SHROOOOOOOOOMS

 A few weeks ago the leaves began to turn in Lyon and it became gradually damper and I only had one thing on the brain: Mushrooms. No I’m not talking about my deteriorating mental state due to being over worked at the AA call centre; I’m talking about my obsession with beautiful, soft, slimy shrooms. I’m sure you can imagine my excitement at finally being in France during mushroom season. A country where foresting for food is still part of the culture, where our fungui friends grow abundantly in every wood, dell and grove, where people who work in pharmacies are specially trained to indentify a bolet from an amanite. Imagine rocking up to Boots with a basket full of toadstalls covered in soil and emptying them out on the counter, I can just picture the look of confusion and disgust on Eileen Potter - the checkout ladie’s face. France is just so equipped to help out a food lover, it’s great. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could walk into a French library and rent out a specially trained truffle hog. 

Adrien: mushroom hunting with style

So after weeks of talking incessantly about mushrooms, me, Daisy and Adrien finally returned back to his home village and scampered off into the forests with baskets, guides, anoraks and stylish waterproof hats we found in his basement. According to Adrien, looking the part is very important. Mushrooms only reveal themselves to countrysiders. It was raining and very dark. The perfect atmosphere for champignon hunting. We filled our baskets with everything we could find. Trying our best to separate different species. We soon discovered that it is very hard to identify which mushrooms will create a delicious recipe and which ones will cause you to die a slow, painful death. For example this mushroom is edible, despite its bluish green, slimy dribbling goo appearance. 

And this one is deadly poisonous?!

Still there are some things that are obvious, Daisy… No we’re sure you can’t eat the red ones with white spots. 

At the very end of the day we stumbled apon a rather scary part of the forest filled with animal bones, and dark purplish black mushrooms that grey in circles around the remains. There were poisonous mushrooms everywhere. And so we nicknamed this frightening corner of france, the forest of death. However it was in this area that we struck gold, blundering across 5 huge cepe mushrooms, they’re easy to identify, very delicious and valuable. I was over the moon (specially cause I found the biggest, most perfect one!) Directly after that we found a whole load of white mushrooms that we identified as clitocype (hehehe), from our guide. They were also edible, so we scooped em all up. 

So after hours of scrummaging around on the forest floor we bounded back from woods towards cours la ville pharmacy to proudly display our ‘recolte’ to the staff. Out came the various mushroom guides and we were informed that our prized boletus mushrooms were indeed very edible, but unfortunately our clitocypes were edible but if consumed with alcohol, could induce vomiting. We couldn’t trust ourselves not to bring out the wine during our glorious shroom feast so we left those ones and carried our cepes back to Lyon in a basket.

The next day we went straight off to the supermarket to buy ingredients for our dinner:   http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/9869/beef-with-a-gratinated-mushroom-glaze

This recipe was delicious but perhaps to heavy on ingredients and flavours. In hindsight I would have gone for a simpler dish. The mushrooms let off a rich, nutty, earthy aroma when fried. It was still bloody gorgeous! So friends get out there and get shrooming!