More Shrooms!!!

Well its been raining and humid most of the time that ive had off lately which means its been perfect conditions for mushroom hunting and this week ive been out a couple of times again once with Brendan and once by myself when i couldnt sit around at home anymore. 

When Brendan and I went out we were very suprised with what we found, although at first we were not sure what exactly we would be picking we soon found and identified a whole bunch of Red crackling bolete which is very similar to the slippery jacks we get back home however they have a red stem and start to crack on the caps when they get older. Unfortuantly due to the rain the majority of them were to wet to pick but we did manage to find some very nice smaller ones hiding in the forrest floor.

After a while of searching for these and meeting anothe guy who had been picking and had some of the biggest Cep type mushrooms ive ever seen we decided to move on and head over to a spot where weve picked chanterelles before, on the way we came across a bunch of these small Cep type mushrooms which had us jumping in excitement and throwing hi fives as we picked about a kilo of them. I even found one of the biggest boletes ive ever picked, even though after identifying it as the Bitter Bolete which is unedible due to its bitter taste i wanted to take it home and try it for myself.

That nite i decided to cook them up but first tried a small piece of each, the Bitter Bolete was exactly as described in the book and toatly unedible while the red crackling once fullly cleaned and the other small ceps were delicious.

So i went with them and planned to simply fry them with butter to go on top of a rissoto.

Everything was going to plan until i tasted the fried mushrooms and was overwhelmed by a bitter taste which as i later found out was thanks to me miss identifying a couple of small Bitter Boletes as Ceps and therefore almost destroying our dinner, which as sophia read later was a common mistake as the grow with the Ceps and when small are very simmilar in look and smell however if tasted when picked have a very unpleasnt bitter taste.

Needless to say as one of the most importatnt rules when picking mushrooms is to make sure you can properly identify what it is that your picking and in our excitement we had failed to do just this but it wont happen again. Oh yeah and we got a 750 kr train fine for having out of date tickets on a sunday nite which added to the learning experience´s of the day. 

 One of the Red Crackling Bolete´s we found

 The small Bitter Bolete

 Some type of Stinkhorn. Apparently this was eaten as a aphrodesiac a while ago. Looks like a Cock hahahaha

 The big Bitter Bolete even the bugs dont like these ones.

 Dinner which was almost ruined. We managed to save the Red Boletes and a few Chanterelles.

DAY 2

The second day i went on my own was very good and although i didnt get as many mushrooms the quality was much better. This time i noticed that all the Red Crackling Boletes were completly gone even though it was only three days later but as i walked into the next part of the forest i managed to identify another nicer type of Bolete the Bay Bolete and although i didnt find many of these they were very tasty just simply fried and eaten on toast with some herbs from our own herb planter were amazing.

Also i found another massive Bitter Bolete of which i only took a photo but still a very impressive mushroom.

 

Heres a nice Bay Bolete they were all in very good condition that day.

 The monster Bitter Bolete with my knife for scale

   
And the end result a good colection of Bay Boletes with some very small Chanterelles to go with.

All in all it was a good few days of picking and alot of learning was done and as the weather remains waarm and raining i cant wait to see whats out there next week.