Mushroom Picking Time

Last weekend my host parents took me to a forest not too far from where we live, and we picked lots of mushrooms.
So how exactly does mushroom picking work? Well, in Finland you can go on any land so trekking through a forest and picking mushrooms is very popular. There are hundreds of different mushrooms, some poisonous (don't eat the bright red ones), some that need to be boiled, others that are just okay cooked or put in salads. When you find a mushroom that looks good, you pick it and use a knife to cut it in half. It is always a race against the worms because you find hundreds of worms. If the inside of the mushroom is white and free of worms, then you've found a good one.
Like berries, mushrooms grow every couple of days in moist areas, but not overlly wet swamp-like areas.

 Our dog Laku came around for the trip too, but he isn't trained to find mushrooms yet. Tatti mushrooms are brown and can be found almost anywhere. They are very good for sauces.

 The pathway behind our house is rich with mushrooms. Some of the mushrooms are huge, this one which is a different type of Tatti is even bigger then our special mushroom knife.

 The yellow chanterelle is one of the easiest mushrooms to recognize, but not always the easiest to find. They are also very good in sauces and when your wandering around a forest near autumn time, they look a lot like fallen leaves on the forest floor so they are a bit hard to spot. I ended up finding an area with about twenty of these chanterelle so I was very lucky.

For lunch we made sauce with the chanterelle and then I helped to make real, homemade, mashed potatoes, and we had reindeer. It was my first time eating reindeer, and it is so tasty! I love reindeer! Yum. We ate the reindeer with lingon berries and it was very good.
Today was a lot of fun and we found tons of mushrooms too that we didn't pick and made some delicious food too.