Foraging Log

[loutfard]

Late October. Yesterday, my wife came back with a fresh fig. Picked from a small tree in a little park in the city center. Figs are not supposed to ripen well here, but a well-protected corner and a warm autumn really helped.

Today I went scouting an interesting ERE compatible area for houses. On the way there, I cycled through the forest. The plan was to look for ceps/porcini/boletus edulis mushrooms, but no luck with that. Plenty of mushrooms, but not the edible ones I was looking for.

I found a patch of sweet chestnut trees though. Almost without effort, I collected about 1.5 kg of sweet chestnuts.

The simplest way to prepare these is to cut a little cross in their tail and microwave them for a minute. Reminds me of when I was a little boy. Popping chestnuts at home, or when my father and his friend treated me to a bag of freshly popped ones from a street vendor in Brussels. My wife was immediately enthousiastic about making a special cake out of them at the end of the year. Let's see if they'll survive that long...

[Laura Ingalls]

I found some really big white oysters mushrooms today that I foraged, plus a puffball I left because it was in a patch of poison ivy.

[guitarplayer]

@loutfard, amazing for the fig! It reminds me of the story of Sepp Holtzer who was growing bananas in Austria, organising the environment right (think he planted the banana amongst rocks and sheltered). I'd love to get the sweet chestnuts here and good to know that microwave works for preparing them. Microwave is my favourite kitchen item. In Scotland, you do get sweet chestnuts but the chestnuts themselves, they are mostly empty (too cold I reckon).

@LI, oysters are satisfying to find, because the clumps are so prominent. Giant puffballs are great to find even to only look at, like bread dough growing to be stuck in the oven.

DW and I have been casually foraging in nearby parks in Glasgow and just looking around. There is one spot for beautiful large horse / field mushrooms and I counted at least three flushes; sadly, this is by a large car junction so I am not touching them. Once we had also found a giant puffball half eaten by slugs, but still impressive.

Also, went to a country park nearby and found remnants of oyster mushrooms (collected by someone else before us), but also a bunch of other mushrooms.



From the sycamore leaf clockwise we have
- lots of honey mushrooms, recommended to cook them in dumplings due to texture when cooked. Highly regarded.
- couple amethyst deceivers as visually pleasing
- birch bolete which we only took the young one because they quickly soften as they grow
- suede boletes - fairly old and slug ridden
- trooping funnels (the four trumpet like mushrooms) - they are real tasty, often added to soups. The specimen we have here are very small, normally hats grow to be 6 inches and more
- birch polypore (bottom left corner) - for teas
- charcoal burners - the purple/blue/green, amongst my favourite mushrooms
- turkey's tails - for teas

I should make a point to start using latin names for ease of communication as common names are often folklore tinted.

[GoatHerd24]

Dandelions become quite bitter fairly quickly in the season/growth cycle.

To add to this, i'll reference "Nature's Garden" by Samuel Thayer:

"The best dandelion leaves, collected in earlier spring, are milder in flavor and more tender than the older leaves." He goes on to say, the greens are best before the dandelion has flowered.

Apparently the stalk and flower are good too - I've never tried. I just focus on the greens.

[Laura Ingalls]

Found some morels and oyster mushrooms today.

[loutfard]

Thank you Laura for making me realise morels are there very early. I had always associated mushrooms with summer and especially autumn. I'll have to go hunt for some in spring now too!