Chanterelles for dinner, and a prize!

I got back to my desk after a meeting this morning to find a little paper-towel wrapped package, in a ziplock bag waiting for me.  The wild mushroom fairies (aka my colleague Tanya who is just back from a week with her family in northern Ontario) had paid a visit, and left me with a generous portion of fresh chanterelles picked from the woods a couple of hours outside Thunder Bay.  When I was a kid,  my best friend at school had a Swiss mother,who would take us out into the woods in October to find these orange coloured, apricot scented beauties, hiding under moss and amongst beech leaves and pine needles.

For me, having grown up in a Scottish culture where any idea of eating mushrooms gathered from the wild would invariably be greeted with derision and possibly even fears for one's sanity, the entire process of gathering these, and their remarkable flavour, which is unsurpassed, was entirely magical.  I have to say, unless my memory has elevated the chanterelles of my childhood beyond reality, the ones gathered in Scotland have a superior flavour.  But then, I wonder if the cool, damp autumn conditions in which we gathered them may have made a difference too, and intensified the flavour?  Regardless, these were a completely unexpected treat and a wonderful reminder of how good the simplest of things can be.  And on another note.....

.....I got a letter in the mail today about the "Etobicoke Great Gardens Contest 2012".  I'm very pleased to announce that I was the first prize winner for Ward 6, in the alternative category (which basically means I don't have a lawn).  YIPPEE!!