The house is filled with the earthy smell of mushrooms cooking. It's
not a welcome-to-winter soup simmering or a ragout thickening; I'm
baking a little mushroom footstool in the oven.
That's not all that's baking in that house, you may be thinking.
The footstool is the product of a furniture-making class taught by Philip Ross
at the Workshop Residence in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood
midway through the fall. To call it a mushroom footstool is technically
accurate, but slightly misleading - it comes out of the oven looking
like weathered concrete and feels slightly spongy, like cork. Only the
pungent smell gives away the footstool's nature.
