A fleshy shot, though not glamourous

Clinton from the District Council knocked at our door promptly this morning for us to have a walkabout, which we do regularly. It got me up and about despite my rather thick head this morning, which I could do without on a Monday morning. Why do I stay up so late, with a brain full of thoughts beyond 1am? Old habits die hard.

Helena hates to not be busy, so when I returned from our perambulations, I found she was preparing a meal to go in the slow-cooker. She had found a recipe for 'Oriental noodles with spring onions and bamboo shoots', with ingredients from the Yip Shing,which I visited yesterday for essential fresh tofu.

I often get carried away with unusual looking ingredients, some of which we never get to eat. I suppose my brain prefers the idea to the reality, as sometimes we come across incredibly old 'use by' dates. (I just thought there could also be 'buy by' date too, rather than 'sell by', when shopping).

Anyway, I saw that she had started soaking some dried mushrooms from a packet which has only chinese hieroglyphics and a photo of exotic-skinned fungi, looking rather like truffles, as I imagine they would appear in the ground. They were all sliced in differing ways so there were various textures, shapes and colours. A slightly pungent or acrid fungal smell was rising too, which I rather like.

I was reminded of being with Sophie G. in the Petit Loir valley in France, looking for fungi. She explained to me about ceps, which from then on have become my favourite mushroom, though I have only found them in the wild a few times since then. But on that occasion, we found a large puff-ball which we carried with us to the local cafe, where she was well-known. While we had our 'boisson', the cafe owner went out to the kitchen and cooked the puff-ball in thick steaks coated in garlic and olive oil. Absolute heaven. I can't imagine that happening in the local bar or cafe here, sadly.

I asked Helena to hang on a while (she was all set to start the preparations proper) for me to try and blip the mushrooms. I dusted off my tripod, which is so enormous and heavy that I rarely bother to use it (I bought it years ago for video filming work). The lighting in the kitchen was from overhead halogens with some ambient grey daylight sneaking in the window. I wanted to show the detail of the intricate flesh of the fungi as they expanded in the water, and how the colours started to stain the liquid a subtle brown. I couldn't get rid of the reflections, try as I might in the short time allowed. I have cropped it and adjusted other settings somewhat, in Aperture3, but it is still not quite what I envisaged. So par for the course then! But as I looked closely at the image I started to see tiny fragments of colour which must have come from diffracted light.