To the more mundane first - well we thought we had the cat saga sorted, but then feckless Joel turned up again. Honestly, there is no point in doing a dramatic farewell and flouncing off in a fit of pique and then turning up again three days later and apologising to every one! Ninette is still next door therefore, or rather is back next door as she has spent the past 3 days between our garage and the vet's being spayed.
She has come through fine - the stitches are due out next week.
But Mushrooms? What is that about? Well, autumn seems to have arrived early this year (my virtual chum, the Mossy Gnome has also pointed this out). In our case, this makes temperatures a bit more comfortable for preparations for the Agricultural Fair or Comice at the weekend (more on that next week), but isn't ideal for the chilli peppers, the green peppers, the aubergines and the frankly embarrassing quantities of tomatoes in the garden. The pumpkins seem to be coping although a few have got to nearly ripe stage, but I don't fancy pumpkin soup, when I have the world's surfeit of tomatoes to eat and deal with.
Again that is all fairly normal stuff. It is out in the woods that bizarre things are happening. The secret wood is now full of bolet a pied rouge - brown capped bolletes with a red foot and a terrifying habit. When you cut them up to cook them, they turn blue almost instantaneously! The blue colour goes if you leave them for an hour or so, or if you cook them, which is what we do. The texture isn't as good as a cepe, nor is the flavour, but they are nice cooked to crisp-ish in butter, and then swirled in a little cream and either horseradish cream or tarragon mustard (but not too much or you lose the mushroom flavour).
We would expect to start finding mushrooms of this type around mid-September and through to the first frosts in November, so August was a bit of a shock. It does seem to be only the Secret Wood however, we have been round our One Acre Wood and there is not a sign of anything yet. The One Acre Wood is higher up and dryer however, which might explain the difference.
Spot the bolet in the photo below!
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