! My oysters were growing like bonkers! Plus, growing them was like farming for the extremely impatient, since they proceeded to quadruple in size over the span of three days. I haven’t completely given up on the idea of hunting out their wild cousins, but for now, the smell of my homegrown mushrooms sautéing in a little butter is a pretty good consolation prize.