What a "Fungi"

Sunday morning Hildegard departed early and Franzi left Saturday for Mannheim.  Now it was just the three of us to tackle the adventure of mushroom hunting.  Switzerland bans picking wild mushrooms from the 1st to the 10th of the month, so the 11th is the best day!

Ben and I are familiar with chanterelles, but Nico is a trained fungi hunter, thanks to his dad, Felix.

Nico finds a strange mushroom that turns  blue wherever you touch it.  He calls it "witches" something - and assures us it is delicious.  It is fun to touch the gold flesh and watch it instantly turn blue.

I find this 8 inch tall oddity, much to Nico's excitement.  It is a Parasol mushroom, and rare and much craved.  When Nico tells us he is allergic to it, I am really doubtful about taking it, but he brushes that aside and swiftly harvests it, promising he will cook it for our lunch.

It is a very successful hunt because Nico has selected an area of forest no one else visits.  It might also be because the cows have created soggy sink holes I keep getting stuck in.

We find this one red mushroom we associate with fairy tales.  It is poisonous, which would be good to know if you were Hansel or Gretel and needed to dispatch a witch.

I keep humming the tune "Edelweiss" from Sound of Music.  Nico says no one ever sees the flowers in the wild here, but we find a clump in a neighbor's garden.

The Swiss are so neat, clean, and orderly that I want to turn over a new leaf and adopt their tidy lifestyle.  Example: this wood pile that also contains flower pots.

I can't resist the adorable window sill scenes.

On the way home, the local hotel owner and guests admire our harvest.

We return to Alpenflora (the Heinzer family chalet) to be greeted by the sheep next door.  After a beer in the garden and Ben and Nico cleaning our pile of mushrooms, Nico plans the menu.  His friend Rachel has arrived earlier and has been hiking all day.  She and Nico plan to practice their guitar-accordion duets this evening.

After a gourmet meal of mushroom, potato pasta (with local cheese from the farmer above) and two salads Rachel whips up from the beets, carrots and salad on hand, we nestle in to listen to music.

Once again it is raining and thundering outside.  The tunes from Brittany cast a magic spell around us all.