Well fed and happy, the healthy forager takes to its keyboard. Originally I had planned to post everyday during this challenge, but believe it or not, there has not been time! The whole process of thinking about where to go, picking stuff, thinking about what to cook with it, stocking up on dry stuff (leaves for tea, flour for biscuits, seaweed), and then cooking it is absolutely relentless. The actual eating takes seconds ;-).
In times of old, people’s lives were organized around this. They also would have had a much richer natural larder to pick from – no housing estates or new Aldi’s with huge carparks taking the space of what could have been wild land.
That said, I’ve found one mushroom today that is making clever use of our built environment: the Agaricus bernardii.
This impressive looking specimen likes to grow in salty areas. However, in the picture you see me standing beside the Aberdeen-Alford road. Not a sea in sight. Why does it grow there then? Well… it’s because of the gritting in winter! This sprays the verges with enough salinity for this mushroom to carve out an existence in a microhabitat. Shop-bought button mushrooms are of the same genus as this one – many of the features are the same. Apart from the size!
Something else has been popping up this week, going by the rather ominous-sounding name of ‘Giant polypore’. They grow out of the base or roots of (mainly) dead beeches. To eat them, don’t wait until they are the size of monsters – pick them while they’re young. Here’s a picture of me salivating over one:
I picked a few fronds off it and stir fried them with carrot tops. It made a delicious lunch:
One particular highlight of the week was finding the mushroom species that was the first wild mushroom I ever ate: Boletus edulis, or porcini. I hadn’t expected to find it so soon in the year. Right next to it were some chanterelles, so I cooked them together in another lunchtime stir fry with cucumber, seaweed, sorrel and flowers:
Yesterday, John and I went back to Cove to pick more seaweed. We went quite a bit further across the rocks than I did when I first went, and we discovered many fantastic rock pools. I was absolutely in raptures as I’ve not seen these things before (in The Netherlands the beaches are just sand). I loved clambering to an outcrop together and taking in the view. I think I screamed a lot :-). (“I want to stay here forever!” “I want to live on a rock!”). Here’s an attempt to capture the moment:
On that note, I’m going to sign off and sink my teeth into a batch of freshly baked dock biscuits. Having to bake them myself makes me realise quite how many I get through in a day… I’ll keep that secret to myself! See you in the next post.
The healthy forager 