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.