The World of Mushrooms: Cooking, Culture + Sustenance
Enjoy an evening of cooking with mushrooms and learning about their bounty and wonder. Together we navigate the complex web & ancient world of edible + medicinal mushrooms. Learn the basic life cycle and biology of mushrooms and their Fungal relatives. Learn how mushrooms exist in nature to better understand how they grow and how they nourish us. With mushrooms gaining popularity, it’s easier to find more exotic and rarer mushrooms in supermarkets, which opens the palate to amazing textures, flavors and nutritional benefits. Together we will enjoy, taste, and learn ways to prepare them with Olga's ancestral flavors of Greece and elsewhere. Learn ways to integrate mushrooms into your diet and fun ways to cook with them. Olga will go deeper and discuss her journey returning to Greece yearly, and sharing the rich mushroom culture there and how mushrooms have been enjoyed there since antiquity. We will also enjoy a long brewed Chaga tea, a delicious medicinal mushroom tea.
Everyone goes home with a full belly of samples and snacks! Plus new ways to cook your favorite mushrooms!
Mushrooms have been provided by the NMMS + other local mushrooms farms
Workshop is sliding scale $20-40, pay what you can afford…what does that mean, check this awesome info out—>!
Speaker Bio
Olga Tzogas created and operates Smugtown Mushrooms in Rochester NY. Her journey with fungi and plants started over ten years ago. Working with these allies by foraging in both urban and more wild settings, and developing skills to identify for food and medicine. In 2011, Smugtown Mushrooms was established due to a need for mushrooms and growing supplies, workshops, events and community based science in her area. While continuously learning more and embracing the never-ending, unlocked potential of mushrooms and fungi. Olga teaches workshops throughout the world about wild mushroom identification, medicinal mushrooms, biology, and mushroom cultivation. She was a core organizer for the 2016 Radical Mycology Convergence and the MycoSymbiotics Festival from 2015-17 and helped establish the first ever New Moon Mycology Summit in 2018. Olga returns annually to offer mushroom and plant focused tours within her ancestral home of Greece.
