p.s. the picture

The picture is of some mushrooms at a shabu-shabu restaurant in Nowon-gu, Seoul, South Korea. (Eunhaeng sagori for those wae-gooks in Korea reading this!)
At the end of each session, the teachers, principal and support staff went out to dinner, often at the shabu-shabu place. We always got mushroom shabu-shabu, and the waitresses brought our jars of cultivated mushrooms to the table. They were so beautiful, and my friend Sarah captured that great picture with my camera... a couple of weeks before she left it in the back of a taxi.
The long, stringy ones are enoki mushrooms, which are quite common in Asia but terribly pricey in the States. There are also beech mushrooms, along with some white mushrooms. And, the ones that look like penises are straw mushrooms. Those are thick, chewy and not so delicious, in my opinion. Coincidence? Perhaps....