Mushroom Bombs

I've heard they are tasty, so it was great to stumble across my first big ring of Common Puffballs this week. You can only eat the young ones, but it's an easy test... the older ones turn yellow/brown inside and then explode in a 'poof' of dust! They're quite delicate.



They were indeed ok to eat... texture's a bit freaky though. You just can't beat Ceps in my opinion, especially for breakfast with a great pourover coffee.

Cep aka Porcini aka Penny Bun aka Breakfast!

I'm banging on about mushrooms right now, but that's just because every day there are new beauties popping up.  It only takes about a day for some of them to appear and grow to about 20cm tall with a big tasty cap.  Today Jan and I went for a walk by the river up at The Fairy Knowe near Aberfoyle and discovered a bit of a bumper harvest of various different mushies.  It included four ceps ranging from a little one that showed me why they are sometimes called a Penny Bun, to a huge monster of a mushy.   We also spotted a few blackberries just about ready to eat, the first of the season up here.

Wild Strawberries

Lots if these around at the moment here in Aberfoyle. They are much smaller than the supermarket ones and actually taste completely different in my opinion. If you remember the sherbet-filled flying saucer sweets, their flesh has a similar crumbly texture and taste. Definitely feels like a guilty pleasure eating them rather than the healthy option it really is.

Cep and Sausage Breakfast

First things first... I didn't find sausages out in the woods! I'm taking a slight liberty and including some non-foraged stuff on my plate... don't shoot me :)
Yesterday whilst walking the cats in our garden (... don't ask!) I spotted my first cep, also known as porcini or penny bun. Been looking forward to getting one as the book says they are "edible: excellent". So in the pan the cap went, with a little crushed garlic.
The sausages were delicious pork from Powters of Newmarket, picked up by Jan at Heathrow on her way back from London. A little ciabatta, butter and olive oil, and of course Tommy Ketchup. I also whizzed up a juice from some apples and melon. Fit for a king :)

There's 'gold' in them there hills

This morning Jan and I got in the car to take her to the airport (business trip).  At the bottom of the drive I glanced left and spotted a gleaming patch of gold in amongst the moss. "Holy Moly!!" I exclaimed, or so Jan tells me cos I can't remember doing so!  It was a splendid spread of chanterelle mushrooms - the first batch we've seen in our own garden.  We've found a few batches recently around the woods here in Aberfoyle but these ones today were the biggest by far. Lovely big golden juicy trumpets!  Jan was clearly a bit gutted that she'd be away in London, leaving me to scarf the lot.


When I got back from the airport I got talking to Mark, who is our landlord's gardener.  He works hard to tend the 20+ acres where we live, and sadly doesn't seem to get much by way of thanks.  I started feeling guilty at the thought of eating the chanterelles that came from the garden he works so hard on.  So I decided to follow Ghandi's advice (see picture).  I gave Mark the gold nuggets with instructions for pan frying them in butter.  Hope he and his wife enjoy them!

The Books We Are Using

On our first foray we were fairly overwhelmed and baffled by all the latin words, strange beards, and what seemed to be an impossibly large number of different species.  It didn't seem our thing really, but we did enjoy eating the mushies we found so we went back the next week.  On that second day out there were a lot less people (not a weirdy beardy in sight!) so it was better because we could spend time being coached and trained by the guys who do know their stuff.  One fella had a mushroom identification book with him, so my wife Jan was asked to try to identify fungi when we found them.

Somehow this extra involvement made it all more fun and easier to understand.  So we got on Amazon that night and ordered the following books.  They compliment each other really well.  I've never been able to tell an oak from a holly tree(!) but the pictures in the tree book really do the job.  It's good to know which trees are which because species of mushrooms and trees form an alliance. Have a look at the mushies we picked and ate today at the bottom of this post... confidently done partly because we identified the tree.

So driving home from work in the rain I glanced over into the grounds of a local church and saw two great big mushrooms.  After doing some digging (in the ground and in the books!) it turned out they were Orange Birch Boletes, a relation of the Cep/Porcini, and particularly delicious too!  We sliced up the caps and made a mushroom and chicken risotto for tonight's dinner. Bloody lovely!!  I need to find out whether the stems taste nice too.  Anyway, here's the pics:

Day 1. What's this blog all about?

We moved from London to Scotland this year. Since then we've been getting into country living.  The latest thing is finding, identifying and eating wild food. It's fantastic!  We used to pay a fortune at places like London's Borough Market for chanterelle mushrooms, blueberries, sorrel etc... but now we can go for a walk and come back with a lovely dinner, at it's absolute freshest, and completely free!

We're just starting and have a lot to learn, but it's amazing how quickly you can pick things up if you go out with people who know their stuff - and then follow it up with a little reading.

So I think this blog will have a few purposes. Basically it's about learning and sharing about wild food, which has to be a good thing since all the experts are getting old now and their skills and knowledge in wild food is at risk of being lost.

1. To help me learn about wild food, from my own experiences and musings.
2. To help others learn from what I've picked up
3. To help everyone learn from each other through their response on this blog and other social media

That's enough words for now, other than to say please do make comments if you feel like it.  We'll all benefit :)