Chanterelles are one of those autumn goods you never have enough of. They’re golden and ebony delicate mushrooms with a great perfume.

Last tuesday, my dad went in the arrière pays and picked a lot of mushrooms : sanguins and chanterelles.
The sanguins are very good pickled and then stored, covered with oil, in a airtight jar for at least 3 weeks. Concerning the chanterelles, you can either freeze them or as my dad, dry them. I admit it takes a long time to sundry them, but frankly you’ve got nothing to do bar puting all the beautiful mushrooms on a double layer of brown paper.

Sun-dried chanterelles
Place the chanterelles (no need to brush them as when they’ll dry, the earth will fall off them) on a double layer of brown paper.
And place all that in the sun every morning : they’ll dry in 2-3 days.

If you haven’t got time or sun : turn on your oven to the lowest temperature and dry the chanterelles -placed in a baking tray- for a night. The next morning your chanterelles will be nicely dried and concentrated in flavour and you kitchen will smell like a mountain cottage.

[looking for the lost butternut squash]

Eric Roux is a cook who have a great chronique on a mid-day show on Canal+. I love his chroniques are they’re the most delicious and interesting food programmes on French tv : to tell the truth the first thing i do when i’m back home for lunch around 1pm is to turn on the television and watch him speak about tomatoes, grapes… while cooking for myself.
Last wednesday he talked about pumpkins. I was all excited because he showed differents kind of them and i was sure he was going to mention the famous butternut squash : the most divine pumpkin for me. Then he mentionned it, needless to say i was in heaven : “afterall it was possible to find buttermut squash in France, hourray!”. I already knew Eric had a blog, but never dropped by.
So i went on his great blog and post him a comment on how much i loved his show and how much i was happy to know i could find butternut squash in france. He very kindly answered me by email that he was sure i could find what i wanted (i’m not going to repeat “butternut squash” all over this post) in Toulouse food maket.
Lucky me : i didn’t have class on friday.

So this morning i woke up at 7am, took the bus down to the city center and went to all the food market i could find; but nowhere was my dear butternut squash. Desperate and hopeless i finely bought 4 lovely pomegranates and tentatively went to the last food market, asked the man if he had courge musquée (french name), but as he didn’t seem to know what they was i said butternut and then he showed me 3 butternut squashes waiting for me to buy them… Guess what i did. Buy the 3 of them. And if i have too much, i’ll just freeze them (clever girl, hey). I found the butternut squashes in a stand located inside the Place des Carmes market. I’ll write recipes for butternut squash next week when i’ll be in my home

Oops, i didn’t tell you everything; Eric Roux asked me if i could give hime a recipe using butternut for him to put on his blog. But i won’t give him only one recipe but 3… that will be :
-butternut bruschetta from BBC’s Ready Steady Cook
-either a very rich pumpkin risotto from Tom Norrington Davies or a beef and butternut squash curry from Paul Rankin
-butternut cheesecake from Feast