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.
Helen Lehndorf 
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