It’s time to look for mushrooms and forest fruits, yummy mountain treasures!
Thursday, 02 September 2010
Passo San Pellegrino has many beautiful forests, with rich plant life and a precious variety of animals. It’s lovely to sit and listen to the sounds, contemplate the colours and pick and taste colorful and juicy wild fruits.
There is no better occasion than a walk in the mountains through pastures or along mountain paths to gorge on blueberries and raspberries, delicious summer treats with numerous therapeutic virtues. They’re rich in healthy minerals and vitamins A, C, B1, B2, and they’re just plain good, impossible to resist.
This is the best time to eat them fresh, as they are, or flavoured with lemon juice and honey, in fruit salads, ice creams or sweets. Children beware, though; many young children can’t tell edible fruits from poisonous berries, especially if they look similar. And you must pick them without ruining the plants, and never in a park or protected areas.
A special mention goes out also to mushrooms, exquisite delicacies that are a gift from the forest floor. The most precious are the porcini and finferli. However, before you go on the hunt for these special spores, you absolutely must know the rules of their harvesting and be able to accurately identify their species: In fact, there are some that are edible, but others can look the same yet be poisonous or even deadly. Only pick pristine mushrooms if you can readily identify them, and never put them in a plastic sack, which will ruin their quality and compromise their natural reproductive process.
RISOTTO WITH FOREST BLUEBERRIES AND CHIVES
A refined first course that recalls mountain aromas.
Recipe for 4 people:
Prepare a vegetable broth, boiling 1 litre of water and two vegetable bouillon cubes. In the mean time, clean the blueberries well in a damp cloth and toast 320 g of rice with 4 teaspoons of oil and a spoonful of chopped chives in a non-stick or steel pan. Once toasted, add 1 cup of Lagrein red wine and let simmer. In a mixer, blend 200 g of blueberries and once the wine has entirely evaporated, add this compost to the rice and finish cooking the risotto by adding broth a few ladlefuls at a time for about 15-20 minutes. Once the rice is cooked, remove from the flame and add 20 g of butter and serve garnished with a few blueberries and chopped chives
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