Swedish Mushroom Adventures

Early September in Sweden is an enchanting time of year. The damp air and moist forests feel ripe with autumnal life and even the grassy areas in town are sprouting mushrooms. Even if they have been carved out of tree stumps.

With the sun being slow to make its mind up as it politely debated with the clouds about who should bat first, I went for a run and landed up at the Saluhallen where I almost inevitably was drawn towards a man selling chanterelles (Kantareller) for a pittance. I snaffled a bagful and grinned as I felt their weight almost drop through the bottom of the paper bag and the change jangle in my running shorts’ pocket.

With my golden cargo and a loaf of honey rye sourdough I made my sweaty way home and cooked the most perfect breakfast of sautéed chanterelles on toasted sourdough topped with some creme fraiche and washed down with the best part of a whole pot of percolator coffee. All I needed to make it extra special was Cowie and a copy of the Guardian.

My weekend mushroom adventures continued on Sunday with a trip to the forest. With Alexandra’s mushrooming knowledge and the advice from a day of foraging with John Wright of River Cottage HQ ringing in my ears and memories of playing mushroom roulette in Richmond Park we fearlessly tackled the mozzies and got stuck in. We found a wealth of half nibbled mushrooms snuggling into the light, sandy soil, sheltering beneath the branches of pine and birch trees.

I’m not sure what they all are, but where I’ve got an inkling I’ve included a caption. If you know what they are please let me know in a comment.

No idea what this one is. But it looked mean and evil.

This monster, we think is ideal for eating. It’s either a cep, or another sort of bolete. It was just a shame that the slugs and maggots had got there first.

And we saw these Fly Agaric by the dozen, as they flamboyantly lined the paths.

I returned home with an impressive clutch of well pored mushrooms which all seemed like they had edible potential, with the ominous exception of the black capped, long stemmed, example which resembled a grim reaper.

We were very worried about this one. It looked particularly evil.

These are called Slippery Jacks which are covered in a slimy cap which can cause indigestion. If you clean the cap the mushrooms themselves are rather good apparently. But their name is enough to put anyone off!

This one, I think, is a cep, which is called a Carl Johan in Sweden, and judging from the amount of holes must have been very tasty.

These two smelled good and when I took a small nibble didn’t taste bitter, but instead, rather impressive. And given that friends in the office and a few online experts suggested these would make for very good eating I plucked up the confidence to tuck in.

I decided to follow a recipe from Mark Hix’s new book “Hix Oyster and Chop House” and simply studded the ceps with slithers of garlic, coated them in butter and seasoning and then roasted them for 15 minutes before sprinkling with parsley and nervously tucking in.

They were absolutely delicious. Soft, tender and buttery and without question, the most mushroomy thing I’ve ever eaten. I am sure they tasted even better because there was a chance I’d identified them wrong and there was a vague possibility that this could be my last meal. If I suddenly drop down dead, please come and find me armed with whatever anti-toxins I require!

Further reading:

Funghi Forays – sign up for their excellent newsletters
Carl Johan on Wikipedia
The Good Food Mood Blog on chanterelles on toast
Beginners’ guide to picking chanterelles in Gothenburg Daily newspaper

Mushroom Mania – Soufflés and Stuffing

My local supermarket, in Gothenburg, tempts me every week with their treasure trove of mushrooms. Ranging from field mushrooms the size of dinner plates to what I’ve assumed are golden chanterelles and oriental varieties as well as the more expected button mushroom and a selection of very expensive dried fungi. After 3 months of sniffing, groping and ogling like a lecherous red-faced outcast in a dirty rain raincoat, I gave in.

My mushroom fetish went into over drive and led me into uncharted fungal waters. My mind wouldn’t let go of the thought of stuffing the enormous field mushroom with other mushrooms! In a sort of pseudo-infinite-fungal-regression. With a glut of mushrooms and only one mouth to feed, I spent most of the week inventing new ways to eat mushrooms. Here are the two that are most interesting…

Field mushroom stuffed with chicken liver, chanterelles and goats cheese

Ingredients:

1 massive field mushroom – skinned and destalked
About a dozen interesting small mushrooms such as chanterelles
Butter
Olive oil
3 chopped chicken livers
1 finely chopped shallot
Thyme
2 beaten eggs
1 clove of garlic
Parsley
Goats cheese

Method:

Season your massive mushroom and brush with oil and butter. Then roast for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, sauté the mushrooms in butter until they have browned and released their juice.

Then add the shallot and garlic and sauté until soft. Remove from the pan and then sauté the chicken livers until rare.

Combine the mushrooms, shallots, garlic, crumbled goats cheese, thyme, beaten eggs and livers in a bowl and then spoon on top of the large mushroom. Season. Then bake for a further 25 minutes at a medium temperature.

Serve as a light lunch. The liver, eggs and double hit of mushroom is a great flavour combination for autumn or a cold summer’s day as you tend to find in Sweden.

I’m not much of a wine expert, but I imagine it would work well with the subtle oaky notes you get in a good white Burgundy or with a piercing New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc to pick up on the acidity of the goats cheese.

Field mushroom with wild mushroom soufflé

Ingredients:

1 massive field mushroom – skinned and destalked
5 small mushrooms
50 grams butter
50 grams of flour
400ml of milk
1 clove of garlic
4 eggs
Goats cheese
Horseradish
Crème fraiche
Salt and pepper

Method:

Start by poaching the big mushroom in the milk. You may need to weigh the mushroom down as it tends to float! Season with pepper and throw in a chopped clove of garlic. Poach for around 20 minutes until it is soft and the milk has become mushroomy. Remove the mushroom and squeeze to remove the milk. Brush with butter and bake whilst you move on with the rest of the recipe.

Make a roux using the butter and flour. Then after a few minutes of cooking the flour add the hot mushroomy milk. Stir until it has turned into a silky béchamel worthy of featuring in a Dulux ad. Then crumble in some goats cheese.

Meanwhile sauté your smaller mushrooms in butter and oil. (If I had some cognac to hand I would have added a glass at this stage.) Once cooked blend to a pulp and add to the béchamel. Then split your eggs. Add the yolks to the now warm béchamel and whisk the whites to stiffness in a very clean bowl. Fold in the egg whites in three batches.

Remove the large mushroom from the oven and spoon the soufflé mixture into the mushroom’s cavity. Return to the oven and bake on a medium heat for 25 – 30 minutes. Resist the temptation to open the oven!

When the soufflé has risen and is looking golden on top, whip it out and serve with a dollop of horseradish crème fraiche and a sprig of parsley. A salad of goats cheese, walnuts and greenery would also be delicious.

The mushroom soufflé is also great on it’s own. Especially if you make an incision in the top and drizzle in some horseradish cream. Next time I am also going to make some croquetas from the glossy mushroom and goats cheese béchamel. These would be awesome either as tapas to go with a very dry sherry or as an accompaniment to a pork chop or chicken wrapped in parma ham.

Mushroom and Chestnut Spelt Risotto

There can be few more perfect places to drink coffee and do some writing than at Rosie’s Deli Café in Brixton. I found myself tapping away on my keyboard, nursing smooth espressos and nibbling on moist brownies last Monday and realized it was my turn to cook.

Before I knew it my hands had picked up a packed of spelt, some dried ceps and a can of chestnuts and my brain had fixated itself upon making a risotto! I asked Rosie if I’d gone mad and she thought it might actually taste quite good…

I find myself making a lot of risottos. It might be because I’ve got a fantastic risotto book that has taught me the intricate details of what makes a good one. But it’s more likely the fact that the process of making one is the most cathartic thing you can do without a yoga mat.

I fried a large onion in a Hurcelean amount of butter, let down with olive oil until it was soft and then chucked in 3 cloves of chopped garlic. Then I poured in 250 grams of spelt and let it crackle in the hot oil. The nutty smell of the frying spelt was quite different to the aroma that wafts off Arborio rice. Then comes the fun bit as you slosh in a glass or two of wine and listen to the liquid vaporize and breath in the winey fumes. It’s the sort of sensory experience that makes me love cooking.

Then start to add your chicken stock enriched with the juice from the rehydrated mushrooms and a splash of mushroom essence. You’ll need a lot of stock because spelt takes a lot longer to cook than rice. Add the stock glug at a time from a large measuring jug until the spelt is softened and the no longer tense. This took the best part of an hour.

Then, as the spelt is absorbing the last lashings of stock, fry about 12 sliced mushrooms in very hot butter and olive oil and flambé in cognac. This will add a rich, warming depth that this super savoury dish others lacks. Do the same with around 10 chopped chestnuts and the rehydrated ceps before adding both to the spelt along with sage and thyme. The sage works brilliantly with the chestnuts.

Stir in butter, parmesan and roughly chopped spinach and allow to rest. You’ll see the risotto transform from brown ricey stuff to creamy, unctuous food porn before your eyes. To serve, ladle into a bowl and adorn with chopped parsley, more parmesan and plenty of pepper.

Although we had it on it’s own, it would be a great accompaniment to pheasant, pigeon or guinea fowl and reminded me of something I once ate at the Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow. Be warned however, that rumours of spelt being flatulence free are, in my experience, are nothing but hot air.

Mushroom Roulette

After a wonderfully rustic-chic meal at Petersham Nurseries, we left feeling like uplifted and so poor that we needed to forage for our supper… that led us like a truffle hunting spaniel to Richmond Park.

No sooner than we had entered the Park, had I spotted a crop of mushrooms… then some more… and then just one solitary parasol mushroom that simply had to be picked. Cowie agreed to stop the car. I ran out and found not just the delicious parasol mushroom, but also a red, yellow and green mushroom with pores rather than gills! The excitement of finding a mushroom wearing Ghana’s football kit was almost too much for me. Was it poisonous? Was it full of polonium? Was it going to contaminate the other, benign mushroom? These were questions to ask John Wright later…

On our walk around the woods we came across loads of fungi in the leaf litter and discarded chestnut casings… it was a picture of Autumn with that deep smell of earth that anyone who lives in the countryside becomes addicted to.

We found some puffballs and a huge “beefsteak” type mushroom that weighed around 2 kgs and was attached to the trunk of a decaying tree. It smelt slightly of vinegar, but had a lovely texture.

We laid out our mushroom haul along the back seat of our car and headed home – unsure whether our cargo was deadly, tasty or just toadstools!

A cup of tea and some nerdy mycology reading later (John Wright’s River Cottage Mushroom Book) and we’d managed to identify most of our mushrooms… and to our delight they were not only classified as edible, but also as good eaters!

We were fairly confident with the Common Puffball, having identified some of these on our mushroom expedition with John Wright. All you have to do is peel the spiney skin off and saute them in some butter and garlic. They are small and a bit fiddly. You’re much better off with the Giant variety if you can find them.

Likewise, we were pretty happy that our Parasols were not only edible, but a really good mushroom. Apparently they are great deep fried in breadcrumbs.

Now, Cowie was very disturbed at the thought of the Bay Bolete mushroom above. Green, red and yellow – like a traffic light. But as you can see from the picture above, Halloween appearances can be deceptive! It turns out that the Bay Bolete is an excellent mushroom. Similar to a cep. I’d never seen one before so was very excited!

Having identified our shrooms we plucked up the courage to cook them up! I’ll let the pictures do the talking…

It tasted deliciously of danger. Of fear. With a hint of narcotic pleasure. We were a bit underwhelmed by the mushroom flavour. But what it lacked in muchroom taste, it made up in slippy autumnal texture.

We spent the rest of the evening watching the Bourne Ultimatum fearing the worst. I had some psychosomatic tingling in my feet and legs. My throat felt tight. And our tummies did a couple of triple salcos! The noise from our tummies during the night kept most of Balham awake… but we made it through the night and survived to tell the tale. I was a great pains to explain to Emma which mushrooms we had eaten – I even left the book out and the camera with it so Emma could explain what we’d eaten to the toxicologist had it all gone tits up!

We are now keen to visit Mrs Tees, the “Mushroom Legend”, down in the New Forrest.

Poisonous and Tasty Mushrooms at Stevington

It’s Autumn and I’ve got a semi about all the fun fungus growing in the hedgerows. Little outcrops of joy. Wondering around our garden I only found a few mushrooms… Dad was far more successful. As he was mowing the grass he kept on unearthing more mushrooms. Here’s a selection of the tastiest and most deadly…

This first set smelt nicely of aniseed. I am relatively confident that they are field mushrooms… or possibly horse mushrooms.. either way I am pretty sure they would have been edible and tasty too. I never plucked up confidence to eat them… and found that they were riddled with little insects which had eaten a fine matrix of little holes.

The second set of shrooms were even more exciting. Dad yelled and I ran out. He’d found a green mushroom growing beneath a cherry tree. The more we looked the more we found. Within 10 minutes we’d found bucket loads. They were all thriving in the mulch all over the garden. Excited at the prospect of an adventurous free lunch.

As you can see they were a weird green colour and covered in white specks… enough to make me refer to a proper text book.

I am glad I did because it turned out these green bad boys were poisonous, called Vedigris Agaric. Thank God I didn’t fry them up and serve them on toast!

The Restaurant Show: Mrs Tees

You know how when you learn a new word you are guaranteed to hear it non stop for next week or so. Coincidence is a strange thing. And I am sure there must be some sort of sociological mumbo jumbo to explain it.

It happened to me last week. On Monday Ed told me a story about how his Dad had just come back from a brilliant trip to a BnB in the New Forest. It’s run by a brilliant woman called Mrs Tees who is one of the leading mycologists (and exotic mushroom supplier) in the country. She is the only person in the UK to have a license to forage for mushrooms in the New Forest. She’s been to court several times and has won each and every time. Just google her. It’s amazing! But it gets better. Her husband used to be Jimi Hendrix’s manager. Never a dull moment.

Her BnB looks brilliant. It’s completely built around mushrooms. You can attend mushroom seminars, go on mushroom masterclasses, walks and tours before coming back for a charming 3 course mushroom extravaganza. Awesome. Probably my idea of mini break heaven!

So, roll forward 24 hours. Jess and I were pottering around the restaurant show trying to find a chef to come up with some food pairings for Courvoisier. We were chatting about food and I told Jess the story in the paragraphs above. Just as I was talking about the mushroom seminars and 3 course mushroom dinner we stumbled across a stand selling mushrooms from the New Forest. Shock, of all shocks, there was Mrs Tees herself! A living legend!

We had a wonderful chat about all things fungal. I guess it’s a bit like talking about football with Arsene Wenger! (Can you tell I’m writing this with Match of the Day on in the background?!) Mrs Tees told me a slightly strange story, which I almost certainly misunderstood, about how the best mushrooms grow by the road side because the enjoy feeding off the diesel fumes! I don’t know that much about mushrooms… but I have met enough mcyologists to know that they are nothing if not brilliantly eccentric!

I can’t wait to take Cowie to Mrs Tees’s BnB. If it’s anywhere near as charming as Mrs Tees is, we’re in for a fungal treat!

Carbo loading Cowie for her Triathlon Debut

Cowie has been in training for months in order to take on the grueling Eton triathlon. Whilst I’ve been sensibly asleep she’s been making waves in Balham swimming pool… doing circuits legging it around Clapham Common or cycling around Richmond Park. You won’t meet many fitter people, let along girls, than Cowie.

As the weekend loomed towards the end of last week attention turned away from Dwayne Chambers and his cocktail of performance enchancing drugs and fell on Cowie’s carbo loading regime. Cowie is normally fairly averse to all things carby, particularly wheat. So we decided to go for an oriental and Italian theme.

On Friday night we went to Fujiyama in Brixton. I went some time ago with Ed and Adam which made Cowie pretty vexed. For once I was early so I propped up the bar with a bottle of Tiger and a bowl of steaming hot edamame. Delicious. Who needs crisps when you can add a tonne of salt and soy sauce to your beans!

We decided to go all out and ordered gyozas, yakirori and sahsimi. The salmon and tuna sashimi were delicious. Massive hunks of fish with a good white dividing line of fat. I must confess I am far from being a sushi expert – but we enjoyed it. My only niggle was that the wasabi paste was a bit floury and didn’t quite seem right. Maybe they thought we couldn’t handle the good stuff.

Our gyozas and yakitori were both in a different league to what we normally wolf down in Wagamamas. Delicious.

For our main courses we decided not to hold back either. Cowie was already hinting that maybe we should order one dish and share it! Rubbish! This was all about carbo loading so we went for chile men and a beef and rice dish that turned up with some iffy miso soup. Everything but the soup was very tasty and filling – with our emphasis being on the energy rather than the quality for once.

All this slipped down with the aid of some very gentle green tea. For such a large amount of tasty food you really can’t complain when the bill comes to 40 quid including a tip. It’s just a shame that the real cost of the meal was over a hundred because Cowie got a parking fine! Again!

We’ll be back to Fujiyama but maybe next time on a bus…

I woke up on Saturday with a smashing headache and blury vision. Either a few cups of green tea had given me a hangover or I was ill. So I went shopping in Balham for provisions for Cowie’s pre race dinner.

We are spoilt in Balham to have such an impressive range of delis. The Fat Delicatessen provided me with the risotto rice and pasta that Trinity Stores couldn’t muster up. But in fairness to them they did provide me with some gorgeous jarred tomatoes, wild mushrooms and aubergine. Chadwicks supplied me with 2 large free range chicken breasts with the skin and wing still attached.

My menu for Cowie was broadly Italian and again intended to get as much energy inside her body as possible. We started with a rich wild mushroom risotto and then moved onto an aubergine and chicken pasta dish that doesn’t really have a name but was really tasty!

For the wild mushroom risotto all I did was sauted some shallots and a sweet onion in plenty of olive oil and then added some diced smoked streaky bacon. When the fat had come out of this and the onions had softened I added 2 large thinly sliced cloves of garlic which have me a sensational head rush. This sizzled away for a bit longe before I added the risotto rice which crackled and hissed like a snake with space dust in its mouth. Then I added a large glug of white wine which reduced down to nothing very quickly.

Whilst this was going on I rehydrated some dried wild mushrooms from the Fat Delicatessen and then used the mushroom stock to top the risotto up with. Half an hour later the rice was cooked and the risotto was almost ready to serve. I turned the heat down and fried some wild mushrooms in butter and olive oil and grated as much parmesan as I could find.

I beat the parmesan into the rice and topped each plate off with a spoon full of freshly sauted wild mushrooms. All of this was seasoned liberally and wolfed down with a glass of very cold white wine. Bliss.

Next step was to create a pasta mega dish. I sauted the chicken having seasoned it agressively in a hot pan with some onions and garlic. Once the skin was coloured I turned it over, added some white wine and reduced this down till it was sticky. In went a squeeze of lemon juice before transfering the chicken to a baking dish to sit on top of some tomatoes.

This cooked for around 20 minutes in a hot oven whilst an aubergine and some peppers turned from being inanimate watery vegetables into gorgeous, sweet flesh!

Some fresh egg pasta cooked in a pan of hot water whilst a very classy tomato and aubergine jarred sauce heated through.

Yum. I was certainly full. We ate it whilst watching the perfect film for the ocassion… GI Jane!

Needless to say Cowie did brilliantly in the triathlon the next day. She came 23rd overall out of 120 in her category. And then even more impressively came 270th out of 1120 including male and female competitors! Roll on Beijing/Blenheim!

Mushroom Foraging at River Cottage HQ with John Wright

I’ve become a bit of a mushroom bore recently. Cowie says I am a mushroom nerd. I prefer the expression mushroom enthusiast! And all my friends at work are a bit dubious about my bureoning funghi fetish!

So off Cowie and I trekked down to River Cottage HQ down on the Devon/Dorset border on a glorious Tuesday morning. All the more brilliant for it being a great day off work. We had been looking forward to our day of mushroom foraging with Hugh’s mycologist, John Wright for bloody ages.

We were immediately thrilled by the charmingly ecentric chicken obstacle course where Hugh’s roosters and hens charge around and play with the mobiles and other crazy bits of kit for the happy birds to play with. It was a sign of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory world we were letting ourselves in for.

We started with a very entertaining briefing by John and Steve in a brilliantly converted barn with a great angled mirror with a plea to us not to eat any bright red mushrooms or break our legs in a rabbit hole! All washed down with a great cup of tea and an organic bacon and egg bap…

Off we pottered with our 24 fellow mushroom hunters to the forrest to start foraging like our lives depended on it. Within 20 seconds I had almost trodden on a tiny little mushroom and yelled over to John, triumphant! Not a great mushroom to start with… but victory nonetheless!

Every time a new mushroom was spotted we all gathered around to see John get really excited and tell us all about the latest find. John seemed to take great glee in telling us stories about some of the more gorey stories about dangerous mushrooms. He is such a great guide with so much energy and knowledge it was a complete privelege to spend a day with him hunting shrooms! He’s a legend. Nothing less.

Here’s John in action from a while ago when he had long hair!

We spent 3 hours trawling through the forrest finding 37 varieties of mushrooms ranging from the tiny and dull to the huge and delicious like the ceps that Cowie found!

And these slimy chaps that apparently are delicious… although you would have to be a brave man to give them a try! Apparently they are better when they are smaller and tend to grow on the trunks of beech trees.

We all headed back with our baskets heaving with mushrooms to HQ where we were treated to a cooking demonstration of how to cook a fantastic mushroom tart and a chicken stew all washed down with a nice mug of pumpkin soup.

In the meantime John had sorted through all the mushrooms we found and laid them out in the wort for him to identify all the varieties in the hope that we would then know what to avoid and what to pick! We were so overwhelmed by his sheer enthusiasm that we are now always on the look out for mushrooms and will use his excellent book as a guide.

We sat down for a delicious dinner with all the brilliant people we met. Our mushroom tart with a foraged salad was stunning as was our chicken stew which we thought was very worthy of a photo…

As were the fried up ceps that Cowie picked… wow!

We loved the charming personality and energy that everyone and everything at River Cottage HQ exude. The loo was an amazing eco contraption that uses a reed bed to filter all the bad stuff out… and it’s made from re-used floor boards.

All this was topped off with a trip to see Hugh’s pigs which couldn’t stop scratching themselves on whatever they could lay their ample bottoms on.

We’d really built they day up and had huge expectations of it before we arrived and were delighted to have them hugely exceeded. River Cottage HQ over-delivered massively and we can’t wait to go back and try another course. Maybe we’ll do pig in a day next time. So long as it doesn’t involve butchering the pig I made friends with!

Countdown to Hugh’s Mushroom Foraging

Cowie and I practiced our mushroom foraging technique a couple of weeks ago in Somerset in preaparation for our trip to see John Wright at River Cottage HQ tomorrow!
Next to Cowie’s stable (for her horses not her) was a beautiful patch of what I think are Shaggy Ink Caps. Cowie’s Mum says they pop up every year. What a sight. I wish I was brave enough to pick a few and see what they taste like.

Inspired by finding a whole family of mushrooms on Cowie’s doorstep we trekked off to Alfred’s Tower to search through the woods. We had done the same thing the previous year and had come back with a carrier bag stuffed full of different types of funghi – far too many to even contemplate identifying. There seemed to be more mushrooms than grass! This time, however, we only just managed to cover the bottom of our Morrison’s carrier bag! A few armour plated puffballs and woody fughi clinging to logs were all that we could find. I guess it has been pretty dry recently and harly conducive to mushroom blooms. Let’s hope that tomorrow we will be overwhelmed by mushroom fever and find tonnes!

If anyone can help to identify any of the above please add your thoughts in the comments section… Thanks!

Mushroom Fever

Cowie and I went mushroom hunting this weekend down in Somerset. We found a few mushrooms including what we think were some Shaggy Ink Caps near Cowie’s horse lorry and a whole bunch of small puffballs in the forset.

We are in practice for our trip to Hugh Fernley Wittingstall’s River Cottage down in Dorset. His chief Mycologist, John Wright, is taking us on a mushroom hunting trip in the woods where we get to eat what we find on our return to the cottage. I’ve been looking forward to this for months and have begun to bore Cowie senseless. I’ve even bought several mushroom books in advance including John’s book, The River Cottage Handbook.

You can tell it’s mushroom season when even the London Metro starts writing articles about tasty fungus.

Here are the details for the event downa the River Cottage HQ:

“This course is all about gathering and cooking wild mushrooms. We will be targeting the abundant and delicious varieties offered up, for free, in the forests and fields during October.

The day begins with a forage in the beautiful West Dorset/East Devon countryside. You will be accompanied by members of the River Cottage team, led by John Wright, our wild food and mushroom expert. John has steered Hugh to many an exciting mushroom find in the River Cottage series. John will teach you how to safely identify, pick and prepare these funghi with pleasure and confidence.

We will then return to our converted barn at RCHQ, for a cookery demonstration from our resident River cottage cooks. Following a talk from John about the varieties gathered that morning both edible and poisonous, you will then be served a four course meal – based around the edible mushrooms, of course – but also the best local and seasonal produce Dorset and Devon has to offer. To accompany this course, when you book you will be given free access to our online Mushroom course designed by John Wright, which normally costs £20.”

Cowie and I will tell you all about it and take as many pictures as possible once we return on the 24th October.