Mushrooms for supper!

Lactarius deliciosus. And they are.

Deliciosus.

In South Africa we call them pine rings, because they like pine plantations. In the States they are usually known as milk caps. Apricot caps (slightly convex) with a suggestion of circles within it, apricot gills, a hollow stem, and they bruise green.

It has been raining. Per my wish. I am lucky. It rained all night. It was like being inside a waterfall, lying in bed, the running water from the steeply-pitched roof like streams past our ears in the gutter just outside the window. Great beating episodes of rain. Today the light is clean and golden and there are fewer leaves on the trees and the clouds over the mountain are tall and whipped like lilac cream. In every pause in last night's rain the click frogs filled the silence, sounding like sharp drops of water in a shallow pool.

After lunch today at a nearby wine estate (amber vines, roaring fire), we drove past a pine forest just to see what the mushrooming prospects might be. Tell-tale brown craters clean of pine needles indicated that someone had pre-empted us. So this afternoon I took the corgis for a hopeful walk opposite my parents' house, in a piney area, and found, one by one and over about an hour, the plateful of pine rings above.

Happiness.

We'll have them tonight as an appetizer, cooked with the suuring (sour oxalis) above.