Wild mushrooms - a seasonal habit

Escaping the chaos at home I took a very indulgent friend with me to go and collect some wild mushrooms in the Tokai Aboretum. It is always best to go 2 - 3 days after rain, anything longer than that and they get mushy and mouldy quite quickly.

The river is always a delight in this season and crossing it is always a game of whose more agile than you! The kids always make it first :)

The kids spread out in the top plantation to look for the right ones after I had shown them what to look for.

Treasure under the pine needles

I made a simple mushrooms on toast for breakfast buy frying them in butter, garlic, thyme and then adding a cup of white wine. I put this on toast and add a good helping of crumbled feta...

 YUM YUM YUM

Identifying pine rings and wild mushroom risotto

Yesterday I went to learn more about mushrooms with a group of families and a fungus fundi. It was a wonderful learning time. I have been collecting pine ring mushrooms in the forest for a few years now and enjoying them in various ways.

The first time I served some 4 years ago Superman was not at all impressed! It was drummed into him as a kid that your do not eat wild mushrooms so when the dish was placed before him a rather unpleasant reflex action took place. He has gotten used to me eating them, and as he too loves mushies, this year he decided to try again.

Pine rings collected yesterday.

One of the problems that we have as foragers is identifying whether a pine ring is fresh enough to eat...let me share with you how to do this first. You will find them in dense pine leaf litter. Look carefully, they are sometimes just a little mound and if you move the needles off you will see the mushroom. The best months are May and June. They pop through about 2 days after rain.

Fresh pinering - notice the concentric circles like a tree trunk and the pale orange color.

Older pinering with the greeny color. I don't eat them when they get to this stage.

Stem of fresh pinerine - notice the little holes in the stem.

Old pinering stem - greening and no holes

This I learnt yesterday - the color test. Cut through the stem just above ground level and print it on your hand. 

 If the mushroom is indeed a pine ring then it will bleed orange. The fresher it is the clearer the circle on your hand.

Another rule about foraging mushrooms, they are best eaten the day they are picked and do not keep long. The tendency of people, when something is "free" is to take as much as they can find. This is really not necessary, take only what you can eat in one day. It is a treat, something special, not something to feast on. You need 1 palm sized (or the equivalent of) per person to add something special to the meal.

Fungi play a huge part in the forest by breaking down leaf litter, tree trunks and more. When you find a mushroom that is not edible, no need to kick it over and break it up, leave it to do it's work.

Last point about pine rings, your urine the next day is an orangey-brown color...not a problem...you are fine :-)

This is Jamie Oliver's recipe for wild mushroom risotto from his Jamie At Home cookbook.

Brown 2 stalks of celery and one onion in some olive oil and butter

Add 400g of risotto rice and stire to cover. Add 1 cup of white wine. Stir until absorbed. Then add, ladle by ladle, 1.5l chicken stock. Add a teaspoon of salt and 1 punnet mixed wild mushrooms (woolies has a special at the moment on Shitake/Oyster mushies.) Sit well with each addition.

Meanwhile dry fry your foraged mushrooms until soft

When cooked squeeze over the juice of 1 lemon, and add picked leaves of handful of parsely and thyme. Mix.

Finish the risotto with 25g cubed butter and 250ml grated parmesan. Mix in and allow to sit for 5minutes

Serve the risotto placing a heaped spoon of wild mushrooms on top.

This risotto is so moreish, comforting and indulgent. Thank goodnes we can only forage pine rings for a few months every year.

PS Superman had no negative reactions this time and thoroughly enjoyed the meal. Next time I hope he will come foraging with us.

Foraging for fungi with friends.

Today a few families got together to go foraging for fungi with a Fungi Specialist from SANBI - Dr N Allsopp. She was a treasure trove of information and clearly her passion for the forest and its diversity rubbed off on us. I have foraged for about 4 years in the forest for Pine Rings but have always wanted to know more about what else grows here and if there is anything else we can eat.

Permanent inhabitants to welcome us

Off we go

Nope, not baboon dropping, rather a fungus that lives on the roots of the Eucalyptus Tree

Gorgeous shelf fungi

This one is used for dying wool and material

This one when open smells like rotten meat

Edible, I tried, but very peppery and unpleasant

A luminous bead like fungi on a tree

Crossing the Princess Kasteel River to my hunting ground

The treasure I came for - Pine Rings

A nice number of Pine Rings to go with dinner tonight.

Tomorrow I will show you how to determine that it is a Pine Ring and fresh enough to eat with the delicious recipe we used tonight. It was so good to be out in the cold winter air with some special friends enjoying this time of learning.

On my mind - mushrooms

Mushroom season past without us getting ourselves organized and going to the forest for pine rings. So when I saw a mushroom kit on a blog I follow - and it was local - I just had to find out more.

Yesterday when I took my daughter to her exams I passed a nursery that sell these kits and I bought the white oyster mushroom kit to try. It should give 4 flushes of fungi and it will equal the price of 4 shop bought punnets. They also have button and pink oyster kits.

I have been thinking about growing mushrooms for a while as I read how you can cultivate them on an old log in Jamie At Home and have been itching to try it...so until then this was a good tester.

On my mind @ Rhonda's

There's a grandma in there somewhere....

Did I ever say how much I love my mom? I truly hope that at her age I will have the same amount of energy and zest for life!

My folks are here for 3 days and today my mom got stuck into my veggie garden...she pulled weeds, got rid of an invasive ground cover around the pond, staked broad beans and just made everything more tidy for me.

I worked really hard (ja, right!) and pruned the lemon verbena and rose geranium and pulled some of the nasturtiums up.



The geranium and lemon verbena are now hung up to dry. I hope to cook with the verbena once it is dry but I have big plans for the rose geranium. Hopefully I will blog about that at my herbal blog soon. In the meantime I just made it into a lovely tea by shredding 1/4 cup of leaves and letting it steep in boiling water, strained and added a teaspoon of honey. Very nice.

When everything was cleared I saw this amazing fungi growing on a stump that I use as a pot stand.

Where are all the mushrooms?

On Wednesday I took a group of about 20 moms and kids up into the forest where I normally cycle with my son. I had hoped that we would get all the way to "Level 5" but as some of the littler ones got tired we had to stop at Level 3. Last year we also made this most enjoyable hike.

There are always more mushrooms further up and we were hunting for edible Pinerings.



There were none up to that point which was dissappointing, but it did not stop the children from having a wonderful time. We only saw baboons right at the bottom, although we could hear them calling throughout the walk.



The rivers and waterfalls were running strongly after all the rain we have had....but no mushrooms!



Right at the end the younger boys found some lovely mushies, just not the edible kind! We hope to walk again and make it to Level 5 before mushrooming season is over.

Loving nature...foraging for mushrooms

Today we wanted to go and find some pinering mushrooms up in the forest. We have eaten them before and they have an unbeatable flavor. We found lots of mushrooms on the way many of which we cannot touch for fear of death!












This is the view from the top near the waterfall which was our target. 7.5km up on a 450m climb - it was long. Another 7.5km down and our legs feel finished.



The kids found some interesting rocks to study.





A lovely morning!