The dog was giving us a walk early this morning when, on an earthbank in a sunken lane, we came across the fellows in the picture. At first we weren’t sure, but a quick check on the internet told us we had stumbled on a late growth of morels. There were lots of them, into the bargain (and they made a delicious dish, braised with shallots and white wine). We got to playing the Noma game, which is to say what else could we find by foraging around to provide a complete meal? We had soon rustled up a hearty dinner as follows: nettle soup for starters (plenty of nettles about at the moment); morels for the main dish, accompanied by wild carrots and a dandelion leaf and wild sorrel salad, with wild strawberries for dessert, and all washed down with a dandelion and burdock cordial. I suppose the point is that we get brainwashed into believing that we can only obtain food by handing over money and receiving something wrapped up in return. We stumbled across the morels by chance (and, by-the-way, they would have been worth a tidy sum if we had sold them) but we will be more alert to the possibilities around us from now on. Indeed, it would probably do us all good to forage a little more and to shop a little less.
I like the morel of this story 🙂
Groan!
I remember going into the forest whit my grandmother when I was little, she knew all the edible mushrooms, and lots of berries. So we picked lots of them each autumn. Incidentally, I did not even like to eat them, I just liked the collecting and the long walks with my grandmother. Unfortunately, the fallout from Chernobyl stopped that tradition… and by the time it was safe again, she had died, and no one of us really remembered how to distinguish the edible from the poisonous ones, so we never took it on again…
I was worried as well, Christian, but it is actually very easy to identify morels and very difficult to be mistaken.
It’s hard to miss the kantarels, the mushrooms my grandmother fried after my brothers and cousins and I had found them. They almost always grow under birch trees.