Sort of Foraged Dinner
Sort of Foraged Dinner
Sort of Foraged Dinner
I’m guessing that it’s the intrinsic hunter-gatherer instinct in humans responsible for the inordinate amount of satisfaction in being able to gather & forage enough ingredients to make a two course dinner for five.
It would be safe to say that my other half is not hugely interested in food. I think my spoken thoughts on what we might have for our next meal before we’ve finished the one we’re eating still thoroughly bemuses Ms R, but stick her in a forest with mushrooms and there’s no stopping her. Foraging for mushrooms is a kind of scary concept for city folk, what with the horrific deaths available from eating a seemingly innocent Myophore, so you definitely need someone who recognises at least one type of edible ‘shroom. We hadn’t even planned to do any foraging, but a new walk in the mountains in Southern Austria revealed a forest absolutely teeming with mushrooms and toadstools of all varieties. Whatever can be said about her other food preferences, Ms R can certainly recognise a Schwammele when she sees one. Now despite doing some non-extensive googling, I’m still not sure whether we picked Girolles or Chanterelles, but whatever they were, we must have got a couple of kilos of ‘em. I also managed to get lucky and picked what I thought were Penny Bun mushrooms ( I was trying to pretend I knew what I was talking about, based on vaguely remembered information from Ray Mear’s survival programmes) but turned out to be Porcini’s.
The only thing about collecting a bunch of mushrooms from the forest is the fact you have to clean the buggers, and that is a singularly tortuous job, using kitchen roll and a small knife. The Austrian way to to deal with this is to sit on the porch with a bottle of schnapps and work your way through the cleaning as well as the bottle (although I wouldn’t recommend trying to cook after consuming the amount of schnapps required to clean a couple of kilos of mushrooms).
I kept the dish for cooking the mushrooms fairly simple, cooking in butter & just adding some garlic & cream before adding to a bunch of cooked pasta (the picture of the meal really didn’t do it justice, which is why I haven’t included it). To finish, I made a fruity syllabub with grapes & apples from the garden, the leftovers of the cream used for the mushroom pasta and some berry liqueur I found in the larder. Sometimes the simple things in life are the best.
Saturday, 19 September 2009
Fruits of the Garden Syllabub
10 Minutes worth of Foraged Mushrooms (the bag got filled)
Porcini Mushroom