Last Sunday we went on our annual Euro-Toque mushroom hunt.
This time our place of search was in county Galway, in a wood, the location of which we have all sworn we will never divulge.
Mushroom hunters are, correctly, extremely protective of their good harvesting spot.
We do have edible wild mushrooms in this country, probably not as many as they have on the continent (maybe because we have fewer forests?) but what is scarce here are the people who can differentiate the good (delicious) from the bad (tasteless) and the ugly(poisonous).

We in Euro-Toques are blessed with a special relationship
with Louis Smith, a lecturer in Galways RTC who guides us
through the pitfalls on our annual search for edible Fungi.

This time Louis explained that we were going to search for edible mushrooms, and good edible ones at that-in other words he didn’t want us cluttering our baskets up with the bad and the ugly (as we did in previous years)

To that end Louis had gone and made a preliminary gather the day before so he was able to show us the good, he had a large sample basket of them.

Principally we were to look for
Hedgehog Mushrooms (the white ones)
Saffron Milk Cap (the yellow ones)
Winter Chanterelles ( the little brown ones)

So off we headed into the woods.
It was definitely the most abundantly mushroomed wood we had ever been on. They were every where.

A lot of the bad and the ugly

And quite a few occasions when the slugs had beaten us to the good.

However at the end of an hour and a half, in glorious Autumn sunshine
We arrived back at our starting point for the reckoning (or should I say the cull)
Of course we had all done what we shouldn’t.
We had gathered far too many duds.

Our marvellous harvest

With a few quick twists of the baskets was reduced to this

Still more than I had ever managed to gather before.
We had gathered a nice few Chanterelles which we plan to eat at the weekend.

Exhausted after our hunt we headed back to St. Clerans for lunch.

St Clerans did us proud with a marvellous Japanese meal from
Euro-Toque Chef Hisashi Kumagai

The house is also a little classical bow sided gem.
It was owned for many years by John Huston the film director and is now owned by American Chat-Show host, Merve Griffin.

Sile and the mushrooms outside St. Clerans.
(I hasten to add that ours was the smallest basket on the left)

The worst part of the day was the long drive home through driving rain to Waterford, but at least the weather had held off this year during the hunt.

The best part was a couple of days later when we enjoyed the little Chanterelles
just gently and lightly fried in butter, they were delicious.