Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms...

Picking mushrooms is one of those family outings no Finnish child can escape (or at least couldn't back when I was a child aaaages ago). Perhaps I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have back in those days, so I decided it was time to give it another go, as the hiking club at work organized a mushroom picking outing, with a mushroom expert joining us 'n all!

We were blessed with a suitably sunny day for the activity, and jumped in our car with Ilario, and headed down towards Greolieres, where the plan was to go mushroom hunting. And there were plenty of mushrooms to be picked, that's for sure! Not really knowing which ones were edible, poisonous and so forth, we pretty much picked all the mushrooms in sight to start with. Only to be told by our expert that most of them were either poisonous or just not very tasty... (turned out that the guy doesn't actually like eating mushrooms though, just studying them!).

But no matter, we had a rather spending time walking around, enjoying the sunshine, and in the end, we ended up with a fair few edible mushrooms as well. And at the end of it all, we enjoyed a nice little picnic lunch (with some of my colleagues bringing wine, and haribos-flavoured eau de vie, if you can imagine it!). We were also treated to a nice and pedagogic mushroom identification session as well. All the names sounded a bit too latiny to me, so I'm afraid the lesson was a bit lost on me!

All in all though, a great way to spend a Sunny autumn day! And we had a nice little mushroom omelet the next day, and didn't even get sick ;-) (unlike a couple of colleagues!)