The world's first genuine mushroom-growing sim

Mushrooms might not be your first choice of characters for a video game, but the creators of Mushroom Garden, a Japanese company called Beeworksgames, beg to differ. The game has simple but addictive gameplay. There is something incredibly satisfying about swiping the screen to harvest your crop. Also, an especially nice touch is a "petting area", where you can interact with the mushrooms you've discovered and collected. OK, maybe THAT is taking things a bit too far.

The video below is its theme song as seen on Japanese TV. Just look at these little nameko mushrooms, they are so adorable!

Stay safe, everyone, do not eat any strange mushrooms, and see you next week!

Mushrooms in Ghana

Cultivated oyster mushrooms

It's usually not good when fungi make it to the news. This week has been no exception: the two notable stories that circulated the web recently were that 15 people got mushroom poisoning in Serbia (fortunately, it was not fatal), and a man in Ohio mutilated himself while high on magic mushrooms, while claiming that "mushrooms made him do it". Evil mushroom alert! Run for your lives!!! Yeah, right.

Thankfully, it is not all doom and gloom. Offsetting these is a story about mushrooms growers in Ghana who cultivate oyster mushrooms, but were experiencing shortage of suitable spawn. The difficulty with it is that it needs to be prepared in sterile conditions, and the existing laboratory facilities in Accra, at Food Research Institute, did not produce enough. Therefore, a research project at Techiman was looking at expanding farm production to include a second crop, shiitake. The project started in 2011 and is now almost ready to supply the 7,000 mushrooms growers in the country with the spawn and logs.

Cultivated shiitake

It's great news for the farmers, as with two crops instead of one they'll be able to reach their full economic capacity. This means less poverty, and more great food for their buyers. Now, these are mushrooms I totally approve of.

Link to the original story - Mushrooms in Ghana

Image credits:
Oyster mushrooms
Shiitake mushrooms

Russulas - beautiful and deceitful

A typical russula

My relationship with genus Russula has never been an easy one. There are some things that are so great about them: they are among the first mushrooms to appear in the forest and among the last to finish fruiting, they are abundant, they are colourful and good-looking. Some of these fungi are quite delicious, too, and this is where I have an issue with them.

Same mushroom from below

It is actually very easy to identify a mushroom as some kind of russula: the form of the cap, stem and gills are all very distinctive. However, distinguishing between the 750 or so species within the genus is a nightmare. After carefully considering form, colour, ecology and spore print, you are typically left with 3 or 4 possibilities, one of which would be edible, one toxic, and the rest inedible or not worthwhile. Arrgh!! I don't want to take any chances!

One could argue that identification in the case of russulas is less critical than for amanitas. Indeed, no one has ever died of consuming a russula, but there are still many among them that are bitter or have unpleasant taste, or worse. Take Russula emetica for instance: eat one of those, and over the next few hours you will be stuck in the loo, with both ends of your digestive tract adversely affected. Not fatal, but extremely unpleasant! The fact that russulas appear so early in the year makes this dilemma even more excruciating. It is easy to give a miss to mushrooms with uncertain ID when your basket is already getting full, but it's a different story when all you manage to collect is a couple of handfuls.

Take the fungus in the photos above, for instance. Is it Russula decolorans? fragilis? or an unusually coloured olivacea? There is no way to know for sure, so with much regret, I put this beautiful specimen back where I found it, and go back home with just the chanterelles. Because I could never mistake them for anything else.

Chanterelle omelette

Selection of ingredients

A meal using the first pickings of the mushroom season is always very special. There's usually very little of the wild food, so it's important to choose a dish that will bring out its taste in the best possible way. With chanterelles, nothing can do it better, in my opinion, than an omelette. The version below serves 4, for more/less just scale the ingredients.

Ingredients:

• 6 eggs
• chanterelles - about 100 grams this time but the more the better
• 1 large or 3-4 small shallots
• 100g cream, single or double
• 25g butter
• salt, pepper

Process:

Works best with leafy salad and
fresh tomatoes

Come on, it's just an omelette. Oh, all right. Finely chop shallots, wash chanterelles, leave whole if small, slice in half or quarter if large. Melt the butter on a large frying pan. Add shallots and chanterelles. Fry on medium heat, stirring frequently, until all water from the mushrooms evaporates and the onions get soft. Add salt and pepper. While the mushroom/shallot mixture is frying, beat eggs with cream. Once the mushrooms are done, pour the eggs into the pan. When the omelette turns golden on the underside and starts to set, gently fold it and turn over. Wait for 1-2 minutes, and it's ready! Turn off the heat and serve immediately.

First crop of 2013

First find

This Saturday I made yet another trip to the forest, and at last brought back some wild food. Just chanterelles as I expected, but it's a start.

As I thought, the first fruitbodies appeared in warmer places, mostly on south-facing path edges. Quite a few sprouted in the sand where dunes of the heath meet the forest - clearly, there has been enough rain to sustain their growth.

Unfortunately, I did not have the time to check on wild strawberries, but to compensate for this, I found some wild blueberry plants (or "bilberries", as they are known in Scotland), and this is something that I have not seen in this forest before. I'll definitely be returning to that spot in August.

It has been raining every day since, with reasonably warm weather. The pickings this weekend were just enough for a small omelette (cooking report coming tomorrow), but next week I hope there'll be enough for a quiche. We'll be going into July by then, so who knows, perhaps there'll be a couple of ceps, too!

The pickings. To give some idea of the scale, the largest mushroom in the foreground is about 1" wide.

Mushroom cultivation

The subject of today's video is mushroom cultivation. Humans may have achieved impressive proficiency with it, but it appears that they still have a lot to learn from the species that invented it: leaf-cutter ants.

Scientists who are studying these colonies with the view of improving fungi-assisted biofuel production, keep marvelling at both complexity and efficiency of the process. One of the things that they have found out is that it is not just the fungi that break up cellulose in plant matter, converting it to digestible food for ants, but various bacteria are an important part of the cycle, too. The amazing thing to me is that these representatives of three different kingdoms work in coordination for mutual benefit.

Enjoy, and I'll be back next week with (I hope) first proper foraging report, cooking, fungi news and more.

Decontaminate! Decontaminate!

Mould problem in here would be rather a more serious
issue than in your bathroom

As if following up from yesterday's post, the fungus-related news item this week is about space.

Meet the robotic European cargo ship Albert Einstein, unmanned disposable space vehicle that has just delivered food, personal items and spare parts to the International Space Station. It docked last week, but was only opened on Tuesday, as the partner nations were discussing what to do about a potential mould infection in its cargo bay.

It's not known if the cargo actually had fungi in it. It was just that Russian side stated that decontamination procedures had been unsatisfactory, and therefore the 6 members of the crew will have to clean all of 21 bags of goods that they'd just received. Curiously, one of the packs contains some special delicacies for the Italian astronaut, Luca Parmitano. Tiramisu is mentioned, but perhaps he also asked for some "funghi porcini"? Could it all be just an error in communication?

Hope it won't come to this

Trying to find more details on fungal space infestations, I found an instructive article about Space station Mir (with a couple of unappetising photos). Also irrelevantly, but rather hilariously, I came across a game that takes the idea of evil fungi to the extreme: it features mutated flesh-eating sentient space mushrooms which you have to avoid on your way to a moon base. So keep vigilant, ISS crew - that is one fungus I definitely do not want to become a reality.

Image credits:
The inside of ATV-4 Albert Einstein, NASA TV via space.com
Lost in space fungus

Slippery characters

Slippery jack

Today's highlight is dedicated to slippery jack, Suillus luteus and its cousins. I have a special place for these fungi in my heart as it was with them that I was introduced to the wonderful world of wild food foraging.

A great thing about slippery jacks is that it has no poisonous lookalikes. If the mushroom you see has a slimy cap and yellow spore tubes, it belongs in the basket. There is only one very similar fungus in Scottish forests, Suillus granulatus, or weeping bolete, and it is just as good to eat. When sorting through my pickings, I always separate these two varieties, but it is just being obsessive. There is no difference in preparation, cooking methods or taste, so this is quite unnecessary.

Weeping bolete

One important thing to remember is to peel the slimy cap and remove the veil before cooking. I did it initially for aesthetic reasons, to preserve the light colour of mushroom flesh in cooking, until I found out that its skin is a rather potent purgative. Thus, removing it is obligatory, unless you wish to troll your unwanted guests. In this case, slippery jacks can provide a more humane option than ink caps.

Many mushroom guides say that it's best to remove the skin in the field, but my experience suggests that this is not good advice. The naked porous surface of these mushrooms easily gets bruised and collects all grime and sand in the basket. You can only get rid of it afterwards by washing, but applying water to these guys is a bad idea as they will soak it all up much like kitchen towels. Also, some people get skin irritation from prolonged contact with the slime, and it is so much easier to protect yourself from it at home.

Just being thorough. They do look
a bit different when put side by side

These mushrooms typically get "meh" reviews in fungi collecting field guides regarding their edibility. Wikipedia, too, doesn't have much good to say about its taste, but notes that it is considered a delicacy in Russia. Weird Russians, right?.. Well, I can accept that slippery jack may not be everyone's favourite morsel on the plate. Like most mushrooms, it lacks strong taste, but it makes up for it with its unique texture. It is very similar to raw oysters, so if you like them, it's definitely worth a try. If you hate them, don't bother. It means that there'd be more left for me!

Image credits:
Slippery jack, Suillus luteus
Weeping bolete, Suillus granulatus

Fungi in space

That's what Martian colonisation
should look like

I recently came across a web site recruiting a crew to go to Mars. The project's name is Mars One, and their plan is to set up the first permanent extraterrestrial human settlement, and also make a reality show which would finance its operations. To date, about 78 thousand people have submitted their applications, although this figure is rather misleading since only about 700 out of these actually sent in complete applications, including the fee.

The scheme has already been multiply criticised for not being feasible, mostly for financial reasons. I also disapprove, and predictably so, because there seems to be no place for fungi in their plans for life support modules.

Generally, given the diversity of possible fungi uses, it is surprising how little presence they have in schemes for space colonisation. Mars One project aside, several governments are currently making plans for constructing a permanent lunar base in the next decade, and those look fairly realistic to me. However, no one seems to be paying any attention to the potential use of fungi: all references I've managed to find online were dealing with unwanted fungal infestations and how to contain them in enclosed space habitats.

I really don't understand why. Fungi are an excellent source of food, both directly as edible mycelium or fruit bodies, and indirectly through increasing the yield of food plants. In addition, they can offer production of cheap biofuel from plant waste and also provide packaging and structural materials as a renewable alternative to plastics.

Right, now if you'll excuse me, I have these calls to make to NASA and RosKosmos. They must be shown the errors of their ways immediately.

Image: This is my photo of an artist's vision of a Mars colony; the author of the painting is Diana Nurtdinova from Pervouralsk, Russia.

Dreams... and reality

11 June 2012

After yet another fruitless expedition for my beloved chanterelles this weekend, I've decided to turn to my photo archives, to see what pickings were like in the previous years.

I really was quite sure that I was collecting mushrooms as early as late May, and this post was going to be full of complaints about the late cold spring and how grass was greener in the years past.

Somewhat sheepishly, I have to admit that all I really have to complain about is my faulty memory: I have been faithfully recording the results of my mushroom forays since 2007, and the earliest photo I could find was dated 11th June, and only one other was taken on 13th June.

13 June 2010

Apart from identifying false memories, I discovered something else while going through the photo archives: it appears that early start of the season and abundance, or otherwise, of early mushrooms, have no predictive value as to how good pickings are going to be. 2012 was in fact one of the poorer years, 2010 only average, and the best year I've had so far was 2011, the first photo record for which was in early July. I collected so many mushrooms that summer that at some point I ran out of freezer space, and for about two months my long-suffering family ate wild mushrooms for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They of course knew better than to complain.

So it looks like there is hope for a good season yet. Just need a little patience.

Friday video - spore dispersal tricks

This is footage of spore emission tricks in a few fungi species. The hat-thrower fungus from my post two weeks ago makes a brief appearance at 01:18, although its unique ability is not commented upon. But we already know how great it is, right?

I have to say that slime moulds are no longer classified as fungi, and the "field mushroom" is either a bay bolete or a very similar species, but the sequences with the giant puffball and especially the earth star, in my opinion, more than compensate for these errors.

Warning: contains stinkhorn close-ups! Thus not quite safe for work.

Enjoy, and see you next week for yet more fungi-related tales.

Fungi for better cider

Scientific research in progress (spot a PhD student)

This week I came across a podcast about a research project conducted by a university lab in Sheffield and sponsored by Heinekken, the producer of Bulmers cider. This project looks at fungal relationships of apple trees in the attempt to find varieties of fungi that will increase the yield and quality of their fruit.

Mycorrhizal association between plants and fungi is a symbiotic relationship benefitting both partners. The plant provides the fungus with the sugars from photosynthesis, and the fungus carries soil nutrients to the plant roots, allowing the plant to feed from a much larger area than its roots actually cover.

The fungi are not all equal, and some species will give their symbiont plant more than others. The goal of the project is to find out, which ones. There are about 160 potted experimental subjects, all apple trees of the same cider-producing variety, most infected with specific species of fungi, and some in sterile soil. In the course of the next three years each of them will be evaluated for fruit yield, general health, and pathogen and pest resistance. One PhD student, Despina Berdeni, is charged with their care and making the required measurements. There are certainly easier ways to obtain a doctorate! I hope she and her lab get some free cider from Heinekken for all their hard work.

The full podcast can be found on the Planet Earth Online web site.

Image credit:
Horse-driven apple crusher in Jersey

The case of fly agaric

Belle of the woods

It's Wednesday, and therefore time for a new species highlight. Originally, I was planning to alternate the feature between edible and inedible/toxic mushrooms. Last week it was chanterelles, so I thought, I need something equally well-known to introduce the poisonous varieties. And what fungus can do better than the iconic fly agaric, Amanita muscaria?

And then, I got on the web to check my facts, and got confused. Whereas all mushroom identification guides I've come across unanimously list this fungus as both poisonous and hallucinogenic, a quick web search threw up several links where people were consuming fly agarics as food.

The trick, apparently, lies in boiling them for at least 15 minutes in lots of water. This removes both the toxin (muscarine) and the hallucinogens (ibotenic acid and muscimol). Afterwards, the mushroom can be fried in butter and has an "unusual nutty taste" which "makes you wish for more".

Interesting taste is not the only argument of the proponents for its food consumption. They point out that the fly agaric is available in large quantities, that there are lots of other foods we eat that are toxic raw (red kidney beans for instance) and that it is almost impossible to misidentify. All true! But then, given the large variation in toxicity, boiling may not be sufficient to detoxify some strains; in addition, they need to be kept separately from other mushrooms to avoid contamination with the spores, which are also toxic; and finally, collecting these fungi can be illegal. You fancy explaining to your local policeman that the 3 kilos of red-capped mushrooms in your basket are for family dinner? Me neither.

Giant fly agarics in Minecraft

So, all things considered, I'd give fly agarics a wide berth, and only collect them as photos. And in Minecraft. Red mushrooms with white dots are safe to eat there and are farmed for both food and building material. Could it be where Ecovative got their ideas from?..

Links to some of the articles:

Eating Santa's Shroom

Fat of the Land's blog

On the subject of fly agarics (this one is about what can happen if you do not cook them properly)

Image credit: 

Fly agaric engraving by William Miller

Exotic mushroom tempura

As promised in yesterday's post, here is the recipe for a mushroom tempura. Strictly speaking, it's not really a tempura, because in order to get one right, you have spend 10 years in training and pass a final exam in which you have to eat your own cooking creation and survive. Or am I confusing it with something else? Anyway, life is too short and I am lazy, so the dish I cooked yesterday should be called "battered mushrooms", but I call it tempura, and my friends know better than to object if they want to be fed.

All ready to go

The ingredients are few and simple:

• mushrooms (this time I used yellow oyster, pink oyster, shimeji and shiitake, and also added one white sweet potato)
• 250g sparkling water
• a few ice cubes
• 250g white flour
• an egg
• salt
• lots of olive oil

Pour the sparkling water into a glass and add the ice cubes. Put into the fridge for 10-15 minutes. Put the flour into the mixing bowl, make a depression in the middle, add the egg and salt. Start pouring the cooled water into the middle and mix with a whisk. The bubbles in sparkling water help to make a uniform mixture, so this is possibly the most important ingredient.

Heat up olive oil in a large frying pan on high heat until it starts smoking. Dip the first batch of mushrooms in batter, place on the frying pan (carefully!), wait for 1 minute or until they start turning golden, turn them over, wait for a further minute, take off the pan. Add more oil if necessary and repeat with the next batch.

Time to eat!

A few important pointers are worth remembering, to avoid spoilt food, personal injury and domestic fires:

• make sure that the frying pan is really hot before dropping in the mushrooms, otherwise they'll turn out wet and squishy
• be generous with oil
• do not overcook the mushrooms
• DO NOT LEAVE THE KITCHEN! (I've learned this one the hard way)
• do not be alarmed if you point your camera at the cooked mushrooms and they trigger its face recognition feature: this is normal and is a sign of a good tempura 

Enjoy, and see you tomorrow for more mushroom stories!

Mushroom season: on the approach

Look! They now grow in groups

This weekend I slapped on some factor 30 sunscreen (yes, such days do happen in Scotland - that's global warming for you) and took off to the woods with the minimum hunting gear: just a knife and a plastic container. There hasn't been much rain recently, so I figured out that the loot, if any, was likely to be found in the deepest and wettest part of the forest.

Still no chanterelles! However, things are definitely starting to look up: there was a spread of little brown toadstools pretty much everywhere under the spruce, and that means that the nice tasty fungi will follow before long.

So desperate was my longing for mushrooms that I took these two toadstools home and took a spore print, in the hope of making an identification. The spore print was rusty brown, which confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that the specimen was a Little Brown Mushroom, Almost Certainly Not Safe To Eat. I knew that already of course, but it's always good to be sure.

So, in the end I had to go for Plan B, the local supermarket. I wish I had a Plan C, because while I was snapping pictures of the toadstools in the forest, the shop ran out chanterelles, which were this week's wild mushroom on offer. What? Competitors on my spot! Arrgh. They must have been reading this blog. I had to console myself with oyster mushrooms and shiitakes. OK, it could have been worse: they are perfect for tempura, and cooking report will follow tomorrow.

"Intelligent" slime moulds

This short video shows the uncanny ability of a slime mould to solve mazes. Strictly speaking, slime moulds do not belong to the kingdom of fungi, so I hesitated at first whether I should write about them at all. They were however once classified as fungi because some of them propagate by spores and form fruitbodies. So, for the purposes of the blog, they can be regarded as honorary fungi, and I'll leave it at that.

Slime moulds solve mazes by following a simple stimulus-response system based on chemical signals, so their "intelligence" is very similar to that of an anthill or a beehive. It is lots of dumb elements following a few simple rules, resulting in very complicated behaviour and powerful problem-solving ability. I just wish it'd work for activity known as "Friday night"...

Enjoy the video, and Friday, and I'll be back next week!

Good news from Vienna - biofuel breakthrough

Trichoderma harzianum under
the microscope

When people think about fungi, they tend to regard them, first and foremost, as food. This is justified to some extent since historically fungi had little more to offer, except perhaps their beauty (or, indeed, ugliness) that was captured in art from medieval times to our days. This is a fascinating topic in itself, and I will surely return to it in another post, but today I wanted to write about the uses of fungi that have become available with modern technology.

In a previous post I looked at an article that presented fungi as an alternative to plastics, in the form of either biodegradable packaging or insulation material. It seems like there is currently a trend for engineers and scientists to explore the possibilities for non-food uses of fungi, as this week there was another news item, this time from the University of Vienna, reporting their success for synthesising biofuel from cellulose with the aid of a fungus of the Trichoderma genus.

Rather expensive biofuel

Biofuel can be easily produced from starchy plants, but this puts its production in competition with growing these plants for food. Cellulose, on the other hand, is present in common waste products like straw and sawdust and seems like a much better alternative. Unfortunately, breaking it down into small sugar molecules that can be subsequently turned into spirits requires special biologically active substances called enzymes. Microscopic Trichoderma fungi can produce these enzymes, but only when yet another special substance, inductor, is present. And here we have a problem: this inductor is 60 times more expensive than gold, which makes the resulting spirit cost about the same as 10-year-old Laphroaig. You wouldn't fuel your car with that if you have any financial sense.

Luckily, the researchers came across a strain of the fungus with a mutation that kept the switch for the enzyme in permanent "on" position, removing the need for the inductor. Such fungus could not have survived in the wild as it would be equivalent to a bird that keeps laying eggs non-stop. Yay, a domesticated fungus! Not a chanterelle sadly, but it's a good start. Subsequent genetic analysis isolated the responsible gene, which allowed to understand the mechanism for the molecular switch, and - voila!  - it seems like we are one step closer to averting the impending oil crisis, and that is very good news indeed.

Full text of the article can be found on the Science Daily web site.

Image credits:
Trichoderma mycelium
Laphroaig distillery

Concerning chanterelles

While I have yet to see this year's first chanterelles, I thought I should present them properly, since in the coming months I am planning to devote quite a few posts to their collection and cooking.

Golden chanterelles, C. cibarius

Golden chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius) is one of the easiest fungi to identify: its yolky colour and absence of true gills clearly distinguish it from similar species such as false chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca) and jack-o-lantern (Omphalotus olearius). Even if a mistake is made, false chanterelle is not poisonous but merely inedible, and jack-o-lantern's effects are not fatal, although extremely unpleasant. Also, the latter is very rare in the UK and as far as I am aware non-existent in Scotland. There was a news report a few years ago that someone died from eating deadly webcaps, Cortinarius rubellus, thinking that they were chanterelles, but come on, it is like mixing up white button mushrooms with shiitakes. If your attention to detail is that bad, foraging for wild mushrooms should not be on your list of possible weekend activities in the first place.

Deadly webcaps - not at all alike

Chanterelles are to be found in Scottish forests from May to October, they usually grow in large groups, so just one good spot is enough to fill a basket. I find that it is best not to clean them if they are not to be used immediately, but just shake off the slugs and put the mushrooms into the fridge in plastic containers, to be washed and cleaned right before cooking. If picked on a dry day, they will keep for a week or more. Unfortunately, this species does not lend itself well to preservation, as drying them ruins the texture, and freezing makes larger specimens bitter. It's best to cook them fresh.

As for their culinary use, chanterelles do great in sauces, stews and even salads. However, in my opinion, their unique flavour is at its best when they are combined with beaten eggs. Even a handful of them in an omelette makes for an extraordinary dish, and if you have enough for a quiche, this will take you straight to heaven. Metaphorically. Chanterelles are safe to eat even raw.

Despite many attempts at cultivation, chanterelles have so far evaded domestication. In 1997 an article in Nature, "Successful cultivation of the golden chanterelle" described a process by which fruitbodies were obtained from under 16-month old pine seedlings, suddenly giving hope to all chanterelle fans. Sadly, it was just a lucky fluke because the authors in the end failed to create conditions for consistent appearance of fruitbodies, and all chanterelles that are sold in grocery shops and supermarkets these days are collected in the wild.

Image credits:
Cantharellus cibarius
Cortinarius rubellus

Exotic mushroom sauce

Ingredients

Today's post, as promised, is a cooking report. This recipe is one of my favourites, because it works with any mushrooms. However, as mentioned in the previous post, it is especially great with firm-textured mushrooms that have strong flavour, and this time I had plenty of those!

Ingredients:

125g exotic mushrooms (mixture of yellow oyster, pink oyster and shimeji)
100g Scotch bonnet mushrooms
several shallots
a few garlic cloves

After adding the white wine

1 tablespoon of olive oil
glass of white wine
glass of double cream
bay leaf and peppercorns, salt

Method:

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and add mushrooms and chopped shallots. Cook on medium high heat stirring frequently until shallots begin to soften. Add chopped garlic, bay leaf and peppercorns, keep stirring. After a minute or so pour in the wine.

Almost ready!

Increase heat to the maximum and wait for liquid to reduce by half. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan, stir in the cream, add salt if needed. Bring to the boil, then cover with lid, reduce the heat to the minimum and cook for a further 15-20 minutes. Turn off the heat and let the covered pot stand for 5 minutes or so. Serve with rice or pasta and green salad. It is best to eat it straight away, but it is also ok to reheat it the next day, or even use it as cold spread on toast.

The recipe will serve 2-3, if you need to feed more, just double the ingredients. Enjoy, and see you tomorrow!

Mushroom quest 2013: continued

Not for eating! Pretty display though.

My Sunday trip to woodland brought yet another disappointment. No matter how hard I looked, no fungi presented themselves even to be photographed, let alone to be collected and eaten. Obviously, the recent warmth has not been enough. I've seen a report on the news that flowering season for bluebells was 4-5 weeks late this year. Does this mean that I'd have to wait for the first chanterelles till the end of June? I hope not!

Scotch bonnets! Oh, wait...

Despite my walk in the woods being a total flop (the magnificent display of wild flowers carpeting the forest floor doesn't count, does it?), I did get a couple of consolation prizes on my way home. Walking down the street I spotted two flower containers with features that were clearly not intended in the original planting design. At first I thought that my first find was a group of St George's mushrooms, but on closer inspection they turned out to be, most likely, some species of Inocybe. The second one at a first glance looked like Scotch bonnets (there was even dead wood present!), but the gills were all wrong, so I reluctantly had to identify them as LBMs*. Trip result: basket=0, camera=2. An improvement on the first attempt, but still not good enough.

Luckily, the supermarket was not too far away, so I consoled myself with buying a pack of exotic mushrooms, consisting of yellow and pink oyster mushrooms and shimeji. Firm texture, strong flavour... I think I know the perfect recipe to make these stand out. So it is decided: tomorrow - cooking report!
===================
* Little Brown Mushrooms