Tuesday 10 July 2012

Woods promenade, wild mushrooms & friends

Preliminary remarks: if the mushrooms are growing on your friends, your friends may be dead. Silly jokes apart, a great pleasures derives and springs out from the chance of walking with your friends in the wood. It is a relaxing way to approach a trip out of town. The contact with nature both on the Apennines and scottish the Low Lands is gorgeous:

This may interest those in Scotland who wish
to know more and amuse themselves

The city chaos is remote, distant, inexistent. You have with you some good provisions: such as water, perhaps some chocolate, and a biscuit, and of course a basket, a license to pick mushrooms up and a proper mushroom knife with brush:


With the practical case it can be fixed to the belt

Anyways, along with Zinga (my Fungi guide) and a couple of trustworthy friends, 


Isa & John (reborn) Lennon,
the best couple of just married friends ever


we had a fortunate hunting and we came back with three baskets full of craterellus cornucopioides or black trumpet. I am afraid it has nothing to do with Shrooms. The pleasure of this discovery is that of sharing time with your friends, understanding how difficult is to find food in the forest, as our ancestors did, and how beautiful is to live nature not only as an exploitable source, but as a prolongation of your soul.


A mushroom form Puglia (the italian heel):
there is a mountain called Cornacchia (Rook)
where you may find amazing varieties of mushrooms


Lethal but really splendid in the beam of the camera


Hunting baskets ready to be washed and cooked


Reserved mushroom


Hit by a ray of light
the pop singer Madonna would praise this definition


In the dark underwood, on the 
pine-needle carpet of a pine forest, where
everything else was dead,
these incredible manifestations of yellow life.


The ox tongue


Mushrooms in a ceramic pan:

fry a clove of garlic in some extra-virgin olive oil;
add the cleaned mushrooms;
let them stay five minuted at medium hob;
add a glass of white wine;
adjust black pepper, finely chopped and salt;
dress your pappardelle.



Home made pappardelle


At Zinga's an helpful dish of pappardelle 
(similar to tagliatelle but thicker)
with our cooked mushroom pray:





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