Dinner for free

Living more or less in the country, I often see strange and wonderful fungi in the woods and fields around my house, and even in the verges and lawns. I’ve had a life long love affair with mushrooms, and have spent a lot of money on imported dried mushrooms from France and Italy in my time. However, I’ve also long suspected that most of my local shrooms are edible, but obviously it’s not the kind of thing you take a risk on, is it?

My interest in mushrooms gathered momentum around a year ago, when I was out walking the dog in the woods and came across a seriously big mushroom. An arcane mystical looking thing, I picked it and brought it home. It had a bulbous firm stem, a large cap around 10 inches across and a slightly sinister yellow foam-like underbelly. When I sliced into it, it had this interesting two-tone yellow and white cross section.

I got out my mushroom book but try as I might I couldn’t identify it. I took a few pictures and then binned it. A few weeks later I was at a work lunch at the French ambassador’s residence (don’t ask) and by coincidence, I sat next to a French lady who it transpired, was also a big mushroom fan.

In France, you can bring wild mushrooms to your local pharmacy and they’ll identify them for you before you eat them. As I was bemoaning the lack of such facilities in Ireland, I remembered that I had a picture of my giant mushroom on my cellphone. I showed it to her, and she said “Oh, that’s a Cep Du Pine – they’re perfectly edible.”

“Really? Wow. Oh well, I’ll know next time.”

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m making mushroom risotto and there in the bag of dried mushrooms I had gotten in Italy was a dried slice of my Cep, known in Italy as Porcini. The one I was looking at even had the two-tone cross section. Hmm. So it’s beginning to dawn on me that there are some very desirable edibles growing wild but it’s simple lack of knowledge holding me back.

And then I came across Mushroom Stuff.com, a website run by Bill O’Dea, a dedicated mycophagist (one who likes to gather and eat mushrooms). He has studied fungi at UCD and attended several workshops and mushroom forays in Ireland and the US. Bill's greatest boast is that he has been collecting and eating wild mushrooms for over thirty years and still survives to tell the tale. Every year he organises wild mushroom hunts in the Irish countryside where he takes people mushroom gathering and helps them identify what they’ve found.

So on Saturday, myself and the wife got up early and drove to Avondale House for some rocket fuel coffee and a solid three hours of hiking through the huge grounds searching for mushrooms. We were blessed with the best weather for the task – it had been raining enthusiastically for days and then stopped the day before the hunt. Around 70 people turned out for the day and collectively, we found HUGE quantities of mushrooms.
Most of them were interesting but inedible, although one person did find a Death Cap mushroom, which was interesting to see. Among the eaters found though were many boletes, such as my one from last year, as well as loads of chanterelles, puff balls, giroles and some edibles I hadn’t heard of before, such as puffballs and hedgehog mushrooms. There was a excellent mushroom lunch and an outdoor mushroom fry up, with several pans on the go frying up the haul.Yumm. At this point, if your not a mushroom fan, this probably seems a bit odd, but ask any serious foodie about the role of wild mushrooms, and they too will get a distant look in their eye and smile. Overall, Bill runs an excellent day long event and if you have even a passing interest in all things fungus, you could do worse than attend the next mushroom hunt.