Adventures in Food

Spent a weekend in the woods and collected a few mushies plus some fresh squirrel! I've also had a bumper crop of sweet chestnuts and walnuts from trees down the road. So i had a superb stew made largely from wild local food, apart from the flour (Waitrose farm in Hampshire), thyme (Dennis' allottment), salt (Maldon's, Essex), oil (olive but local rapeseed would be perfectly good substitute. I just happen to have a five gallon bottle of olive oil that was given so am making good use of it!) and carrots (Abel & Cole). Here is my recipe for squirrel stew, incorporating Tristram's suggestions about the first stage for the meat: Preparation stage: 1 squirrel, skiined and prepared ( see Flickr for details of how to do this) A few ounces of flour with salt and thyme mixed in Oil For the stew 1 or more penny buns (cep mushroom) A few spiny puffballs Handful of Amethyst Deceivers Handful of sweet chestnuts , peeled Handful of walnuts Water 6 medium size Chopped carrots Sp

found this and thought of blog... apparently chicken breasts need 60 miles of cooking at 65mph

There is a tree at the end of our road dropping handfuls of fluffy- looking balls onto the pavement and the very busy road next to it. These are not fluffy at all but very prickly. So one has to stamp on them to find the gorgeous, glossy, yummy, sweet chestnuts inside. I brought some to work. Not sure yet if they are popular but I hope they can at least make a good showing against the Piggy Gummy Treats from M&S that someone brought in the other day. I just got an email from a friend who is planning a tree-planting weekend. Apparently the sweet chestnut "was introduced to Britain by the Romans by 400AD and has naturalised here - it is also a very useful wood!" If you find one, don't mess about. Pick those nice things up!! (Leave some for the squirrels. Or don't. I dont know it so confusing, what species is OK and what isn;t and who gets what. Leave a comment if you feel the need to protest - at anything)

The little purple one was the edible and rather delicious Amethyst Deceiver . The River Cottage handbook claims that they are generic, "filler" mushrooms. I don't agree. They are a bit tough and chewy but that was a good thing. I spent ages poring over these little lilac beauties thinking they might be Lilac Fibrecaps, in which case a very nasty dose of pretty much everything was in store. They are called Deceivers because they have a near relative that is edible but takes on a thousand forms, making it very tricky to recognise. Happily the story ends well with me having a nice purple treat and a full tummy. The one in the background was Charcoal buirner ( Russula cyanoxantha ) or simliar, but it turned out to be full of little mushroom grubs. All the other mushies we brought home were poisonous - or couldn't be identified but were similar to known poisonous ones.

Yesterday we went mushrooming in Epping Forest. We didnt find much to eat, but I was amazed how many different kinds of mushrooms there are when you start looking. We found at least fifteen different kinds. I will put some photos up. We did get some Amethyst Deceivers which are edible, but there arent many of them and the River Cottage book suggests they are not a top mushroom but being pretty can be good fillers or with a nice saffron risotto. We got lots of poisonous ones and a couple I really cannot figure out what they are. Watch this space for photos or upload your own in the comments!