What a difference a ten days make.

The day after I drove back to the Czech Republic from England I did what I always do on my return and went for a walk in the forest above the house. I went of course with mushroom basket in hand. I returned with it full of giant chanterelles - as you can see from the picture above. I had two meals of these treasures and froze enough for probably six more. I duly made a mental note to go back this week.

So it was that a Czech friend and I arrived in the forest this afternoon, but despite nearly two hours walking we found only small and sometimes dessicated mushrooms. This seems just weird to me as we have had several days' worth of rain in the village in the intervening time. Maybe our weird microclimate meant that the forest above us did not receive any rain. Mind you I'm not complaining I still have enough for a couple of meals and there's only limited space in the freezer compartment (which is full of wild strawberries, cherries and now chanterelles).

One point of note is that this wet and for the Czechs mild summer has had an interesting impact. The Prague News is announcing that as a consequence the famous bark beetle is dying off. It seems the environmentalists were right - nature is taking its course and intervening to restore balance and the Sumava authorities' drastic logging actions may not have been necessary afterall.

The Early Bird Catches the Mushroom

I was up and out of the house at 6am this morning. This was partly because the weather is so hot that to attempt anything physical after 10 is foolhardy and I wanted a walk in the woods. Of course this was not just any walk but a mushroom-gathering one, and in order to get the best one has to be up early. Already there were two women in the wood rummaging under fallen pine branches. On the road on the other side of the hill several cars were parked, including this one which had illegally been driven up the track to gain a few yards on its owners' mushrooming rivals.

Well I was lucky and got a good basketful. This year is a spectacular one for chanterelles. They are huge (four inches high) but the moss in which they nestle is likewise tall, so it is very easy to miss them. In addition I got some sheep's polypore, hedgehog mushrooms and russulas. So that's my supper sorted for a couple of days.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I share in the Czech obsession of mushrooming and how in England I am often met with disbelief when I assure people I meet in the forest that you can eat what I have collected. I would like to think that my eccentricity on this is seen as normal in the Czech Republic. But this is not always the case. Czechs are taught what to collect by their parents and grandparents, they inherit a repertoire of mushrooms that they collect and often this is not large. I was taught mushrooming by a Czech with a large repertoire and I have additionally made a great study of mushroom books (so much so at least two are to be found next to the loo in both my Czech and British homes).

Today a fellow mushroomer (a Czech) stopped me in the woods, and she busily told me that the charcoal burner (a russula much prized in Britain) was not edible and wrongly identified the sheep's polypore as a field mushroom. Tut, tut, tut, she went as I showed her I was confident enough to nibble some, and away she went shaking her head. Another Czech friend with whom I occasionally go mushrooming was shocked that I collect blewits (great favourites of mine and ones which are now commercially cultivated) or fungi that grow on trees. She will however collect the blusher – which you will find often listed as poisonous in English books, but which is very popular in the Czech Republic.

So there you go, I can't win. By the way I have eaten blusher – it's okay but not worth the fuss the Czechs make over it, especially as you go through a polaver to cook it.

PS. In response to Karen's comment - here is a photo of my basket of mushrooms. The egg yellow ones are chanterelles, the charcoal coloured one is (you guessed it) charcoal burner, the white ones with the beige tops are sheeps polypore, and the large brown one is a boletus.

Chanterelles

As you will have gathered from my earlier posts I have caught the Czech mushroom collecting bug. Although you can find early boletus in the woods, my favourite at this time of year is the egg yellow chanterelle. You will find chanterelles in small troops nestled into moss on banks of dappled shade. They are good mushrooms for a beginner as they are easy to identify with their yellow cap fluted down into a yellow stem. Instead of the usual mushroom gills chanterelles have forked ridges which continue from the cap down the stem. Like all mushroom collectors of my acquaintance I have several mushroom identification books (my favourite by the way is the River Cottage Handbook No 1) and these talk about chanterelles having a scent of apricots. Well they do but only in the way that you get those white paints with a hint of apricot. Chanterelles smell of mushrooms with a hint of apricot, which you can miss if you haven't enough of them.

Today I returned home with enough of these yellow treasures to make a dinner of them for my husband and me. They have such a wonderful flavour and texture that they do not need fancy recipes, just fry them and then serve with scrambled eggs and a slice of bread (Czech rye bread if you can get it) and you will be in ecstasy. My husband was quite smitten with them.

PS Chanterelles were not the only thing harvested in the forest today, there were wild raspberries and strawberries too. However those small atom bombs of flavour somehow didn't make it to the basket. Don't tell my old man.

Chanterelles

A friend of ours, who works on the North Sea oil rigs, has just bought a forester's cottage in the woods. The house is sited right next to the forest as you would expect and there is even a small private gate from the garden that takes you immediately into the trees. To get there you climb a winding forestry road out of Cesky Krumlov, on which you will occasionally meet large forestry lorries laden with trunks coming down in the opposite direction – not something to enjoy on the narrow road, but which mean that in the winter the road is kept clear of snow.

Alongside the cottage runs a track which after a brief spell among the trees takes you to an expanse of upland grassland and spectacular views across the Sumava mountains all the way to Austria. That is of course if you get that far. The woods behind the little house are a first-class place for collecting egg-yolk coloured chanterelle mushrooms in the moss covered ground. My friend's partner being Czech born and bred has of course discovered this fact and moreover in the spell after the rain did not even make it to the garden gate and into the forest before her basket was full of these treasures with their slight scent of apricots. I do wonder however whether having mushrooms reliably on your doorstep will not in some way reduce the enjoyment of the hunt. We shall see.