TODAY was all about food, and I spent the day in the King Valley with a gaggle of locals who not only know where to find the best free-range ingredients but how to cook the goodies into wonderful home-style feasts.
Bright chef Patrizia Simone - the matriarch of the Simone family and the force behind Simone's Restaurant - was leading out little party of foodies and we spent the morning foraging for the ingredients she and her chef son Anthony would use to prepare lunch.
We met High Country local Franca Norris in Mrytleford and she took us to a spot beside the Great Alpine Road where we parked our cars and walked into the bush to fossick for the mushrooms that grow below the old pines when the weather turns cold.
The treasure was saffron milk caps, a plump little mushroom the color of orange sherbet, and we walked along a fire trail in the gloom below the dense canopy with our eyes scanning ground that was carpeted by fallen pine needles.
Frana's father is one of the King Valley's top mushroom hunters, and he has passed his skills on to his daughter, and she now spends many hours from autumn to spring walking through the bush collecting baskets of fresh fungi.
Our next stop was at a chestnut farm in Wandiligong, out past Bright, where we got a lesson on another of the High Country's top crops seeing the fruit on the tree and sampling a few dishes prepared once the nuts were harvested and roasted.
Then it was back into Bright for lunch at Simone's restaurant which included pasta with mushrooms and an meringue-like desert made from chestnuts.
