Yesterday my boyfriend and I went collecting mushrooms in a forest nearby Berlin. After six hours of not finding a single one and thinking about going home, suddenly this beautiful "Krause Glucke" appeared on our way through the bush. The meaning of the German name can be translated as: "crinkly mother hen", in English it is called cauliflower fungus. I'm a real newbie in picking my food in nature for it is not such a common thing to do for young people in Germany. A lot of parents are afraid of collecting the "wrong" plants, thinking they might be poisonous or psychoactive.
It's hard to find this one and especially on a day without any other it was a pleasant surprise of nature. The Krause Glucke has no psychedelic effects but it tastes marvellous! Here is a picture how it looked on our plates:
We filled five plates with pasta and this one mushroom. At first we cut the mushroom into small pieces and cleaned them. This is very important, because lots of small insects love to life inside this big brain.
After cutting and cleaning we fried it in a pan with onion, oil, salt, pepper and a mix of local garden herbs. The final step was a good shot of white wine to cook the meal until it steemed away. :)
Besides the mushroom we found beechnuts, cranberries, rose hips and nettles.
We roasted the beechnuts and put them on our salad. The cranberries and rose hips we cooked with some sugar and cinnamon, vanilla, cardamon and glove to a sweet-sour sauce which we used hot for our vegan vanilla ice-cream. The nettle is a great healing plant and gives an amazingly tasty and powerful tea.
Thank you for reading :)
Lots of Light and Love <3
Another mushroom story here: @yoganarchista/we-went-mushrooming-again-and-ended-up-eating-the-devil-s-snuff-box