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Chiltern's were nice this morning; reasonably quiet car-wise and only a few groups out and about. Bit windy, bit of showery rain, much sun in-between, some of the lanes resembling Autumn-y muddy ditches already - and no puffballs in the Wallingford / Stoke Row / Sonning triangle :-(
Took to the keo's for the first time and apart from a few slips, quite like them vs. spds. Much better on climbs for some reason.
crossedthread
My ride this Saturday was a quite pootle in the Chiltern lanes which I wouldn't normally bother telling you about were it not for the hedgerow find you can see in the frying pan below.
They are slices of a giant puffball. This is one of the few wild mushrooms that I can recognise with enough confidence to eat. I'm not sure that I cooked it in the best possible way, because the flavour in the mouth although good, wasn't as outstanding as one might have hoped. On the other hand the house was filled with a delightful mushroom smell, so maybe the taste somehow escaped from the pan.
My grandparents lived roughly in that area, and I remember a great aunt talking about knowing when and where wild mushrooms grew, and going out to collect them. I was a bit surprised to find this puffball since it was growing on the verge of the road, in full view of every passerby.
Thinking about it, I realised that probably all the locals have been pushed out of their idyllic village homes by rich incomers, who zoom along the lanes in their expensive German cars not noticing the treasures lying about at the roadside.