I love foraging mushrooms. It is a great exercise and also an amazing walk in the forest. Disconnected from the city rush, it is a wonderful place to meditate, listen to the birds or just to rest in the grass.
If you check my facebook account you will see a lot of photos from the forest especially in the last week.
We had some guest from France and I took them in the forest. A few times we went twice a day.
We also had great weather for mushrooms. I seen more mushrooms in a week that I saw in the last 5 – 6 years.
Most of the mushrooms were Boletus Edulis which are the best mushrooms in the world – my opinion of course. I love to smell them when I found them in the forest.
So imagine a week with 6 years old boy and some adults foraging in the forest, sometimes in the rain, with people screaming with joy when they found mushrooms.
I had a few nights when I went to sleep and I would dream about finding mushrooms. Ha ha ha!!
Coming home with 2 -3 kg of mushrooms became a problem. We needed to cook them or preserve them. My husband made an amazing “Bors de hribi” – Sour soup with boletus and we made boletus with sour cream, boletus cream soup and simple fried boletus.
My mother in law boiled them a little and then refrigerate them, but most of them I dried them. Imagine the smell of all the dried mushrooms.
Boletus edulis is well suited to drying—its flavor intensifies, it is easily reconstituted, and its resulting texture is pleasant.
Cut them into lengthwise slices no less than ½ inches thick from cap to base. Put them on a twine and leave it in the sun or hang them in the kitchen.
Reconstitution is done by soaking in hot, but not boiling, water for about twenty minutes; the water used is infused with the mushroom aroma and it too can be used in subsequent cooking. Dried boletus have more protein than most other commonly consumed vegetables apart from soybeans.
