An Autumn Russian Tradition

It's a tradition that is common in Baltic and Slavic countries, (and apparently the Northeast US) but is still VERY popular in Russia. The beginning of autumn is mushroom season, and Russians are MUSHROOM CRAZY!
Everybody wants to eat them all of the time- my favorite is the mushroom soup. It's salty, a tiny bit slimey, watery and full of delicious fungi. All of the restaurants have specials with mushroom dishes, people are on the side of the road selling baskets full of mushrooms.
For me, it's wonderful! It's like the best holiday ever invented! Most holidays are too screwed up- full of material, gluttony and unhealthy practices (not that I don't LOVE having a couple of drinks with my family) So a tradition all about going to the forest, spending a day hunting mushrooms, then having enough to cook for weeks?!
This is my Halloween!

Actually, it was like a really chill, family oriented Halloween mixed with the raddest Easter Egg Hunt imaginable.

Ever since reading about this tradition in my Moscow Eyewitness Travel book, I was excited and looking forward to this time more than any other.

We made 2 trips out to the forest to hunt for mushrooms. The first time, I didn't have my camera, which of course was the most successful of the trips. I do have pictures from the cellphone that are of horrible quality, but I will share them anyways.
The second trip was completely unsuccessful, but at least I had my camera.

We woke up at 6 AM, met up with the family, and packed in the car for a ~2 1/2 hour drive out to the countryside. We arrived around 10 30 AM to a very small house in a very small village.
The Russian countryside is REALLY beautiful and I have been dying to visit it more closely. The villages for the most part still run like they did during the days of communism. Unfortunately there is a lot of poverty, and not much opportunity for anything but.
The houses are all little shacks, brightly painted with great window decoration- they look like they are out of a children's book. They have outhouses for bathrooms and wells for water. Nothing has changed in a very, very long time. They share the land, their livestock, firewood and every house has a garden. There's a lot that's really appealing about the lifestyle.
So the family knows someone who has a house out in one of these little communist villages, and they live there during the summertime (the rest of the time in the city). These people were... interesting....

The first thing we did is have breakfast in the little 2-room house. One room was the kitchen/dining room/parlor/radio room (rather than a TV), the other, separated by a sheet, was the bedroom that held 4 beds. The roof and siding were all made of different materials, as if they had just patched things up as they rotted away. I had to duck to walk around the house. It reminded me of the old cabins up in the mountains of North Carolina.

So we had breakfast, I ate some bread and a Luna bar (had already eaten at home) and the family was doing the regular Russian thing- bread, boiled eggs, cucumbers, and different kinds of Russian processed meats (such as kolbasof). The food was paired with plenty to drink- plenty of black tea and vodka.

The host offered me milk- I respectfully declined, and they proceeded to tell him that I am vegan. (I think it was unnecessary, I usually dont offer explanations to people in this situation)

His response- "I know sick people like that, too"
(Ouch, man!!)
oh and this great statistic he gave us "People who eat soy live 40 years less than those who don't"

(Actually, real scientific studies show that healthy vegans live an average of 10 years longer than omnivores)

I think that his bad attitude is common in Russia. During the Soviet Union soy was cheaper, so people ate mostly soy instead of meat. I think that they were lied to many times about the contents of the meat- so I think that the good name of soy has been ruined here.

ANYWAYS- on to the good stuff.
After breakfast we walked for about a kilometer to the forest. We spent at least 3 hours walking through the forest with our cute little woven baskets. Hunting for mushrooms is no easy task! For every 20 mushrooms I found, 1 was edible. Luckily we had some experienced people with us who knew exactly what is good and bad. Some of the mushrooms are highly poisonous- they showed me a mushroom that can kill an adult if only 1/3 is consumed. Ouch!
Some mushrooms that we found:

BAD!


Poisonous, but impressive!


I think we all know that this one is a little bit poisonous...


Yuri, my dear friend, at his proud moment- he was the first to find an edible mushroom. And it's quite an impressive find:


Also found by Yuri, also edible and impressive in size:


Not edible, but a good example of what slugs do to the mushrooms:


There were a couple of species that were big, brown and delicious. But only a trained eye could find them. I could only find them if they were really big, like the circumferance of my face, but by the time they had grown to that size they were too old.
So I stuck to the bright yellow mushrooms that were easy to see even for an untrained eye. I ended up with a basket overflowing of these mushrooms.

All in all, we hit the jackpot:
(poor quality cameraphone pictures)


Me, quite proudly, after a long day of the best kind of vegan hunting:



After a day of travelling and hunting for mushrooms, I was completely exhausted.


Two weeks later we went back again. Mushroom season was at it's peak and it had been rainy and foggy- the perfect environment for our little friends!
However, we had no luck at all. The mushrooms hadn't grown back yet, or we were looking in the wrong places- I found 1 edible mushroom in about 2 hours.

But, I can share the pictures I took that day, supplemented with pictures from the first day:

On our way into the forest, Day 1


Day 2



In the middle of nowhere:





I LOVE the beautiful white birch trees- there are huge forests of them here:




Houses in the village:














Cutting down our mushroom rich forest :(




Stealing well water from the poor old babushkas


Afterwards we piled back in the car and headed back to Moscow. The older men sat in the back, drank 2 bottles of vodka and we made at least 5 stops for food to go with it, which I thought was hilarious.
I feel like I had a true Russian experience, mushroom success or not!




PS- I hope that this post wasn't totally dull and boring for you. I'm probably a bit abnormally over excited about the thought of mushroom picking :)