Forests' Bounty

Blueberries

I always had a love hate realtionship with blueberries. They taste delicious and can be incorporated into countless dishes. But picking them is a royal pain. I remember as a child spending hours picking berries under the watchful eye of my slave driving grandmother. In a sense it's better than picking cranberries, because at least you can eat them while you pick them, but it's still a whole lot of work. Especially since the wild blueberries of my childhood were quite a bit smaller than the ones you get at the store, so it took forever to pick a decent amount. They grow on bushes about a foot heigh so you're bent over or on your knees the entire time, too.

Sure, you can buy blueberries at the grocery store, but it just isn't the same thing. I always complained to Jennifer about the berries from the store, how they don't have the right flavor and color. She usually dismissed it as euro-chauvinism (as she does my ravings about bread) but she did develop new blueberry appreciation this summer. Well, it turns out that what I think of as a blueberry is actually a Bilberry, which looks and taste similar, but not quite. Beside the more intense flavor, the biggest difference to me is that unlike cultivated Blueberries, the Bilberry is deep dark inside -- picking it leaves you with purple fingers and pants, and eating it leaves you with blue lips and tongue. BTW, I've since learned the berry in the store is the "high brush blueberry" (which is apparently what you'd get in the store in the Czech Republic as well) but there also wild or "low brush" blueberries which, for all I know, might be more similar to the Bilberry I know and love.

Luckily this summer I mostly picked berries for on-the-go consumption, although there more blueberries than I had ever seen. And we got plenty to eat, too, in kolaches, dumplings and with pancakes.

Mushrooms

Now with mushrooms, I had the opposit relationship. I loved to hunt mushrooms but I didn't like eating them. Now I love to do both. Mushroom hunting is a thoroughly enjoyable pastime. You get to spend time in the forest with its wonderful scents and sounds, trying to detect mushrooms that blend into the ground and sometimes barely poke out through the needles covering the forest floor. Plus there is the risk of accidentally picking one of the many poisonous mushrooms bearing such lovely names as Death Cap or Destroying Angel.

I strictly stick to mushrooms I'm familiar with, so I'm not too worried. Beside, most of the mushrooms we pick are Boletes whose poisonous members look quite distinct. We found some beauties, too. We did pick a lot of Blushers that are related to, though not as pretty as, the psychoactive Fly Agaric.

We actually lucked out with our mushrooming. Due to the cold, wet summer, they started growing much earlier than usual and there was a lot of them. There wasn't a big varienty, though. Mostly Rusullas, Blushers and Boletes and the occasional Stinkhorn with its delightfully descriptivie latin name Phallus impudicus.