Be vewy, vewy quiet, I'm hunting mushwooms.....

Sunday I went hunting for mushrooms with my little friend Mia and her dad. Because I was supposed to babysit while he went for a ride, but it was raining and he didn't want to get wet so he told me to forget it. Then Mia was upset because she wanted to see me that morning so they invited me along on their mushroom hunt. I'm not sure how he thought walking around the forest with a three year old in the rain would be drier than riding a bike in the rain.....but then I'm not a real cyclist and don't have the mindset yet.

Lest I get into all sorts of trouble, let me clarify a little bit. Legally, to hunt mushrooms in Tuscany you must have a basket (so the mushroom can drop it's spores) and a stick (because you're walking in the hills and you need to move leaves and such to find the mushroom) and a license (because in Italy everything, everything requires a license or a stamp of some kind). We had a three year old along so what we really did was go for a walk in the woods while carrying an optimistic plastic bag and a broken branch we found on the side of the trail and talked about what it might be like to actually see a porcini mushroom. Which he assured me we wouldn't do as we had a three year old girl along and couldn't look properly.

So when he started to explain what I should be looking for and we both pointed at something on the side of the path and he said "sort of like that" and then looked all amazed and said "actually, exactly like that." Then he got a little worked up because he had just finished telling me that I shouldn't expect much because he couldn't remember how many times he went looking before he actually found a mushroom. Like telling someone who's batting for the first time in baseball not to worry if they don't hit a home run the first time because no one does....and then they do. Worse yet, we could still see the car. We didn't even actually get into the forest.

We spent the rest of the morning just wandering around the woods listening to Mia play the harmonica and discussing mushrooms and chestnuts and other woodsey things. They let me take the mushroom home to show Leif. It was a very, very small porcini. About two inches tall, beige and mighty tasty. We had it with pasta that night for dinner.