It was macabre from a distance; a pure white, human-sized skull glowing out from the darkness of the woodland glade. My son whooped with delight and charged up to the perfect sphere, raising it above his head like a trophy. Out in the sunlight, we inhaled its sweet fungus scent. It was a giant puffball mushroom, the size of a football. It was no longer sinister; it was less like a murder victim’s skull and more like a snowman’s head, cool and heavy in our hands.

Since having children, I have lost my mushroom foraging confidence. Poisoning myself would be rather inconvenient (especially for those around me), but to make the children ill or worse through mistaken mushroom identity would be devastating and unforgivable.

The giant puffball is my safe foraging mushroom because for me it is so easily and reliably recognisable. With a young specimen, bigger than a grapefruit and perfectly white throughout, I can be utterly sure of what it is. They can grow even larger than your head, although the orb becomes lumpen and yellowed, like a whale’s brain imagined. To find out if it is OK to eat, you need to slice it in half. If the flesh inside has lost its solid white, fresh-driven-snow-like appearance and turned beige or yellow, then it won’t taste good. Luckily, it will still be ideal for a messy game of fungi football.

I’ve never managed to find a puffball on purpose. The best plan is to go blackberry picking and keep your eyes open for strange white objects in grassland or deciduous woodland edges. However, they do often regrow at the same spot each year, so if you get lucky one year, it pays to return the following autumn. Indeed, it is something of a miracle that we aren’t surrounded by puffballs, because inside a large, mature puffball, when it has turned brown and dry, there can be more than a trillion spores.

We returned home with our heavy bounty. It was big enough to provide several meals. First, simply fried with garlic and butter and served on toast, the texture somewhere between firm tofu and a savoury marshmallow. The next day it was cut into discs for puffball pizza. Each disc was sprinkled with olive oil and grilled on each side until soft, then topped with tomato sauce and cheese and returned to the grill until golden and bubbly. Pudding was blackberry muffins, still warm from the oven.

Our foraged food, found and shared as a family, roots us into our environment more deeply than ever.

Kate Blincoe, 2016