One of the things I like best about mushroom picking is that it’s like meditation. You’re so busy looking at the ground that your mind can wander wherever it likes. After saying a tearful goodbye to Leonardo at Gare du Nord on Sunday, we bought some sandwiches for lunch and drove north for about an hour to Senlis forest.

We went to our usual spot, which I won’t describe in detail because mushroom pickers never tell you exactly where they go. Who wants someone else getting there first ? We put on our walking boots and set off. There were a few toadstools along the way, which was promising. Would you believe there is no word for “toadstool” in French? They just talk about “champignons comestibles” and “non comestibles”.  You can either eat them or not. Toadstools are usually far more attractive than mushrooms. Beautiful purples and oranges, not to mention the amanita muscaris or fly agaric – you know, the famous red one with the white spots that’s always in cartoons. The edible ones, apart from the little amethyst deceiver (Laccaria amethystea), are usually various shades of white and brown and sometimes black.

We soon branched off the path, wading through masses of heather and brambles. Get those muscles working again. Relationnel spied an “amanita vaginata grisea” which I had no recollection of whatsoever.  I usually steer clear of amanites which all contain a poisonous substance that fortunately is destroyed by heat. So all you have to do is cook them! But Relationnel assured me the grisette was fine. So I memorised the little stripy bits on the edge of the cap so I wouldn’t mix it up with any others. That’s the advantage of being with someone who knows about mushrooms. There’s always some little detail that distinguishes each mushroom and stops you getting poisoned!

After lunch, with about twenty grisettes, a handful of quite large pine boletes (Boletus pinophilus) that we found hiding under fallen pine tree branches, and one tête de nègre (Boletus aureus), Relationnel suggested we go looking for trompettes de la mort (trumpets of death) called horns of plenty in English. The name in French is not as ominous as it sounds. It’s really because they’re black and found around All Souls’ Day on 1st November! He seemed to know where he was going although I didn’t remember finding them in that part of the forest. We arrived in a clearing and he said that was the place. Horns of plenty, along with chanterelles, are among the hardest mushrooms to find because they look like squiggles on the ground, peeking up from among the fallen leaves of oak trees.  We searched for a while but found nothing.

I decided I needed a rest and sat down on a tree stump while Relationnel went searching further. About 100 metres away, he called out, “Come and see”. By the time I got there, he couldn’t find them any more. Then we both saw them at the same time. The most wonderful thing about horns of plenty is that when you find one, there’s bound to be others. I put a plastic bag on the ground to protect my knees (I once spent two days in bed after bending over to gather chanterelles for an hour) and started picking. After ten minutes, we had filled our basket and I’d forgotten all about Leonardo going to Australia on a one-way ticket!

For more information on mushrooms, check out www.rogersmushrooms.com. Recipes coming soon! Any suggestions welcome.

See more photos on my FaceBook page (click link on top right)

When Relationnel first mentioned mushrooming, he said you had to get up at the crack of dawn or there wouldn’t be any left. As our only free day was Sunday, I decided to give it a miss. I am not an early bird. But a few years later, the Serbian man who runs the Pergola, a restaurant with a wonderful outdoor eating area along one of our favourite cycling paths, dished up freshly picked wild mushrooms. He told us he’d picked them in the country the afternoon before. Ah ha! Afternoon, not dawn, you will note. So I put mushroom picking on the next Sunday’s  agenda.

Relationnel checked out the lie of the land in a forest about an hour north of Paris. It seems mushrooms grow best on slopes with southern exposure.  He always knows things like that. The weather was fine, about 12 or 13°C and sunny. We waded through acres of knee-high ferns just turning brown at the approach of autumn without finding anything like a mushroom. I didn’t know I had all those thigh muscles before. Not that I really knew what I was looking for. I’ve learnt since that it takes about ten or fifteen minutes to get your “mushroom eyes” working. Edible mushrooms usually blend in remarkable well with the foliage around them. Each type of mushroom also has its own particular habitat so you have to learn to identify the different types of trees and shrubs.

We eventually came to a pinewood and Relationnel excitedly called me over to take a look.  Here was this cute little brown mushroom a couple of centimetres high with a darker cap and a thick stem. “Tête de nègre” (negro’s head) it’s called, would you believe it. He carefully cut it off at the bottom of the stem. You should avoid pulling mushrooms out by the roots if you want to find more in the same place the next year. And Relationnel has this amazing capacity to return to EXACTLY the same place, even a couple of years later. I’m more like Hansel and Gretel. I wouldn’t even be able to get out of the forest again on my own!

He turned it over and showed me the part under the cap which looks kind of spongey. That’s the way you identify boletus mushrooms. They’re called pores. The only variety I’d seen in Australia were agarics, which have gills under the cap.  You may have come across the boletus in your culinary travels. The best known specimen is  called porcini in Italy and cèpe in France. The wonderful thing about the boletus is that it’s never poisonous.  There are a couple of varieties that are bitter.  I’ll never forget the time we spent a whole afternoon collecting, then cooking, an amazing number of boletus with slightly pink pores, but had to throw the lot away after our first taste! Turns out they’re called bitter boletus. There are one or two others, easily recognisable, that will keep you up all night, but none are lethal.

Mushrooming is now one of my favourite activites, particularly in the autumn and right up until New Year (I once found chanterelles under the snow), but I’ve learnt to spot summer boletus, parasols and field mushrooms when we’re cycling in the summer. My biggest find was on cycle path along an old railway track. I found a boletus about 30 centimeters in diameter that I baked in the oven. Absolutely delicious! Anything we don’t eat, we freeze, so we can have them all year round.

Have you ever been mushroom picking?

Check out more on www.rogersmushrooms.com and watch out for the next post on Trumpets of Death.

It’s surprising how one’s tastes change over the years. When I first arrived in France, just out of uni, I fell immediately in love with baguette – the lovely white squidgy sort. I even remember the price at the time (1975!): 90 centimes. Francs, that is.  Today it’s 90 cents. Euros, this time. You know, I just put that into an inflation calculator on the web and it comes out at +347%. Kind of frightening, isn’t it?  Anyway, I soon learned there were different types of baguette, such as “moulé” and “non moulé“, depending on whether they cook it in a tin (moule) or not. I never liked the thing they call “un pain” which is a larger, shorter, often burnt and most unappetizing loaf that people seem to prefer when it’s stale. You can’t keep a baguette for more than a day, mind you, even for toasting. By next day, it’s rock hard or if you put it in a bread bin, it’s rubbery.

Once you’ve decided whether you want it to be “moulé” or not, you can choose how long it’s been in the oven: “bien cuit“, “cuit” or “pas trop cuit” according to how squidgy you want it. A lot of the bakeries confuse “bien cuit” with “burnt” and “pas trop cuit” with undercooked. You can actually have a baguette that is well cooked inside and normal colour on the outside. However, being an Anglosaxon, they won’t let me argue with them and I have often left the bakery at boiling point because they refused to give me what I wanted. My better half, Relationnel, prefers his “bien cuit” while I only like the “pas trop cuit” variety.

I did give vent to my anger once and couldn’t show my face in the bakery again, I was so embarrassed. There were a lot of people there too that day because we had been waiting for the next batch of bread to finish baking. It was a big pity because they used to sell my favourite baguette and after that, I always had to get Relationnel to buy it instead. I learnt to say “bien blanche” in other bakeries which seemed to help.

When my kids were small and I was going through my “bio” period, I started buying a multi-grain loaf from the health food shop and we kept baguette for a Sunday treat. Most of the time the “bio” loaf was the right colour but sometimes the baker would forget to take it out of the oven in time and it took on a darker burnt siena hue. I was always amazed that they would sell it anyway. The organic bakery eventually closed (maybe it got burnt down in the end!)  and I had to find a substitute.

Around that time, bakeries in general began making all sorts of different breads and you could get a decent loaf of multi-grain in most bakeries in Paris. But when we went away on holidays, we’d have to go for miles to find bread we liked. Alongside the squidgy baguette, you would now see the “baguette tradition“, made with unbleached flour and a lot more expensive than the normal baguette whose price is regulated. No doubt a subtle way of increasing prices … But we eventually moved over to the tradition which is really much tastier and never squidgy. But I’m not into squidgy any more.

After we moved from the suburbs into the centre of Paris, I had to look for another bakery. We tried “Chez Julien” and “Gosselin” on rue Saint Honoré, reputed to have supplied the presidential palace at one time. Julien doesn’t open on Sundays, which is a bit of a pain, because that’s our oyster day and you have to have good bread with oysters. Gosselin has inconsistent quality, in my opinion, and is always full of people. There was one vendor that would systematically give me the opposite of what I asked for. When I lived in the suburbs no one took me for a tourist but now that I live in the 1st arrondissement, I often get spoken to in pidgin English and given bad service. Even though my French is probably better than theirs most of the time!

I started to eat less and less bread, which probably wasn’t a bad thing, just keeping it for the oysters on Sunday. Then we spent Christmas in a gîte in Normandy and the lovely owners, who live nearby, offered to lend me their bread-making machine. Relationnel had refused all endeavours on my part to possess one on the pretext that it would take up too much room.  But Valérie kindly gave us flour and yeast as well and I made batch after batch. Everybody loved it, so when we got home I started checking out the consumer magazines to buy my own machine.

Valérie had said hers was a cheap one and had a few drawbacks so I finally settled on a more sophisticated Kenwood mainly because you could make smaller loaves. I was a bit worried about the long-term effects of all this delicious bread. The first batch was a diasaster. Completely flat. This went on for a while, gradual improvements alternating with total flops. One of the main reasons is that Kenwood is American and all the recipes are based on American flour which it turns out is not the same as the flour you buy in France.

Then one day, when we were coming home from holidays in the south, we stayed overnight in a chambre d’hôte in Georges Sand country. The hostess told us about a wonderful pumpkin fair next day in a place called Panzoult. I’ve never seen anything like it. The winning pumpkin, grown on a pallet so it could be taken to the fair, weighed 600 kilos. There were all sorts of pumpkins and squashes – even a butternut or two – and a local miller selling flour. I told him about my bread-baking problems and he sold me some multi-grain flour and dried yeast. Imagine my surprise when I saw the kangaroo on the packet! He said it was the best yeast in the world and that they imported it from Australia! Ah ha!

Immediate success. Every loaf was perfect.Then the flour ran out. I rang the bakery but it isn’t open on weekends and it’s a bit far to go during the week. I know a 3-hour drive isn’t much for Australians but you have to remember that the traffic in and out of Paris can turn an ostensibly short trip into a nightmare. So I kept trying out other types of flour and cut down drastically on my bread intake.

Another trip away – you may have guessed by now that we go away a lot – took us to a chambre d’hôte in Briare near the famous canal bridge built by Eiffel, but that’s another story. At breakfast, I congratulated the hostess on the lovely bread. Home-made. And would you believe where she goes to buy her flour? No, not Panzoult. But to the supermarket next to our gîte in Normandy when she goes to visit her family. She says she makes perfect bread every time.

I looked up the supermarket chain on the web and discovered that all their stores are in the west of France, the closest being an hour and a half away so I emailed them to see whether the flour mill might be closer. No such luck so we went to the closest one on the list. It was in a very dicey, most unlikely looking housing estate, but they had the flour. I bought up as much as I could considering the sell-by date.

Ever since, I have been making perfect bread twice a week. Relationnel still prefers “baguette tradition” with his oysters on Sunday but he buys it himself at the market and I no longer have to put up with people not giving me what I want!