Mushrooms Galore

To be more exact, porcini mushrooms (Boletus edulis), or as it’s called in Sweden “Karl Johan mushroom”, named after a famous Swedish king.
Normally when we go out looking for mushrooms we walk for miles through the forest and come home with one or two specimens. If we find enough for an omelette we feel very happy. So when Lasse and Annika suggested a mushrooming trip we were happy enough to go out in the forest for a walk but not optimistic about locating our dinner.
We drove along a road through the forest, stopping now and again to check out the forest. Everywhere we stopped Lasse decided it was “too dry”. I knew a nearby path that led to a small stream so we decided to give that a look. We started finding porcini mushrooms about 50 metres from the road and when we crossed the stream we seemed to find them everywhere we looked!! Even our “experts”, Lasse and Annika, were amazed, saying they had never seen so many.
In my main blip Annika is photographing a particularly nice specimen, but there are many smaller porcini around. If you look carefully you’ll find at least 10 of them in the picture.
We collected and did a rough clean at the same time, brushing and cutting all the earth away and any bits the slugs had nibbled. We got choosy and all the older specimens were left, as were the really small ones. Even so we had to go back to the car to get more bags! A pause for a snack, the Swedish fika, and then we carried on collecting. When we walked back to the cars we could only just carry all our porcini. We also had a bag of chanterelle mushrooms because Jan had also found a great patch of those yellow beauties.
Once home we started the long process of cleaning, cooking, freezing and drying our harvest. Some of the best specimens were finely sliced for drying, others were cut into chunks, fried gently for a few minutes and then packed into boxes for the freezer. Some turned out to be full of worms and just got thrown into the compost. Others had a few wormy bits which we could cut away.  A lot of soil and forest debris needed brushing off, despite our initial clean in the forest.
Dinner was chanterelle toast, followed in my case by some sautéed porcini.
Right now the oven is on at a very low temperature, drying three racks of porcini. Another 4 racks plus a meter long mosquito net (extra) are waiting to be dried.
Unsurprisingly HarlingDarling also blipped this event, so take a look there to see a slightly different take on the day.
We were out in the forest for 4 hours and cleaning and preserving took another 5 hours. Time for bed…