The seasons are turning, Summer is definitely over and Autumn is making it’s presence felt. Squash and pumpkins are available – it is definitely decorative gourd season – and slowly root vegetables are edging out the salad vegetables from the shelf space in the supermarket. I made my first pot of soup of the season last weekend and I’m once again thinking about getting back into baking my own bread. It’s also the time of year, especially if you’re me, when thoughts turn to…mushrooms.
I live in the north of Scotland, a beautiful part of the world, and we get a lot of light in Summer. In Winter though, we do not, and like most Scottish people I need to top up my Vitamin D in winter. (Official NHS advice there, if you don’t work outside, you probably aren’t getting enough.) Over the years I’ve learned to listen to my body and the first sign for me that we’ve crossed the rubicon of light versus dark, is when I start craving mushrooms. I enjoy mushrooms all year round but when I start catching myself adding extra mushrooms to recipes and the more exotic kinds start to look awfully tempting. I’m generally a chestnut and portobello girl, my favoured dried mushroom is porcini and I tend to keep an emergency tin of straw mushrooms in the cupboard for stir-fries. But outside of this time of year, I struggle to get excited for Oyster or Shitaki mushrooms, and only in Autumn do I find myself perusing mushroom forager blogs and looking longingly at illustrations of Chicken in the Woods and the like.
My first indication that the seasons are turning from Summer to Autumn, before the temperature has permanently dropped, even before damp has become the most common description of the weather, is generally that I start adding mushrooms to everything. I tend not to notice as its happening, perhaps I’ll have made a mushroom risotto and added a normal amount of mushrooms to a stir-fry or an omelette, but something generally happens to make me realise, we’re in mushroom eating season. Perhaps I’ll catch myself ordering a mushroom pizza – our local craft beer pub does excellent wood-fired pizzas, but the mushroom pizza is a LOT of mushrooms and ordering that is usually an obvious cue. This year though, it was the point where, while making a mushroom sauce for my pasta dish, I looked at the rest of the tub thought ‘those won’t last’ and instead of adding a couple of extra mushrooms, used the whole rest of the tub. I doubled the pasta while I was at it, but it was by any objective measure an excess of mushrooms, and yet it felt only a sufficient amount of mushrooms.
As someone who generally has opinions about chefs who vegetarianise a meal by replacing meat with mushrooms on a 1:1 ratio this is obviously a really blatant hint. (I like a mushroom burger, but putting a portobello mushroom between the halves of a burger bun with a bit of lettuce and some cheese does not a burger make.) So here I am with a lovely veggie cottage pie – loaded up with, amount other things, some very nice portobello mushrooms – baking gently in the oven and several different meals planned to use up the ‘wild mushroom’ selection I bought on special yesterday. (I’ve got a polenta dish and a nice noodle soup dish planned for starters.) I have a bit of a hit and miss relationship with Chinese mushrooms – my dried mushroom of choice is definitely porcini rather than shitaki, which I alway find a little disappointing – however, I’ve recently been introduced to the joys of ‘black fungus’, not the kind you don’t want to get in your lungs I hasten to add, but the other name for cloud ear mushrooms. The unlikely location for my introduction was the Hug and Pint on Great Western Road, who do a cracking Asian small plates menu, where I had a dish that also involved bean curd skin – tastier than it sounds – and salted black beans. Apparently in their fresh incarnation they’re as smelly as a ripe blue cheese, but reconstituted from dried they’re pretty mellow and not noticeably odorous!
While I was writing this I was reminded of the excellent book on fungi that I read early this Summer – I was travelling across France for work, it seemed an appropriate choice – Entangled Life by Melvin Sheldrake. It’s a fascinating book about the hidden myco-world beneath our feet, and looks at many of the uses that humans have put fungi and their fruiting bodies to over the millennia – from edible mushrooms and truffles, through recycling/neutralising pollution and chemicals, to medicine and altered states of being. Of course as a vegetarian I was disappointed that he didn’t really touch on the less common uses for fungi – mycoprotein is an increasingly prevalent part of the meat substitute market, one I normally encounter in the form of quorn. I’d hoped it might go into a bit more detail than I’d gleaned from casual googling – it’s a strain of fungus that is cheap to grow, nutritious and palatable to humans! – but I suspect that that was more a product of Sheldrake being of the ‘but why not just eat mushrooms’ school of thought which is fair enough. A good read nonetheless.
Cupboard Life 