Insert fungi-related pun here

If you know me reasonably well you'll know that I really can't stand mushrooms. Just a cursory glimpse at the entry on Sicily, with my allusion to them ruining perfectly good Carbonara, would be enough to give you a clue. What is it about them? I'm glad you asked. Everything. Everything. Taste. Smell - they smell of the grave. Texture. Awful dead-slug-like appearance of many of them when cooked. The propensity of some of them to imitate edible* species when ingestion of the slightest quantity of the impostor will kill you stone dead, and horribly. The fact that they get put in food, especially in restaurants, without appearing on the menu in the ingredients, thereby rendering what you thought was a perfectly safe order completely inedible. You get the idea - years ago, before living with my partner, I wouldn't even have uncooked mushrooms in my flat.

In Viana, though, I seem to be in a minority of one. At this time of year everybody goes hunting for mushrooms, with one prized above all others. Choupines, as they're known here, or Parasol Mushrooms in English, provoke a giddy excitement. Photos of the first ones found will appear on people's FaceBook feeds, with kudos going to the first person to find one each year, and the locations of good foraging spots are carefully guarded lest somebody else should get there first. 

We are of course right in the middle of the countryside here and, dry years like 2017 apart (and I can't adequately describe to you the wailing and gnashing of teeth that the absence of Choupines caused by last year's drought provoked here), this is the wettest part of Spain. Ideal conditions for fungi of all kinds. A friend of ours was going foraging for them on Monday, and would we like to come? Since I have fond memories of picking blackberries in Brighton's Wild Park when I was a kid (this has got to be more or less the same, right?), the sun was shining, my missus loves Choupines, and our mate knows how to differentiate between what you can (allegedly) eat and what will kill you, off we went.

Last one to find one gets the beers in afterwards. Right. Unlike my companions, I had great difficulty spotting these things, or any other types, in either the shaded, heavily wooded river valley we went to first, or the open, heavily cowpatted pasture we went to afterwards. My missus and our mate both seemed to be able to see them at great distance, whereas I only found them when I was close enough to almost step on the things. They'd both found several before I got my first one. I was exultant despite knowing it wouldn't stop me having to stand for the cañas. I'd celebrated too soon - it was no good, it'd dried out - if only we'd found that one yesterday. Next one - no good; worm-ridden. Next one - no good, not a Choupin but a very similar looking, inedible cousin. Bastards! I can now add fungal mockery to my list of reasons to hate the things. 

I did, though, eventually find some, as well as another sought-after thing, a boletus. Spud ugly they may be but our mate was delighted when I found some of these things. We had quite a haul - this is what we'd found after the first location, before we got a lot more in the open fields later:

The baskets, far from being an affectation, are actually more or less compulsory.
According to a local, you'll get fined if you use plastic bags - they stop the mycelium
spores from dropping back to the floor and potentially litter the landscape. 

You have to be careful - you have to know which land is private and which not, which areas allow foraging freely and which require a licence, as well as identifying the safe 'shrooms of course. You also have to cut open anything you may be suspicious about to see if it's riddled with insect larvae. (I don't know how much more justification my refusal to eat these things needs!) But they're plentiful, and apparently grow very quickly, so you can go looking in the same spot more than once. We even found a large number of the common-or-garden white 'supermarket' mushrooms growing on the wet fields between the council pool, its water now green and vanishing, and the tennis/padel courts. This was a good excuse to use my penknife, and an extremely pleasant way to pass the morning, but there was nothing in those baskets for me.

Far more appetising are the abundant chestnuts, apples and walnuts that also dot the countryside here. There are untended, wild trees of all of these around, quite apart from the privately owned and tended trees which you must of course leave alone. Much of this comes into season at around the same time, allowing a few hours' foraging to gift you a bonanza of stuff to both eat now or preserve over winter.  I'll eat chestnuts, but I'm not a huge fan, and assuming you can safely extricate them from their alarmingly spiky cases, you have to bite the very bottom open to check there isn't a worm living inside each one before you eat them too. It seems like a pretty good rule when eating anything foraged here - check for grubs first.

The envious approval received from people back in town, and the scarcely veiled entreaties for the locations we'd foraged, evinced our success. In case we'd let our finds go to our heads, however, Cookie assured us that it was no more than he'd 'pick up with his left hand' while out hunting. The mushrooms will be turned into empanada, risotti, croquetes etc, in the next few days, but very few of the chestnuts even made it back to the house - my partner scoffing most of them on the hoof. Their importance here is deserving of another entry in itself, and will feature here soon.

*This isn't, of course, a problem for me. As far as I'm concerned they're all inedible so I'm in no danger from these impersonators.