Sunday, April 26, 2015

Mushroom time

I love Autumn. I love the milder temperatures. I love the Autumn foliage. And above all, I love that it's mushroom season.

My mushrooming experiences have mostly been in Finland, where the locals, from a very young age, learn to differentiate between the tasty and the toxic. The Finns seem to descend into the forests in droves in search of mushrooms in the Autumn.

Here, in Australia, we have less of a culture of picking mushrooms and it seems all we ever hear about are the incidents of people being poisoned after consuming death caps.

On Saturday, Nathan and I went to Gippsland to visit his family. We dropped in to see his uncle in Yarragon on the way back home. He had just been on the farm and had brought home a nice harvest of field mushrooms. We took some back with us to Melbourne and managed to make a very nice pasta dish with them for dinner.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I don't like mushrooms, we picked them during my childhood quite often. While we knew which were the right mushrooms to pick, we may left some that were ok but we weren't sure about. Once we set up a roadside stall to sell what we picked and the first customer bought the lot. We had put such effort into setting it all up and buying brown paper bags and ensuring we had change and the mushrooms had gone in one hit. We should have been happy but we were disappointed.

Adaptive Radiation said...

Nice story. Kids can be so entrepreneurial!

Victor said...

I've never fancied mushrooms.

Adaptive Radiation said...

More for me then ;-)