You mean we can eat those?

The last stop of our big road trip was Strasbourg, France. We have some friends from school, that used to live here in Belgium but had to move back to Strasbourg. They have become our adopted family, their kids are like the cousins we don't have here, so we wanted to visit them one last time before our big move.

We love our trips to Strasbourg, because whenever we go, we always get to do something we've never done before. Once was a hike to the site of Saint Odile. Another time we made Tarte Flambee (flat pizzas from Alsace) in an outdoor oven while the children played along the river. This time, we went on a hunt for mushrooms in the woods.

We went to a secret spot in the woods, known within their family to be a good place to find mushrooms. The children have all studied mushrooms in school, Miss B has been talking about different kinds of mushrooms for weeks. But John and I had no clue what we were looking for. I'd always been told, "Don't ever touch a mushroom in the woods, it's poisonous," so this whole outing was a little bit out of my comfort zone.  But I trusted my friends and their knowledge of all things edible within the woods. 

Not much was found within the first hour. Every single mushroom I pointed out was deemed poisonous, thus reaffirming my original strategy: don't ever touch mushrooms in the woods. But then we found a bunch of good ones growing out of a stump -- little yellow ones with the right caps -- I can't remember now if they were curved in or out - it makes a difference. And we found some others, known as "pieds du mouton" (translation: sheep feet) said to be very expensive in the store. 

By the end of our outing, we had bags filled with edible mushrooms. I even found my own, rather large, stash of the sought after pieds du mouton. We ate them all for dinner and they were wonderful. That night I had nightmares about mushroom poisoining. We all woke up the next morning without incident, so there was really nothing to worry about. 

But I don't think I'll ever go foraging for mushrooms without a trusted expert. I will, however, start buying some of the more exotic kinds of mushrooms in the grocery stores.