A Postcard from the Woods

I don't remember the last time I went mushroom hunting, certainly more than 20 years ago.

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Here at home the weather is quite strange: it is so warm that during the last cooking classes we even had lunch outside, under the olive trees. The temperatures even reached 24°C during the day. In the evening, though, it begins to be cooler, more humid, and in the morning we often wake up surrounded by a thick blanket of fog. Is this autumn? Or is it spring? Maybe the seasons don't really exist anymore… but surely this is mushroom time!

We live surrounded by woods: a large one made of oaks and beeches, the very same one we see every morning when opening the bathroom windows (the most instagrammed view of the house that our friends recognize immediately), and a pine forest a little further on, a destination for autumn walks.

Marcella, Giulia's grandmother, has the instinct of a mushroom hunter in her blood, a passion for delving into the scrub. The craving for finding mushrooms has always surpassed that of eating them. For her, the fun was in the woods, not in the kitchen.

Now that, given her age, she no longer ventures into the thick of the woods, it is Felice, my father-in-law, who has inherited the role of mushroom hunter.

I don't remember the last time I went mushroom hunting, certainly more than 20 years ago. This year, for the first time since I moved here, we all ventured into the woods in search of mushrooms. More than mushrooms, though, I found photo opportunities of some beautiful no-edible mushrooms, even if for the first time I also managed to find two porcini mushrooms!

Have you ever been mushroom hunting? Or do you prefer to rely on the stalls of a market?

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October Cook Along. The ingredients and the link!

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