You know, I simply can’t keep up with the harvest just at this point. No sooner have I brought home the nut crop, than the mushroom season is upon me. Imagine how busy I would be if I’d actually grown anything on purpose. I can’t think the larger-scale food producers cope.
I harvested the first crop of mushrooms this morning, when I was hanging out
the washing It’s the first time I’d noticed them, though judging from the size of some, they must have been there for a while. It has been very dry lately, but finally rained few days back (I was so relieved, the drought was playing havoc with the late radishes) and that must have brought them out in a rush.
When I first saw these mushrooms, two years ago, I turned for advice to my trusty copy of Richard Mabey’s ‘Food for Free’. Richard Mabey is my guru and this little book is largely responsible for converting me from a callous city slicker to the dedicated daughter of the soil I have now become. You really must get yourself a copy.
‘There are 3000 species of large-bodied fungi growing in the British Isles, yet only twenty-odd of these are seriously poisonous’ says Mabey. That’s odds of 150:1, even if you ate fungi at random with your eyes bandaged.
One of the twenty-odd turned up in my first proper garden, in Kent. It wasn’t really a garden, more of a landslide – eighty or so feet of mud, trees and brambles rising up behind the house at around 60 degrees from the horizontal. I didn’t walk to end of the garden: I mountaineered.
I was very busy earning a semi-honest crust in one of those lucrative but dubious industries you don’t admit to at dinner parties (not estate agency, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bought such a daft house) and so I didn’t take much interest in the garden. But as the months passed, I noticed from my window a spot of colour amongst the damp vegetation. Grabbing a handful of crampons, I clambered up, to find two of the most perfect scarlet toadstools. They were absolute beauties, big enough to shelter a fair sized gnome, let alone seat a toad, and I was pleased as punch with them. Thanks to Richard Mabey, I now think they must have been Fly Agaric ‘very common in birch and pine woods’. They are of course toxic, but you’d have to be insane or suicidal to try eating anything that evil-looking.
Richard Mabey set me off on the mushroom trail.
Having first moved to the country, I found in the local woods in winter a quantity of Velvet Shank, also known (not by Mabey, I hasten to add) by the revoltingly anti-semitic name of ‘Jew’s Ears’. They don’t actually taste a great deal, and are fairly tough, but they are definitely edible. Mabey suggests you add them towards the end of stews where ‘….they will float on the surface like fungal water lilies’. I prefer to add them, chopped, at the beginning; well disguised from guests nervous of eating of fungi that don’t come from Tesco.
A year or two later I was walking on a wet autumn day around the grounds of a National Trust property, killing time before a meeting. Suddenly before me was a really magnificent giant puffball. I didn’t need Richard Mabey in my briefcase for this one. I’d read the Fay Weldon story, and I’d been hoping to find a decent puffball for ages. But the whole point about them seems to be that they pop up quite unpredictably. As this one had.
I checked around, but there was no-one in sight. Swiftly, I detached the puffball, opened my briefcase, and squeezed it in amongst the paperwork. Back home, only slightly bruised (the puffball, not me), sliced, fried in butter and olive oil, sprinkled lavishly with sea salt and black pepper and eaten all on its own, it made a truly sumptuous meal.
I first spotted my very own garden mushrooms two years ago and, working on the principal that they were probably Ceps, I ate them. Not all at once, though. Following tried a
nd tested methodology, I ate a small piece on day 1, half a mushroom on day 2, a whole one on day 3, and, when I still wasn’t dead on day 4, a large plate of them, fried, on toast.
Looking again this year, I can see that they are clearly not members of the boletus family, as they don’t have the distinctive spongy gills. So I’ve no idea what they are, but I shall keep eating them anyway. If you can identify these mushrooms from the photos, please let me know. And if they are one of the poisonous varieties, please do so as swiftly as possible. Thanks!
I harvested the first crop of mushrooms this morning, when I was hanging out
the washing It’s the first time I’d noticed them, though judging from the size of some, they must have been there for a while. It has been very dry lately, but finally rained few days back (I was so relieved, the drought was playing havoc with the late radishes) and that must have brought them out in a rush.When I first saw these mushrooms, two years ago, I turned for advice to my trusty copy of Richard Mabey’s ‘Food for Free’. Richard Mabey is my guru and this little book is largely responsible for converting me from a callous city slicker to the dedicated daughter of the soil I have now become. You really must get yourself a copy.
‘There are 3000 species of large-bodied fungi growing in the British Isles, yet only twenty-odd of these are seriously poisonous’ says Mabey. That’s odds of 150:1, even if you ate fungi at random with your eyes bandaged.
One of the twenty-odd turned up in my first proper garden, in Kent. It wasn’t really a garden, more of a landslide – eighty or so feet of mud, trees and brambles rising up behind the house at around 60 degrees from the horizontal. I didn’t walk to end of the garden: I mountaineered.
I was very busy earning a semi-honest crust in one of those lucrative but dubious industries you don’t admit to at dinner parties (not estate agency, obviously, or I wouldn’t have bought such a daft house) and so I didn’t take much interest in the garden. But as the months passed, I noticed from my window a spot of colour amongst the damp vegetation. Grabbing a handful of crampons, I clambered up, to find two of the most perfect scarlet toadstools. They were absolute beauties, big enough to shelter a fair sized gnome, let alone seat a toad, and I was pleased as punch with them. Thanks to Richard Mabey, I now think they must have been Fly Agaric ‘very common in birch and pine woods’. They are of course toxic, but you’d have to be insane or suicidal to try eating anything that evil-looking.
Richard Mabey set me off on the mushroom trail.
Having first moved to the country, I found in the local woods in winter a quantity of Velvet Shank, also known (not by Mabey, I hasten to add) by the revoltingly anti-semitic name of ‘Jew’s Ears’. They don’t actually taste a great deal, and are fairly tough, but they are definitely edible. Mabey suggests you add them towards the end of stews where ‘….they will float on the surface like fungal water lilies’. I prefer to add them, chopped, at the beginning; well disguised from guests nervous of eating of fungi that don’t come from Tesco.
A year or two later I was walking on a wet autumn day around the grounds of a National Trust property, killing time before a meeting. Suddenly before me was a really magnificent giant puffball. I didn’t need Richard Mabey in my briefcase for this one. I’d read the Fay Weldon story, and I’d been hoping to find a decent puffball for ages. But the whole point about them seems to be that they pop up quite unpredictably. As this one had.
I checked around, but there was no-one in sight. Swiftly, I detached the puffball, opened my briefcase, and squeezed it in amongst the paperwork. Back home, only slightly bruised (the puffball, not me), sliced, fried in butter and olive oil, sprinkled lavishly with sea salt and black pepper and eaten all on its own, it made a truly sumptuous meal.
I first spotted my very own garden mushrooms two years ago and, working on the principal that they were probably Ceps, I ate them. Not all at once, though. Following tried a
nd tested methodology, I ate a small piece on day 1, half a mushroom on day 2, a whole one on day 3, and, when I still wasn’t dead on day 4, a large plate of them, fried, on toast.Looking again this year, I can see that they are clearly not members of the boletus family, as they don’t have the distinctive spongy gills. So I’ve no idea what they are, but I shall keep eating them anyway. If you can identify these mushrooms from the photos, please let me know. And if they are one of the poisonous varieties, please do so as swiftly as possible. Thanks!
The plate of cooked mushrooms looks delicious -- but you're much braver than I. The only wild mushrooms I ever ate were morels -- picked by my grandfather (who was a forester).
ReplyDeleteMore on http://thegreatmorel.com
Cheers. -- Jim
You are so right Jim! We had a breakfast on Sunday of homegrown mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs with bought bacon and sausages (Note to Self: must buy pig) and my partner went down with a dodgy tummy. I reckon it was the sausages, but he was not convinced.
ReplyDeleteThere's a Dorothy Sayers story where the murderer shares an arsenic omlette with his victim. The murderer has built up an immunity in advance so is fine, whilst the victim dies. Unfortunately my partner does not have life insurance...
The morel (sorry) of the story is - 'Stick to your grandfather's favorites.' He lived to be a grandfather, so obviously knew what he was doing!