christa: Would love to join your Polish forest mushroom hunt.
I just went to Oberon, in NSW and found a lot of Saffron Milkcaps (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron_milkcap) in the pine plantation areas. I didn't go in a Polish group but I saw a couple of groups of 30+ people who could have been Polish at rest stops. I also heard that a Polish group rents a bus to go to Oberon. You can get to decent picking places by car but a 4WD will get you to places that haven't been stripped bare by other mushroom hunters. I'm not sure when the season starts but heard that it ends in April.
Oberon is also a popular place for fossicking for gold and, more often, sapphires.
(Speaking of snow, we went to Oberon 3 years ago and saw snow all day on December 6th - that's SUMMER here; a gift from the Aniołek? *grin* It was a rainy day, too, and even at 4pm there was enough snow for a snowball fight and a snowman! No snow on April 10th but it was 10-13C all day... and rainy, again.)
The mushrooms are easy to identify. I was told not to pick the red ones with white spots or any of the brown ones. There are two orange topped mushrooms there. One has an orange set of gills underneath. The other has white gills. I was instructed to ONLY pick the one with orange gills. The stem is even orange so if I saw white I left it.
We came home with two boxes of mushrooms, maybe 5 kilos - we're taking more boxes next time! Don't freak out but the mushrooms stain green and look moldy when handled and look scary by the next day. They're fine. I dried 3/4 of our treasure in a dehydrator and filled two 400g Moccona coffee jars. We ate our fill for dinner with friends, just fried in butter. The rest I'm experimenting with as the mother of a Polish friend told us to remove the stems to make them more like steaks, parboil the mushrooms for 2-3 minutes, let cool and then freeze individually. You can thaw as many as you want for dinner, crumb them (the regular egg and bread crumbs combo) and fry them. Can't wait!
Hope you find them, too.
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