Be my guest - Sally Lynch of Taste Trekkers remembers mushrooms

This is another installment in E,d+bK's Thursday series "Be my guest - my most memorable meal".



Today's guest is Sally Lynch, a passionate cook, a dedicated cooking teacher, a kooky tour guide and a food fanatic.  Sally moved to Brisbane from Melbourne in 2002 for a year and she is still here! She has run restaurants, cafes and wholesale food manufacturing businesses and has been able to travel the world while doing it. She now follows her passion for amazing and exotic ingredients, kitchen gadgetry and sharing her food discoveries from around the world with others. Taste Trekkers is an ecletic mix of all these things.

Sally travels back in time to her first memorable meal.

The Great Memorable Mushroom Meal

Memorable meals are varied and are not just about the food but the smells, the people, the place, the time in your life, the temperature, the tan (ok – maybe not the tan, but when I picture myself back eating these meals I always have a hot tan!) and of course, the amazing food.
Sally Lynch


My first memorable meal experience - that I actually knew was going to be a meal memory- was when I was in my early twenties and I was travelling with a friend in Perth.

The night was balmy, the company Perth establishment, the restaurant expensive (name long forgotten), the tan golden after a day on the beach.

No menu selection required, the food was just delivered - the most amazingly simple but delicious field mushroom was served first up. It was the size of a side plate and had simply been grilled with slivered nutty garlic, fruity olive oil and fresh fragrant thyme and sliced into chunks but left as a whole. The taste was earthy, fleshy and fresh – I can still remember the mingling of flavours and the taste of love that came from the deft hands that had skilfully prepared this simple mushroom.

I have, through my travels, had many memorable meals on the streets in Vietnam and on the pebbled alleys in Italy and on various beaches the world over - since then and possibly many before the great mushroom meal. However none really had as much impact on me as a cook as this single gorgeous mushroom.

It was this meal that I understood the importance of fabulously fresh ingredients handled with love and simplicity and the impact that they have. It is a lesson and a memory I have never forgotten and use daily.