Everything that I cook these days seems to be jet black.  Tomato sauces, risottos, bean stews…we have been putting wild mushrooms in all our meals and they make your food extremely dark!  We have been foraging for wild mushrooms with the help of a friend who oversees the mushrooms collected.  The flavour of wild mushrooms is distinctly earthy and almost incomparable to their supermarket brothers, the texture is amazing, the shapes and sizes are fascinating, the foraging is fun, it’s free and also nutritious.  Now that is hard to beat!  I also quite like having to clean off bits of soil and earth rather than weird white clay granules that you often have at the bottom of bought mushrooms.

It has been a great year for mushrooms.  Although they are just finishing, if you go out exploring with someone more knowledgeable than yourself you might still gather a little basketful.  Once you learn a few safe, edible varieties you can gather those and gradually build on your knowledge.

The most well known and widely collected is the regular Field Mushroom.  This name incorporates several members of the same ‘Agaricus’ family.  They look very much like regular ‘bought’ mushrooms and grow on pasture and grassland.  If the right combination of damp weather followed by sunshine occurs, mushrooms can appear as early as July.  Mowing and grazing seems to encourage growth whilst chemical farming depletes it hugely.

On a nutritional note, mushrooms are a very good source of potassium and trace minerals.  Potassium is used in the body for water balance and distribution, muscle and nerve cell function, heart, kidney and adrenal function.  However, people tend to eat mushrooms in such small quantities – in terms of weight – that the contribution they make to the diet is much more to do with taste and texture than nutrition.

But before you go out eating any old mushroom you see growing, please don’t forget that mushrooms can be extremely poisonous. There are about 3,000 different species in Great Britain and Ireland, and about 100 of these are both edible and worthwhile eating, whilst 20 of the 3,000 are fatal if eaten.  Learn from someone who really knows their mushrooms!  Happy Hunting.