This Week’s Blogger Round-Up starts with a logical follow-up to Monday’s post on Forbidden Mushrooms. Susan from Days on the Claise talks about what mushrooms are safe and explains how to pick them. Next on the list is a description of a Fest Noz in Brittany by Abby from Paris Weekender. If you’re intending to visit Brittany in the summer, you should make sure you include one of these very traditional festivals. And to finish off, I’m including a book review by Claire from Word by Word, who is a constant inspiration for my insatiable reading habits. My Brilliant Friend is the first in a fascinating tetralogy of novels by Napolitan author Elena Ferrante. All available on your Kindle. Enjoy!
Would you eat these mushrooms?
by Susan from Days on the Claise, an Australian living in the south of the Loire Valley, writing about restoring an old house and the area and its history and running Loire Valley Time Travel.
The mushrooms in the basket are all edible. They belong to a group called boletes, of which the ceps are the best known and most prized. They grow in forests. There several species in the basket, mostly Orange Oak Bolete Leccinum aurantiacum, but also a few Bay-brown Bolete Boletus badius and Red-footed Bolete Boletus luridiformus. The person who picked them was only collecting for the table and has not touched anything they did not know to be edible. Boletes are the best beginners mushrooms here because they are safe — none are lethal and the couple that will give you a stomach ache are unappetising looking (coloured or staining luridly) and/or bitter to taste. Read more
Fest Noz in Malestroit
by Abby from Paris Weekender, an American dividing her time between New York, Paris and Brittany who offers suggestions for Paris weekends, either staying put or getting out of town
A Fest Noz, or night festival, is a traditional festival in Brittany, centered around dancing and music.
Just about every very town in Brittany holds its own festival, so especially if you’re visiting the region in the summer, it’s hard to find a single evening when there isn’t one somewhere within an hour’s drive. Read more
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante tr. by Ann Goldstein…Neapolitan Tetralogy Book1
by Claire from Word by Word, Citizen of Planet Earth, Anglosaxon by birth, living and working in France, who loves words, language, sentences, metaphors, stories long and short, poetry, reading and writing
Elena Ferrante is already something of an Italian legend. An author said to spurn interviews, her pen name fuelling speculation about her real identity. Her work is said to be autobiographical and already capturing the attention of English readers in a similar way to the autobiographical series of novels by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard …
In 2012, My Brilliant Friend, the first in the trilogy of Neapolitan novels was translated into English and the two subsequent books The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay were published in 2013 and 2014 consecutively. Read more
