This past weekend I noticed that my local grocery store carries truffles - not chocolates, but actual rooted-out-by-pigs bits of tasty and highly-prized fungus.

Yeah, I know. I go there for the produce - the pretension is just glace on the gâteau.

The truffles were in small, delicate-looking glass jars, two to a jar, $11 a jar. They looked odd, like hundred year-old lychee nuts there among the canned vegetables, right next to the carrots and the peas and the carrot-pea medley with the carrots cut into pea-sized cubes.