Puff Daddy

Today I took pictures of a moderately sized Puffball fungus (Langermannia gigantea) in my parent's front yard. This one is only about 10 inches wide in the past I've seen them grow to the size of soccer balls on the same lawn. A few years back I ate one of the puffballs with a co-worker (who knows about mushrooms), we sliced it into thin pieces which we then cooked in olive oil in the toaster oven at work. It tastes a bit like tofu. There is some good info on David Fischer's American Mushrooms site, to get to the site you have to click two pop-ups that implore you to read the text on the entries so that you don't accidentally get yourself killed eating the wrong mushroom. Here's a quote from Ficsher's site:

Puffballs are unusual mushrooms, lacking gills or any other exterior spore-producing structures. They produce their spores internally (Note: the spore-producing interior of a puffball is called the gleba) and then releasing them in astronomical numbers. The Giant Puffball, in particular, is a reproductive wonder: Specimens can attain diameters of two or three feet or more, and a single specimen has been estimated to produce as many as nine trillion spores!