Gino shows off the huge Porcini mushroom-shaped cloud he foraged this class .
It ’s a good fall for collectingmushroomsthis year . My wife and I drove up into the mountain this week to attend an agrarian festival , and the side of the route on the way up was dotted with the parked cars of mushroom hunters . We saw a bunch of them carry their harvest baskets filled with mushrooms , and we saw a fairish telephone number of barbarian - wild boar hunt parties , as well .
The most in demand mushrooms are the Brobdingnagian Porcini . We stopped at a friend ’s rest home on the way up and took a pic of her neighbor , Gino , who had just returned from his morning of foraging . He had a kerchief full of mushrooms and was happy to pose with one of his prizes .
Porcini mushroom areBoletus edulisand are appreciated because they are enceinte , super tasty and , respectable of all , they ca n’t be confused with some other specie that might be venomous . I do a piddling routine of mushroom-shaped cloud collecting myself , and one of the most frustrative situations is ascertain some wonderful look mushroom and then not being certain if they are an edible eccentric or not .
One does not want to be daring when harvesting wild mushrooms . I have a half dozen mushroom-shaped cloud - collecting field guides that I take with me , and I always spend more time looking at the books trying to identify my find than I do actually scrounge . I ’m learning , and there are now a lot of unlike coinage I can recognize , but I always bump even more fruit that I can not identify . There are a few shoes in Rapallo where I can take my mushroom-shaped cloud harvest to have them identified , but it ’s sort of a fuss . I can understand how multitude make mistake and bear that what they have discover is an edible mixed bag .
regrettably , the news tell apart stories every year of people who have poison themselves with wild mushrooms . There was a whole family that conk last year , and the year before that , a crowd of nuns in killed themselves and their convent ’s Edgar Guest with a deadly mushroom dish served for dinner . Obviously , the fact that Porcini are easy to identify aright is a big plus for mushroom-shaped cloud collectors .
Gino shows off the huge Porcini mushroom he foraged this year.
Photo by Rick Gush
Italian craft artists showed me the lacing crafts their grannie taught them .
The ag fete was a typical Italian affair , with a whole bunch of booths crowded together inside an exposition area , all deal various cheeses , salamis , breads , bring about and ag - related handiwork . We load up on cheese , corn bread cookie and a belittled salami made from angry Sus scrofa meat .
Italian craft artists showed me the lace crafts their grandmothers taught them.
My preferred part of these affairs is chatting up all the oldsters show their heritage crafts . The women visualise right were making lace crafts and were quite happy to tattle to me at length about how they had learned this craft from their own grandmothers . Plus , they express me the fresh borage andbietole(beets ) ravioli they had just made .
We went to a restaurant for tiffin with our friend and enjoyed , among other knockout , a plate of polenta with Porcini . Polenta is like corn mush and really good with a number of mushrooms and gravy . I also hadstinco di maiale , a big leg pearl covered with tender meat , sort of like a devil barbeque rib . I enjoyed my lunch and direct the leftover ivory with me in a doggy bag . afterward , while drift through the townspeople of Santo Stefano , I gave the bone to a very appreciative dog .
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