JAMIE STONE: Wood blewits show there is life outside politics...
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Jamie's Journal by Jamie Stone
"Wow!" I pulled up suddenly on the back road to Dornoch from Tain.
"What is it?", my better half asked.
But I was out of the door before I could reply.
Yes! My fleeting glimpse hadn't been wrong – wood blewits!
At this stage, gentle reader, you might be wondering if I had forgotten to take my tablets. But you see, the truth is that there is life outside of politics, and I had been looking for these chaps for years.
The wood blewit (Lepista Nuda) is an edible mushroom of the most delicious variety. Although they were the subject of many of my searches over the last 15 years, not one did I find.
There was a time, when my children were in their teens, when you could find lots of them. In October and early November, the last mushrooms of the year could be found growing in short grass, often grazed by sheep, quite near the sea.
Why are they called wood blewits? Goodness only knows. I've yet to find one in a wood or forest...
There they were, five of them growing beside the road to Dornoch. I hastily picked them and carefully placed them in my car's back seat.
Returning from a trip to Glasgow on the A9 at Ballinluig, I saw an astonishing number of blewits growing beside the road which could have filled my entire boot in a matter of minutes. But, of course, stopping on such a high-speed road would be hazardous – not to mention that the mushrooms themselves would be marinaded in exhaust fumes.
Why is it that so many of them have appeared, this particular autumn? Particularly after so many years of there being none? I can only imagine that nature waits her careful time until the conditions are perfect, and whoosh, there they appear, as the expression goes, like mushrooms in the night.
By the time you read this column, I would have picked more, cooked them in butter, and then frozen them. Of a winter's evening, wood blewits on toast are very tasty.
Here is how you cook them: fry the mushroom in butter and then, after 10 minutes, add a dash of cream and white wine, and a pinch of salt and pepper. When the cream thickens and they are turning a slightly golden colour, that is the time to spread the toast and get out the knife and fork. I really do recommend it.
There is only one snag – correct identification is important. There are people around the far north who know what they are doing when it comes to edible fungi, and I strongly recommend that you take their advice.
Once you know for certain what a wood blewit is, you will never forget it because the shape, colour, and particularly the smell, is very distinctive. If any reader should bump into me picking them in the next few days, then I will be very happy to share my knowledge.
So there you are, there is life outside of politics.
Although I may well return to matters political in my next column, I shall share one other facet of my life. It is this – I am returning to performing in Tain Pantomime at the beginning of December. This year, it is going to be Humpty Dumpty.
Does Humpty and falling off of his wall remind me of UK politics right now? Well, perhaps it does...
- Jamie Stone is the Liberal Democrat MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross.
