Mushrooming

It is the right season for going out mushrooming, and I took sometime offwriting yesterday to just that.
The fields and forest at this time of year sport an array of mushroms. Most are not worth eating as they are either only margianlly edible or sometimes highly poisonous. But it is good fun to try to find mushrooms and identify them. And such proved the case yesterday. However, down a steep bank on the top of a birch tree clustered a horde of beautiful white Oyster mushrooms. Now I have never found them in the wild before, so I was very excited. We picked afew but left the vast majority gow undisturbed.

I shall dry them and eventually add them to stews and/or sauces.

I always go with a field guide to identfying mushrooms. Roger Philips' are probably the best. And unless one is absolutely postively sure, one never eats a mushroom. it takes a slight leap of faith, but my dh has done mushrooming since he was a boy. The first several times, he collected horse mushrooms, I made him eat them and watched to see what would happen. As he survived...I became a convert.

Last year, I found parasol mushrooms and field blewits -- both excellent, but thus far neither has reappeared.... still October is the best time for gathering mushrooms.


I had a lovely email today from a reader, asking to be put on my email newsletter list. Thus I suppose I needto get one sorted -- certainly in time for A Noble captive hitting the shops in the UK. From little acorns, mighty oaks grow and all that.


The wip is within touching distance of the end.