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Thursday, 14 July 2022

Picking mushrooms is so exciting…

Maxim Gorbulko, an electrician of linear telecommunication and wire broadcasting facilities of the HPP Cascade, told about his hobby

It is not for nothing that the people call mushroom picking a "quiet hunt". First of all, you are in silence, picking mushrooms slowly, looking under the bushes, under the Christmas trees, looking all around. And you find them both in the grass and under the foliage peeking out of the ground. And the beauty is that there is such beauty all around. You walk: and the birds sing, and the grass, and the fresh air. All this inspires you to go further through the forest and collect mushrooms without feeling tired. You get great pleasure from such a holiday.

I collect mushrooms in the forest in our beautiful and beautiful big Almaty nature reserve on BAO. In hard-to-reach places where the forest mixes with stone ridges. There are sometimes a lot of mushrooms there, and picking mushrooms is so exciting. I go out with the sunrise, you walk through the dew and the mushroom caps shine and delight the eye.

I take a backpack with me, and I collect mushrooms in a bag. Many people take buckets and baskets with them, but this is inconvenient for me. I take a snack with me, light waterproof warm clothes. In the mountains, the weather is unpredictable, it may rain, it got into snow and hail.

I collect different mushrooms:

grouse, variegated hedgehog, black grouse

These mushrooms I do not collect purple spider web. They are in the red book.

I collect mushrooms under Christmas trees, under bushes, in the grass. And sometimes you go, you look, something familiar seemed in the ground, then the mushroom is only the edge visible. You will stir the ground with your hands, and there is such a wonderful mushroom, but not one. Where there is moss, there are a lot of mushrooms. Once I walk through the forest, pick mushrooms, inspect everything. And I passed through one place several times, there are no mushrooms and that's it. Disappointed. I sat, rested, I pass again and then I see such wonderful boletus there are a dozen of them in the grass there was joy.

Many novice mushroom pickers make the main mistakes when collecting mushrooms. First of all, mushrooms should be collected only those that you know. Secondly, it is necessary to collect mushrooms only with a knife. Many tear with their hands and damage the mycelium. Next year, mushrooms will no longer grow there, the mycelium will die. Thirdly, do not collect old, flabby mushrooms, wormy. Fourth, do not pick mushrooms in vain. You need to collect as much as you need. Don't be greedy, think about the fact that animals and birds also eat mushrooms.

As for cooking mushrooms, I cook them in different ways: mushroom soup, carcass with potatoes, in the oven with sour cream, mushroom pie, salt. I can share a recipe for pickling: you boil mushrooms for seven minutes. You pull them out and let them cool down, then you make a brine according to the volume of the container and add salt, spices, cloves, lavrushka. Pickling mushrooms is a creative thing, you add herbs and spices to your taste. Then, as the mushrooms have cooled down, you put fresh horseradish leaves, dill, garlic cloves on the bottom of the jar (and garlic is not minced, the taste of mushrooms spoils) and put the mushrooms in layers tighter after laying horseradish leaves and umbrellas on top again, dill (gives a fragrant taste to mushrooms) and pour brine. The brine should be cooled down. I do not pour boiling water, because the brine becomes cloudy, then the mushrooms lose their color and taste.

My favorite mushrooms are boletus and ginger. Especially ginger. It is when it is cut off by one color, and when you cut it off, its edges become an emerald greenish color, especially in the place of the cut. Many people do not know this and then throw it away, and this is its normal appearance after the cut. Ginger is delicious in salting, and frying, and steaming is good.

These are the wonderful mushrooms the local forest spirit gave me.

The most important thing when picking mushrooms is not to lose heart. After all, it's how lucky you are, how much you will gain when collecting. The important thing is that you rest, communicate with nature, breathe fresh air.