Harvesting wild mushrooms in the Norwegian forest

After a whole week of straight rain the sun finally returned, and with that we have optimal conditions for mushrooms to grow. This gave me the opportunity to bring my wife and child out to the Norwegian forest to look for some mushrooms yesterday, and it really paid off.

This was the best part of the trip. In this image you can see some amazing edible mushrooms such as Cantharellus cibarius, Hydnum rufescens, Hydnum repandum, Leccinum versipelle, Boletus edulis and a few others. These are all exceptionally good to put in a stew or soup, and we've dried most of them to use for later. The chanterelles will be used for a soup tomorrow.

The other half of the harvest is not as good as the ones from the first image, but we've got some Albatrellus confluens, a decent amount of Leccinum versipelle in this platter as well, and a few different Russula sp. Most of these were pretty old, so very little of the mushroom were used to make any good with. However, if we had gotten our hands on these a day or two earlier most would still be very good.

If you look at the very bottom of the image you can also see the shell of a freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritafera margaritafera), an endangered species of mussel that actually produce pearls! We found a few of the shells washed ashore on the river bank, and decided it would be a cool souvenir to bring with us. I didn't find any living mussels, but I would of course have left them alone if I did.