Foraged mushrooms - deadly or delicious?

So I've been back out running. It's surprised me as much as you, believe me. 

After the Great South Run in 2010, I honestly thought I would never run again. I tried a few times, but no. I was completely all out of run.

Then, earlier in the summer, a thought came over me that it might be worth having another try, so I did, and what do you know, I've got my 'run' back. I've been taking it very slowly, but yesterday was a great day - I crossed the 5 mile threshold. I'm unlikely to ever run much further in one go - the 10 mile Great South was too far for someone like me, who, let's face it is built for comfort rather than speed or distance. If I'm honest, I knew it while I was training, but running with a group of friends, I kind of got carried along with it all. Anyway, that's beside the point The point of all this is that at the end of my very slow 5 miles yesterday morning, I came across some mushrooms.



Now the Husband and I have spent more than a little time collecting mushrooms in our life together. We've always been ultra cautious, and up until last year, the usual outcome of such foraging expeditions was that we chucked every single fungus we had collected into the bin, and put it down to experience. You see, mushrooms really is something you can't be too careful about. Get it wrong, and you're talking serious problems, if not actual death.

I had a close encounter with the possibility that wild mushrooms can kill you a few years ago. Until recently, I used to get my haircut by a friend who had a one chair salon in a very smart shed in her back garden. One day, during school holidays, I had no option but to take the kids with me. It was a nice day. I thought they could play in the garden. Nicky had just started cutting - my hair was wet and clipped up in the way that it is, when the kids came bursting in: "We've been eating mushrooms" they proudly exclaimed.

I established that they had been eating mushrooms that had grown up in my hairdresser's grass.

I was seized with a kind of paralysis. I was of course extremely cross that they had eaten mushrooms, and also that this was likely to interrupt a longed for hair appointment (I know, I know - but bear in mind that this was just after Blue had finished his chemo, and I was a lot angrier about EVERYTHING then). I was also very worried, but my anger took over and I sat back down in the chair and said to Nicky that she should carry on cutting my hair and I'd take the kids to the doctors afterwards. 

I sat there for about 3 minutes before exasperation, frustration and everything else consumed me, and I stood up, hair dripping, clipped up and a little bit cut, gown and all, and frogmarched the kids all 2 minutes down the hill to the doctors, where we spent a happy hour establishing that the mushrooms were not toxic and they would be fine. Fortunately, Nicky wasn't expecting her next client for a few more minutes, so I even had time to get back up the hill and finish off the haircut, so it all worked out fine in the end.

I suppose I had always thought we had impressed on the kids how important it was to check with an adult before eating something wild, and this made it clear to me that we hadn't been clear enough, and I suppose it's something that I'd like to pass on.

(Also, if you're in the Chester area, Nicky's just moved and is open for business up there. I'd thoroughly recommend her!)

Near misses aside, last year,  we seemed to cross some kind of mushroom identification rubicon - well the Husband did. Thanks  to the River Cottage Mushroom Handbook, a Field Guide to Mushrooms and a website called foragingguide.com, last year, he bagged a fantastic haul of edible mushroms which made some very delicious soup. Just to stress how careful we are about this, he does use at least 2 books to identify his finds. It really is something not to be blase about - after all, I'd rather not suffer agonising kidney failure and death, and I'm sure you'd rather not too.

Anyway, the mushrooms I found looked and smelt like field mushrooms, so I took one home and the Husband thought I was probably right, so we went off with the kids and foraged away.

A basket or so later - probably about 1.5 kilos worth, mainly field mushrooms and a few puff balls, we decided to head back. It looks like it's going to be a bumper mushroom year, and there are certainly loads of promising fairy ring marks around the fields, so we decided there would probably more to gather over the next few days.

Just in case you're wondering, he then checked each mushroom individually. I'm not going to even start to give you advice here about how to check them - you need to consult the experts - but having put aside 500g worth for soup, we decided that the decent thing to do was mushrooms on toast for lunch.

Mushrooms on toast is such a simple and yet totally delicious meal, especially with beautifully fresh mushrooms - but if you can't forage for them, try and get them as fresh as possible from the shops. 

Heat some butter and oil in a pan - you want to get it good and hot so the mushrooms fry and don't boil in the juice they release. Try and resist the temptation to cook them all at once - again you want to make sure they fry. A crushed clove of garlic, a sprinkle of thyme leaves and some reasonably decent bread, toasted how you like it is all you need. Believe me, this is not the moment for some pappy sliced loaf.




Pile the mushrooms up on your chosen toast (butter it first if you're feeling extra decadent), grind over some salt and pepper, and consume. 

Enjoy - and then try not to spend the next few days worrying about whether you're going to die a horrible and painful death...

The thyme really brought out the flavours of the mushrooms, so I'm linking up to Cooking with Herbs hosted by Karen on Lavender and Lovage 

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Pretty Salad

We all like to eat beautiful food. I'm not very talented in the presentation department, but occasionally, with a bit of effort, you know, I can produce something that looks reasonable as well as tasting good.

The answer appears to be flowers.

I got a gorgeous little packet of violas in my veg box the other week - that's what I love about getting my veg from a truly local outfit - a family run farm a couple of miles away. The monthly newsletter that came with that particular box included the following:

"We always have blocks of different colour lettuce but this year we are also growing viola, calendula, cornflower and borage for salads..."

How exciting!

We had a glut of eggs, and try as I might, there's only so much cake you can bake. Pink and her eggy bread addiction helped, but I was fighting a constant battle as all 5 chickens were laying every day...

One of my summer stand bys is a very straightforward salad that once started off as a River Cottage idea - probably from one of the first books, where you 'soft hard boil' eggs, so they are still a bit squidgy in the yolk, then serve with a fairly plain salad of crispy lettuce, and a vinaigrette type dressing (by which I mean whatever combination of oil & vinegar plus a little mustard takes your fancy).

We have loads of lettuce in the garden too - so it was a very local meal - apart from the olive oil and cider vinegar that went in the dressing, of course, and some toasted pumpkin seeds and pistachios that I added - a handful of each - and so, so pretty.

I think I will be tempted to put more flowers in my food from now on.

There's no recipe, I'm afraid - you honestly don't need one. The eggs are something I do by eye but roughly, put them all in a pan of cold water, bring to the boil and boil for 6-7 minutes depending on size which ensures hard whites, but ever so slightly soft yolks.

The lettuce should be crispy and wash it well, especially it's from your garden or organic veg box (they may prove that it's organic, but no one wants a slug in their tea...) - use little gems if you don't have any thing else.

A handful each of pumpkin seeds and pistachio nuts dry toasted in a frying pan adds extra crunch and interest.

I learnt my vinaigrette ratios in France, and although I can never quite remember, I usually use about 3:1 oil to vinegar, and then taste massively. Dijon mustard is good, may be a pinch of sugar; salt and pepper...

Scatter with pretty flowers and sigh at the loveliness..

.

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Trials of Dogs and Husbands - and a light but sophisticated supper ;-)

 

Quite often, we save our big meal for the evening on a Sunday and spend the day doing exciting things like shovelling horse manure into the allotment or moving greenhouses, but the weather was so foul this weekend that we couldn't think of anything to do outside except a particularly unpleasant dog walk for which (surprise surprise) there were no other takers (apart from the dog, of course). The dog couldn't care less whether it's wet or dry, grey, sunny, snowing - whatever. He doesn't do very well when it's very hot and slows down a fraction, but otherwise, well, as long as he's out and free: whoopee - he's a happy spaniel.



Yesterday as I tramped (or rather, sloshed) through the fields, and he frolicked ahead, I had one of those pivotal dog owning moments. The dog runs nose down following smells to wherever they may take him. One day he will run straight into something - a comedy tree, or concrete bollard randomly placed in the middle of a field but yesterday he hit a metaphorical pot of gold: fox sh*t. If you don't have much contact with dogs, this will be lost on you, but dog owners everywhere will sympathise when I tell you that even from 50ft away, I saw the look of ecstasy cross his face and through the gale, heard the sigh of contentment as he flopped, shoulder first, into the pile for a good old roll.

"F-R-E-D-C-O-M-E-H-E-R-E-Y-O-U-H-O-R-R-I-B-B-L-E-D-O-G"
  
It's a measure of how far we've come, Fred and I, since the dogcatcher cake incident that he actually stopped, mid-shoulder rub, pulled himself together and (knock me down with a feather) - came back. Fortunately, that was at the beginning of the walk, and it was so wet that the rain actually rid him of the eau de reynard (sounds so much better in French) before we'd got home.

We ate our lunch and had a fun afternoon (actually, the kids had their mates round and built a better than Hot Wheels car run down the stairs using chopping boards with the aim of shooting the cars into the wellies by the back door rather than through the glass, while the Husband bemoaned the fact that he couldn't finish moving his greenhouse* and watched the rugby instead and I laid low and surfed the internet).
 
By the time the kids were in bed, the Husband was starting to feel hungry again. This is a problem with eating on a Sunday lunchtime rather than in the evening, especially when, like yesterday, the kids get their tea at a 'Messy Church' session that we go to once a month. I tend to forget that we might need to eat in the evening.

At the same time that I was staring into the abyss of the Sunday night fridge, the Husband decided to make like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and prepare some soup to feed us on Monday when we both work at home, using a haybox. If you don't know, the principle of haybox cookery is that you heat your food up to boiling and then transfer the pan to a well insulated box and cover it with an equally insulated lid and it cooks. While he was cluttering up the kitchen with the enormous polystyrene box he has somehow salvaged for this purpose, a great big enormous parsnip from the garden, plus (ridiculous to the sublime) his ipod Touch to access the 'app' which had provided him with the basic recipe for soup he was following, I was also trying to make like Hugh F-W, all be it in a more elegant, 'sophisticated light supper' way. The kind of thing the man himself might serve up in that gorgeous rustic kitchen of his...

I found mushrooms, leeks, some dill and a pot of double cream. Hugh would have been proud.

Sophisticated mushrooms on toast for 2


a little olive oil
250g button chestnut mushrooms (wiped if you can be bothered for that extra sophisticated touch)
2 leeks (thinly sliced)
double cream - perhaps 50 ml?
a tsp dijon mustard
some fronds of dill, finely chopped - to taste (frankly, in my case it was whatever I could salvage that wasn't only good for the compost bin)
salt & pepper 

slices of good sourdough bread (if you have it - and do please smite me for being smug), toasted - and possibly buttered.





Heat the oil gently in a small pan and sweat the leeks for a couple of minutes before adding the mushrooms and cook gently for ten minutes or so, stirring every now and then, till everything is smelling lovely. Add in the cream, the mustard and the dill, and stir together, still on the heat, for a few more minutes. grind in some salt and pepper, taste etc.

Serve on the toast. Feel sophisticated.

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POSTSCRIPT

if you look closely, you can just see that it once held squash soup

*In fact, the Husband did progress the greenhouse project - he is in the process of constructing a heatsink which is something I am completely ignorant about despite him explaining it to me very slowly and clearly a couple of times. It involves pipes and rubble buried in the soil and a fan - and apparently my pseudo-tupperware. I am impervious to engineering, though, unless it's about cake or how to spatchcock a chicken, but so far this has involved him disembowelling a hard drive of an old PC for a fan, and inserting it into one of my valuable plastic tubs (valuable because he used one with a matching lid). The heatsink will somehow act as a heating system for the greenhouse by harnessing the sun's heat, but beyond that well - ask Brian Cox or someone who understands, to explain it to you. The Haybox soup was pretty good too.

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