Mushrooms

It's Saturday - time to walk into Eltham for the weekend paper. So I set off pondering on what I might write in this blog and I saw some mushrooms - it's a damp time of year. So I started taking photos and when I got home I took some more. They make wonderful photographic subjects I discovered - such delicate shapes and colours. Then I started thinking of what I might write and decided there may be a bit too much to say - but we'll see. I can always come back to it some other time.

First of all a little gallery of some of those mushrooms (together with the accompanying weeds, leaves and bushland debris) I photographed today. I'm really quite proud of some of them.

Now I have no idea whether any of these are edible - I think perhaps the whitish ones are, but I'm not really game to try. For this is the thing with mushrooms isn't it? You have to know what you are doing. I have bought books and studied the pictures but am always a bit nervous. I did cook some once that I found in the garden and we didn't die. I should do one of those courses on offer sometime. The Europeans are very much into this though and know what they are doing. Even here in Australia you can often see Italians and Greeks out mushroom hunting with baskets at the side of the road.

"My voice

Becomes the wind,

Mushroom hunting" Haiku by Shiki

We used to have a neighbour who had a particular spot up the road under the pine trees which was apparently particularly good for a specific kind of mushroom. On one of my exchange visits to France we all went out to search for girolles or chanterelles as they are also known in the nearby forest of Sologne, where the French kings used to hunt, in the Loire valley. It was such fun - for they are comparatively easy to find - the picture below will tell you why - very distinctive colour and shape. They are really rather beautiful and are a French delicacy.

Then there are cèpes and morelles, shown below, together with a bunch of unidentified mushrooms we saw in a market in France once.

In France if you are not sure what you have you take them to the chemist and he will tell you if they are edible or not. Don't think you could do that here. But it is rather sad isn't it? All that bounty going to waste - if only we knew which were OK and which were not. I mean I know the bright red spotted toadstools are poisonous but I don't know about the others.

And you can dry them too to preserve them for a non-mushroom time. Think porcini and dried cèpes. When you dry them their taste intensifies and you really only need a few. Then there's truffles, but I think that's a separate topic some time.

Today mushrooms are becoming fashionable again, and even the supermarkets have a growing variety of them for sale - enoki, shiitake, oyster ... Today though Coles only had your everyday mushrooms. We went to a mushroom farm once - I can't remember where - rows and rows of racks of growing mushrooms in trays. Indeed you can grow your own - and I have. You just buy the kit in Bunnings.

The little white button mushrooms are called Champignons de Paris in France - because this is where they believe the first commercial mushroom production happened - for Louis XIV. Before that, and still in some places, they grew them in caves. I think I even saw an old derelict church being used for the purpose once on the television. Gourmet kind of people are a bit dismissive of them, but I think they are delicious - with pasta, in soup, in boeuf bourguignon or stroganoff - perhaps the very best use of mushrooms that I know. Try Delia's wonderful Pork Stroganoff with Three Mustards. It's one of our favourite dinner dishes. And your basic stroganoff is one of the simplest dishes you could ever cook but is oh so delicious.

Or try Elizabeth David's field mushrooms baked in vine leaves. "Line a shallow earthenware pot with vine leaves, keeping some for the top. Fill the pot with about 250g flat mushrooms, scatter the chopped stalks on top, add salt, freshly milled pepper, several whole small cloves of garlic. Pour in about four tablespoons of olive oil and cover with vine leaves and the lid. Bake in a very moderate oven for about one hour" She says it "works a notable change in cultivated mushrooms, making you almost believe you have picked them yourself in some early morning field."

There are thousands of recipes for mushrooms of course - Jane Grigson has written a whole book on the subject and no doubt others have too.

As well as being a tasty food they also have been used for medicinal and hallucinogenic purposes. Once when we lived in Adelaide we saw some people on our bit of hillside foraging for a particular kind of 'magic mushroom' - well that's what our neighbour told us. But some of them are definitely used for their hallucinogenic effect. They were very popular in hippy times, and then the Chinese, amongst many other cultures, have long valued them for their medicinal benefits, and today they are yielding up their potent secrets.

"Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health." Paul Stamens

Well I'm sure there's a lot more to say about them but I'm running out of steam. I'll just add two more of my favourite photos - the first is from my walk and the second from the garden.