Mushroom Foraging

Nicolette and I are always up to something - constantly on the hunt for edilbe wild things, wild flowers or thinking about how to regrow vegetables from our food scraps.

Last weekend, Nicolette and myself went down on a foraging exploration of the Mornington Peninsula.

And we hit jackpot.

We were on the hunt for pine mushrooms and slippery jack mushrooms specifically. For a couple of reasons, firstly, I am very confident in what to look for with these two, this is the biggest rule with foraging - if you are not sure, leave it behind! Secondly, they're delicious.

These two mushrooms are really distinctive, the slipper jacks have a slimy top with a yellow sponge like underside. While the pine mushrooms are a coral red colour with a ribbed underside, both types only grow around Pine Trees.

It's coming to the end of the season but as Nicolette and I discovered, there were still a lot of mushrooms to be had.

We spent the first couple of hours scouring around for these ellusive guys. With literally nothing found. As we were driving we found some slippery jacks that were bigger than our heads - decided to leave those ones behind, I cant imagine they'd make for great eating.

Finally we found 2 pine mushrooms! 3 hours in and we found 2. So we decided the best course of action would be to go to T'gallant for some pizzas (and sneaky wines).

After lunch, we set about on our way home, somewhat defeated and all it took was for Nicolette to look to her left to discover an untouched field of mushrooms! Hundreds of piney's waiting for us to discover them. We we're so excited that we ended up with about 5kg of them. We ended up ditching the slippery jacks though because to be honest, they we're kind of gross with their slimy caps.

What came next? Days upon days of mushroom meals.