Russula Mushrooms

August 20, 2009December 27, 2013Margaret Lear Autumn, Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Crumble, Fruit, Fungi, Hedgerow, Jam, Pickle, Pine Woods, Pudding, Summer, Wild Food & Wild Things Tags: Beauty of Bath, blackish purple russula, Boletus edulis, Ceps, chanterelles, charcoal burner, cherry-plums, crab apples, damsons, Discovery apples, jelly making, nursery, plums, poisonous mushrooms, rowan berries, Russula atropurpurea, Russula cyanoxantha, Russula emetica, Tawney Grisette, The Sickener, yellow russula Leave a comment

My favourite fungi to eat at present are Blackish-Purple Russulas (Russula atropurpurea). They are SO tasty and have a lovely nutty texture. Be very careful not to muddle them with the poisonous scarlet red Russula emetica (The Sickener) or the Beechwood Sickener, which is also bright red but found under beech of course. R. atropurpurea is claret-coloured, with a distinctly darker, blackish centre. We are finding many on the village green at Pitcairngreen, also there are Charcoal Burner Mushrooms (Russula cyanoxantha), Common Yellow Russla (R. ochroleuca) and R. xerampelina. All edible and very tasty.

Found other species of Russula on our latest wild food ramble, including – we think – the rare Russula obscura, which we didn’t pick of course. Lots of Tawny Grisettes, Chanterelles and Boletus species too – some early Bay Boletus and a couple of Ceps (B. edulis) which were appallingly maggoty. Rowan berries were just about ready, but I’m holding off till the crab apples over the fence are ripe as I like to add them to Rowan berries when making jelly to get a better set. Meanwhile Andrew is coming home regularly laden with “feral” plums, damsons and cherry-plums of differing shades (Prunus cerasifera), which I really love. They all go off quickly so have made plum and courgette chutney as well as several crumbles, and will be making some jam this week too.

At Elcho Castle we helped pick some of the first eating apples (Discovery and Beauty of Bath) and bore home a big bagful to finish ripening. Have also eaten brambles off the bushes, so it’s that season again, summer nearly over and autumn fruitfulness to enjoy!

Blaeberry Harvest

August 5, 2009December 27, 2013Margaret Lear Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Fruit, Fungi, Hedgerow, Jam, Nuts, Pine Woods, Pudding, Smoothies, Summer, Wild Food & Wild Things Tags: Amanita rubescens, bilberries, blaeberries, caterpillars, chanterelles, elephant hawk moth, hazelnuts, honey fungus, jam-making, tawny grisettes, The Blusher Leave a comment

We’ve been entertained since last weekend by a huge caterpillar on the willow herb outside the kitchen window – an elephant hawk-moth. S/he is still there, on the second full stem which is being systematically stripped of leaves, but is getting fatter and slower. The cat is scared of it.

We also had visitors, Tim and Gill and their daughters Lucy and Alice, and as is customary they were pressganged into picking blaeberries (bilberries). This absorbing task yielded enough of these tasty and nutritious fruits for jam, cakes, puddings, breakfasts and the freezer…. and there’s plenty more if we are back in the right habitat, which is acid woodland. Lucy was quite revolting with her blaeberries – squashed them to a mush in their plastic bag, bit off the corner of the bag and sucked the pulp out. Ugh! Fruit Smoothies the rustic way I suppose. Tim and Andrew were sidetracked by some nice big chanterelles, and Tim and I collected honey fungus on the way back – a big show of these and more to come. They were delicious in omelettes. There are a few other mushrooms about just now – several of the Russual genus are showing their faces, but not enough to get a selection of edible species, and in the Millenium Wood Tawny Grisettes (much chewed by slugs) mix with The Blusher (Amanita rubscens). We don’t eat the Blusher. It’s said to be edible, but a. it looks a bit like the poisonous Panther Cap which is also about just now and it wouldn’t take much of a deviant Panther Cap to get mistaken and b. so many creepy crawlies have already eaten it by the time we get there anyway.

Hazelnuts are swelling and becoming obvious in our local copse.

Wet wet wet…

July 31, 2009December 27, 2013Margaret Lear Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Fungi, Hedgerow, Summer, Wild Food & Wild Things, Wine Tags: Ceps, chanterelles, cultivated burdock, field mushroom, tawny grisette, wild cherries, wild gooseberries, yellow russula Leave a comment

It has rained so much and so heavily since our return from holiday that I’ve scarcely been on a walk, and when I have I’ve got too drowned to hunt for wild food very much. Plus the weather which makes foraging tricky makes the garden grow prodigiously, so that we in the midst of a glut, of salads, courgettes, broad beans, tree spinach, spinach spinach, soft fruit, cultivated burdock, sugar pease and goodness knows what else – mammoth chutney and freezing operations, and more winemaking have been required.

Some summer fungi like the wett, of course, and there are probably more out there than we’ve managed to get to so far, but this will be remedies soon I hope. Andrew found some field mushrooms at work, unfortunately, so did some little flies who laid eggs in them. We picked an impressive bag of chanterelles yesterday, enough for a meal, and there were a couple of Yellow Russulas (Russula lutea) and Tawny Grisettes as well. There was one Cep (Boletus edulis), but it stayed where it was because again the flies and slugs were already there.

We also laid into some wild gooseberries, raspberries and a selection of cherries that hadn’t yet been blown or washed off the trees – they vary so much in sweetness and flavour Andrew decided to collect the pips of the nicest ones and grow them…. you can see how readily Homo sapiens went from a foraging lifestyle to deciding it would be easier to grow your own, and carrying out a bit of selective breeding…

PS. He managed to get to some field mushrooms today before the flies and before the man with the mower – very tasty.

First Fungi appear!

June 25, 2009Margaret Lear Broadleaved Woods, Cordial, Flora, Fungi, Hedgerow, Pickle, Summer Tags: ash key pickle, Bonnie Dundee, carrots, chanterelles, chicken-of-the-woods, Claverhouse, dryads saddle, elderflower cordial, Fungi, Jacobites, Killiecrankie, polyporus squamosus, polyporus sulphureus, potatoes, self-sufficiency, spinach, sulphur polypore 2 Comments

Alternating heavy rain and warm sunny days have prodded the first fungi of the season into appearing. We have a pretty ring of nondescript brown mushrooms on the lawn, but I don’t eat nondescript, because of the risk of misidentification. No such risk with the Dryad’s Saddle (Polyporus squamosus) which has appeared very conveniently on the end of a log I’m using to edge the soft fruit plot. This large bracket fungus with its distinctive beige scaly top and white flesh is very good when young, meaty and substantial. We had it for breakfast; being greedy I didn’t want to waste the stem part but that was a mistake, as it’s far too tough and chewy to bother with. I’m hoping this tree fungus will continue to crop through the summer.

Dryad's Saddle

Another edible tree fungus I found last week was Sulphur Polypore (aka Chicken of the Woods), in Latin Polyporus sulphureus. I found it in the woods at Killiecrankie-oh, when my mind was more on the Jacobite trail of John Graham of Claverhouse, Bonne Dundee, than wild food. It was just starting to grow, was beautiful, and of course, I didn’t remove it. That would NOT have been sustainable foraging! But I clocked its location for future reference…

And this weekend we came upon – and ate – our first chanterelles of the year, near Dunkeld. They were at a very young stage, but plentiful and delicious. I am still using last year’s dried chanterelles and Boletus, so that’s availability 12 months of the year. Just like my spinach beet. If I could live on fungi and spinach, I’d never have to go near another shop! Well, let’s be honest, I probably could, but having gone through the Lent thing, I’m glad I can find and/or grow plenty of other things too! The Lent challenge has left me with distinct squirrel tendencies…. I am worrying myself silly that I’m growing enough beans and peas for drying, have tucked two big bottles of elderflower cordial in the freezer already for winter use, and have potatoes growing everywhere, including the compost heap. It’s a bad year for carrots though, and also we’ve noted it’s an off-year for the ash trees of Perthshire. Normally I’d have made ash-key pickle by now, but there are none…..

July – last weeks

February 7, 2009Margaret Lear Berries, Diary entries, Fruit, Fungi, Nuts, Pickle, Pudding, Wine Tags: Boletus, Ceps, chanterelles, elderberries, John Evelyn, pickled ash keys, poisonous amanitas, red elderberries, tawny grisettes Leave a comment

July – Week Four
Ah, now we’re talking. This weekend, Andrew and I, having spotted some growing by the A9, went cycling after Red Elderberries. These are the fruit of Sambucus racemosa, a non-native but commonly naturalised sister of the familiar Elder (Sambucus nigra). They ripen earlier than the native berries and don’t taste quite as good, but can be used for the same things. Being in the midst of a glut of soft fruit, we wanted to pick some to mix 50-50 with blackcurrants for a red wine. After picking them we thought, it having rained copiously last week (especially on Mull of course), that we should just check for fungi….. and YES!! the first Chanterelles, and a couple of Brown Birch Boletus, and a few fairly chewed Russula lutea. These all went into a delicious pie for dinner. Pointed out we still have last years dried chanterelles to use up. On the way back we picked wild cherries and wild raspberries (inexplicable as the garden ones are coming out of our ears at home but we couldn’t resist….. we ate them as a TV snack to accompany Midsomer Murders (well, you need something..)

Today I sampled the pickled ash keys I prepared in March – and they were good! I seem to have perfected the timing and recipe (well it was John Evelyn’s recipe to the letter actually).

July – Week Five
We’ve both had a week more or less off work this week – though spent much time in the garden.

We decided it was time to see what was happening in a local Forestry Commission wood which gets a good range of autumn fungi normally…. I wanted Tawny Grisettes especially, and there were quite a few. This is an un-nerving fungus for the beginner, being in the same family as Death Cap and Destroying Angel (Amanita). But once you know it, you can’t mistake it for anything else, even from a distance. It stands on a tall stem, no ring around it unlike the death cap, and the reddish-brown cap, conical at first but soon flat, is edged with little striations. Slugs love them (regrettably) and so do I. We also found a single Bay Boletus (Boletus badius), and a relative we hadn’t tried before – Suillus variegatus. This was nice, though not over-tasty. There were quite a few edible Russula atropurpurea, but the slugs had largely had them already! But there were MOUNTAINS of chanterelles….. kept us going for days…..

Dimly aware the English school holidays were starting, we also gathered several pounds of blaeberries (bilberries) by the River Braan. The connection here is that the English hols is when we are most likely to meet up with Tim and Gill and their daughters. Tim is a compulsive and exhausting forager even by our standards, and we have fond, gooey memories of Tim’s blaeberry muffins! Anyway, as usual we spent ages filling a bag with small, sparse and hard to find berries on ankle-high plants, only to get round the corner and find big juicy ones a dozen to a stem on nice tall bushes, which took no time at all to pick. The moral is never start picking till you’ve found worthwhile quantities! The blaeberry is good wayside snacking; they have kept us going all week on walks and cycle rides, here and up at Braemar where we went camping.

Cep (Boletus edulis)

On Monday, Andrew spotted a perfect, un-maggoty, classic Cep (Boletus edulis). They’re called King Boletes on the continent, and they taste magnificent. This one did both of us for breakfast. To finish the week, I’ve just come back from a bike ride. I had no intention of foraging so didn’t take a bag. Instead I ate all the big juicy wild cherries there and then (pig). But when I saw the chanterelles in the wood…. well, did you know you can stuff the sleeves of a cardigan full of fungi, tie it round your waist and get them home in perfect condition? Good timing, I was seriously thinking of buying some mushrooms.