Last weekend I had a yearning to go on a mushroom/toadstool hunt in the bush.  I took my family out for a ramble around a bush track on the Woodville end of the Manawatu Gorge, looking out for autumnal fungi. I was not disappointed!

There were some wonderful red toadstools.

Bright orange fungus:

Tiny ethereal mushrooms (hard to photograph! This one was not much bigger than a pea and I liked the way it was growing upwards towards the light from underneath a log.)

Warty armies of toadstools:

Odd phallic looking ones with speckles:

I don’t know enough about wild mushrooms to know if any of these are edible, so I let them be and just took photographs.

After our walk, we stopped for a simple picnic of pikelets and feijoas.

Back home in the fridge was a package of field mushrooms a friend had picked from her farm. I cooked them in garlic, onions and lots of green herbs, stirred in cream right at the end of cooking and ate it on pasta. Amazing.