Champignons, mushrooms and other toadstools...

Corrèze, one week of GOOD weather (20-25 degrees and sun!)

This year is a bad year for mushroom-hunters, so it says on the first page of the local newspaper of this week (continued p.3 with interviews of local connaisseurs):

no cèpes this year!

Even so, my father and I had a go, and were delighted to find an handfull:

chanterelles or girolles

Mushroom-hunting is fun, the only problem is that, where we are, they grow on slopes... and for that matter I am more dutch, I wouldn't mind them growing on flat grounds... I therefore looked carefully around the house... but as usual, the only mushrooms growing there are the ones "good for your mother-in-law" as they say poetically in France... or for slugs, who probably have better stomach than mother-in-laws:

amanite citrine (dangerous, not always deadly)

It probably just interests me, but while writing, I wondered about the difference in english between "toadstool" and "mushroom": after looking this up, it seems that in english "toadstool" refers to a non-eatable mushroom. Funny, in dutch, there is only one word for mushroom and it is "paddenstoel" which litterally means "toadstool". Anyway, the only mushroom that the Dutch eat (they are quite suspicious about mushrooms - many mother-in-laws in Holland!), it is the common white one you find in supermarkets and that they call "champignon", which in turn just means "mushroom" in french! The dutch "champignon" is called "champignon de Paris" in french (= parisian mushroom), since it was originally grown in caves outside Paris. (Nowadays all the "champignons de Paris" come from Poland.)