'shrooms

The weather has been crazy in Austin lately. Cold, then hot again, back and forth, and lots and lots of rain. As best I can tell, we're up to about twenty-five inches above normal for the year; even today, we had a huge thunderstorm, and the rain was falling sideways.

The good news is that the plants are taking care of themselves with all the rain, which saves me from having to do it, as long as they aren't swept away in the flooding. The bad news is that I haven't had a whole lot of time to do outdoor photography in between rainstorms and after work, especially since it gets dark around 5:30 lately. Last week, I took Tuesday off work, intending to go out to Lost Maples, one of the few local areas where you can see fall foliage, while there were still leaves on the trees, but the weather was so bad that I stayed home instead and didn't do anything.

The rain has brought with it all sorts of weirdness, though. Our front yard has a drain to the sewer that we use to keep it from flooding in the wet weather, and that's been open more often than it's been closed lately. I'm not much of a fan of the drain, but I have to say it's a fulfilling feeling to open it up and watch the water drain out of the yard like some giant bathtub. It improves my mood immensely somehow.

The rain brought these crazy mushrooms, as well -- not in my yard, but at work, across the street from my building. I'm no mushroom identifier, but these are impressive indeed -- each clump the size of a small tree trunk.

In an interesting bit of coincidence, I cooked mushroom soup last night, the way Claudia and I always used to make it, though without the creme fraiche that we usually include. It wasn't quite from scratch, but it was very, very good.

Mushroom Soup

• 1 yellow onion, chopped (I usually get bored with the chopping and crying about 2/3rds of the way through the onion and say 'to hell with it' and stop there.
• 1 pound of mushrooms, sliced (I usually add more. Mmm, mushroomy.)
• 1 32 oz. box of creamy portobello mushroom soup

Sautee onions until they're glassy. Add mushrooms and sautee those until they're reduced in size and have absorbed all the oniony and mushroomy goodness. Add box of soup and bring to a boil. (If you're using creme fraiche, you add it in when the soup has come to a boil and allow it to melt down nicely. It's incredibly rich and fattening, but without the creme fraiche, it's vegan, which is a nice bonus.)

And then it's done. Very easy -- I was even able to remember how to do it without pleading for directions from Claudia.

As I was cooking the soup last night, I did some quick Google research on mushrooms and discovered that the cultivated ones double in size every 24 hours. Fascinating, but if that's true of the crazy mutant mushrooms that live outside my office, I may not have a place to work in a few days.