Today the mushroom guy was in delivering mushrooms oddly enough and I got to chatting with him. His farm is about 6 hours from ottawa on the quebec side in a town who's name I can't remember, he wants to move his farm closer to ottawa but apparantly nobody wants to finance a mushrooms farm these days. Apparantly mushrooms are risky business, most mushroom farmers pasturise their "growth medium" which basically sterilizes it so that when you shoot it full of, say, shitake spores all you've got growing on there are shitakes. There's a problem with this though, apparantly the pasturization makes the growth medium extremely volatile and other mushrooms/fungus could invade easily, kinda like how using all these anti-bacterial soaps makes you get sick more often. Oh, by the way, the "growth medium" is just a fancy way of saying the stuff the mushrooms grow in. I used to think mushroom farmers used logs to grow their mushrooms but apparantly it's a bit more sophisticated than that. The growth medium is a tube of plastic filled with dirt and wood chips and stuff that gets injected with spores and once the spores start to grow the bag is slit open. Mushroom guy said the whole process takes about 6 months for fast growers like oyster mushrooms and 3 times that for slower stuff like shitakes. Thanks mushroom man!

I was talking to my boss (chef Richard Negro) about his beginings in the business today and apparantly he has no formal training and the only other place he's ever really worked as a cook was Domus, another similar place here in Ottawa. He was attending a fund-raiser for an art gallery he was on the board of at the time (possibly the National Gallery) and each of the board members had to cook a dish. Everyone fucked up but Richard so the chef offered him a job and since he didn't have one at the time he decided to take it. Years later he'd worked his way up to one of the top positions at Domus and he started looking around for someplace else to work. He had trouble finding a place equivalent in cuisine and quality to Domus so he decided to start one. It's like working at McDonald's, quitting and starting Burger King, crazy!

I was at Shawn's cottage last weekend and he had "How to Cook Everything", great book, lotsa good sounding foodstuff, and diagrams of procedures like boning chicken. This may well be the new Joy of Cooking (which I have but How to Cook Everything is just way nicer asthetically speaking).