My wife Sandi is Canadian and therefore takes Halloween far too seriously. Not content with dragging the kids around town for hours on end “Trick or Treat”-ing she’s about to embark on a massive pumpkin massacre, aiming to end up with something that may or may not look like a ghoulish spectre.

Pumpkin carving has always seemed a bit wasteful to me – like hacking down an oak to carve a matchstick – but Sandi is pretty resourceful. The seeds get cleaned off and roasted in the oven with a sprinkling of salt, and the rest of the flesh goes into soup, or roasted with onions, garlic and herbs and served with grilled sausages and baked potatoes.

With the spookiness of Halloween fast approaching, pumpkins are everywhere and it’d be shame not to put them to some culinary use. Why not try one of our pumpkin recipes?

We are just on the cusp of summer and autumn, and there are plenty of mushrooms about. At the moment you can pick chanterelles(girolles), winter chanterelles(chanterelles), hedgehog fungus and horn of plenty. These are all very easily identifiable edible mushrooms. Always be 100% sure about what you have picked, otherwise don’t risk it.

The best way to be sure is to use books as reference. In my mind the best way to go about it is to cross reference between a scientific book and a culinary one. The two I use are Roger Phillip’s ‘Mushroom and funghi of Great Britain and Europe’ and Antonio Carluccio’s ‘The Quiet Hunt’.

When picking always keep the types you know away from the ones you don’t, because they can contaminate each other in the basket. A good way to be sure is to go out with someone who knows what they are doing and you will find it a very rewarding experience. We are just entering into the penny bun / porcini / cep season (see pictures) which is so exciting, but make sure they are the boletus edulus, you cannot be too sure, there is a mushroom that looks just like the cep but is incredibly bitter, hence its name ‘bitter bolete’.

Good luck with any hunting you are doing, and remember to check, check and check again. If you would like to join one of my mushroom hunting courses click here.