Dennis Desjardin
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article presenting some of the best minds of the Bay Area. One of them is Dennis Desjardin, a professor of mycology at San Francisco State. Dennis is amazing. Melissa and I went on a culinary mushroom hunt in Jenner (a couple hours north of San Francisco), and we were lucky enough to have him as a guide. The idea was he'd help us find mushrooms, and then we'd use them in a dinner that night. Here's the article; go to the bottom of the page.
The way I describe the trip is that we drove two and a half hours along curving roads in the rain, trudged for an hour and a half in a rainy forest only to find virtually no edible mushrooms (the rains were late that year), and drove back through those same rainy curvy roads.
But it was a fantastic trip. Despite all the setbacks, Dennis's enthusiasm for his subject carried the day. I felt like I learned more from that trip then a whole botany class at Berkeley that I took. Melissa and I came home and joined the San Francisco Mycological Society the next day.
And since he had already realized that we weren't going to find anything, he had his mom FedEx some porcini for us to have for our mushroom dinner that night. And you didn't think this was food-related.
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