The mushroom poisoning in Vic...... we are gripped!.....Part 3

[Dustyblue]

New thread! Cheers @echt for noticing!

That sketch from the court artist in the Guardian article always makes me think of this...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-matching-fresco-monkey-christ-resurfaces-zaragoza-spain

You're not wrong, @SkyOfficer

😆 We really need the laughing reaction as an option on here!

Obviously the stores didn't knowingly sell poisonous cheese but it somehow got into the system.

True, but the emergence of listeria is an intrinsic hazard of the cheese making process. It's not a hazard of drying shiitakes that they somehow turn into death caps. (Listeria also turns out to be a risk with dried mushrooms! — https://source86.com/hofood99-recalls-enoki-mushrooms-due-to-listeria-scare/)

Isn’t it? It sounds fancy to me.

Well, it's not an everyday meal. But you don't have to be a world-renowned chef to make it. I could make it, and I'm not much of a cook.

Yes, some food items can harbour listeria and other bacteria. Lettuce and a certain chocolate item are the first things that come to mind that in the past couple of years been found to have caused illness in a number of people. However, this can happen in the right conditions, it’s rare but not unheard of.

Mushrooms grown for shops are not picked in the wild; as far as I’m aware they are commercially grown with no chance of DCM getting mixed in.

Yes there’s a chance they and cheese etc could contain listeria but this is not what happened. Erin is saying that there must have been DCM in the mushroom mix she bought. No one else reported any problems in the area.

Have they proven that she visited the naturalist website showing there were death cap mushrooms? Or are they just saying there was a post about them, that she may have seen shortly before visiting the area?

starting the feel bad for the jury- this trial is looking like it will be a lot longer than 6 weeks.

I still think it’s suspicious she did individual ones too. I think they’ve shown the recipe for the one she made, and that was for a large one? Yes, she’s said she couldn’t find a cut of meat large enough to do that, but she travelled to places she wouldn’t normally travel to to get mushrooms (as she couldn’t even remember the Asian grocer she went to) so she could have travelled to find the meat too. Didn’t she say she wanted to make a special lunch? That would have looked special. But it would have meant sharing the same wellington…

Like every Australian apparently including Erin, I wouldn't trust myself to make it with any recipe except Nagi's 🥲

What did she leave out? Interesting that she deviated from it!

I think I’ve read that she said she searched on the inaturalist site about them?

However she’s denying having seen the posts about them sharing the location shortly before she visited the area. I thought they’d be able to prove this by her history, even if she’d deleted it?

This is a quote from the BBC site:

“I looked up death cap mushrooms on my phone'published at 02:06 4 June
02:06 4 June
Defence barrister Colin Mandy SC now asks Ms Patterson about an online search for death cap mushrooms on the iNaturalist site, a citizen scientist database which tracks plants and fungi.
Ms Patterson says she doesn't remember viewing the page - which the court has heard was accessed on her phone in 2022 - but that it was possibly her, as she recalls wanting to know if toxic mushrooms grew in the area.
"It was possible that was part of the process I went through to see if they grew in South Gippsland."
She replies that searches about mushrooms were largely on her phone because she had it with her during her walks.
"It was just the most convenient thing."”

The whole thing reminds me of a creative 7-year-old who has fairly obviously done something naughty coming up with a 200-point story involving amazing gusts of wind, the dog, and invisible extraterrestrials. I remember our DC doing something like that on occasion.

I mean, it could have happened, but the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, not demonstrating every other possible explanation is literally physically or mathematically impossible.

I listened to 'The Trial' podcast about this last night. The phone location evidence is very compelling.

I had never heard of the iNaturalist app but as a lover of nature, it sounds wonderful - what a great idea. I think I will download it.

She’s probably very disappointed she hasn’t been able to research things such as would throwing up after eating DCM stop you getting seriously ill!

She's said she used the Recipe Tin Eats recipe, and had the cookbook with splatters on the page the detective said.

But instead of doing a log as per that book, she did the individual BWs. Instead of doing a crepe, she used filo pastry. She left out the prosciutto, because Don didn't eat pork - fair enough. But she also left out the mustard, apparently.

The recipe also includes "a classic Red Wine Sauce", but she didn't bother making that and served it with a sachet of gravy decanted into a gravy jug.

But she also left out the mustard, apparently.

The recipe also includes "a classic Red Wine Sauce", but she didn't bother making that and served it with a sachet of gravy decanted into a gravy jug.

Hello, is this the recipe police? I'd like to report a breach.😆

I was just answering a question.

There are a lot of oddities around her version of Beef Wellington. The fact she made 6 individual BW, is the main one. Also, if she made 6, one for herself, Don, Gail, Ian, Heather, and Simon, how did she manage to have leftovers to "scrape" the mushrooms off and feed them the following evening to her kids - the leftovers of one and a half BW were found in the bin by the police days later.

So she must have made more than 6. (And obviously made them in two batches, or she and the kids would be ill or dead.)

She also bought an enormous amount of puff pastry and filo pastry. Enough to make an army of Beef Wellingtons. Yet only 5 beef eye fillets...

Wasn’t the story that she intended to make one big log line in the recipe, but then the supermarket didn’t have a cut of the right type of meat that was large enough? So she had to pivot and make smaller individual ones. This then threw out her recipe because many smaller ones would have a greater surface area than one big one and she needed to cover them all with the mushroom paste.

she then needed more mushrooms than she had planned for.

@velvetandsatin we don't agree on much in this matter but I think we both do agree that but serving home made beef Wellington with packet gravy is inexplicable!

She has a lot of stories. If she'd made one big log she could not poison her guests without poisoning herself. I doubt the butcher and the local supermarket were both incapable of providing the correct cut of meat, for a meal she had planned for some time.

I'm still curious about the number 5 with the fillets, for 6 alleged individual pies, and then for the "leftovers". It doesn't add up.

Missing out the mustard in a beef wellington deserves a prison sentence on its own

There are a lot of oddities around her version of Beef Wellington. The fact she made 6 individual BW, is the main one.

Sorry not sorry for the derail, but: A friend of ours held a party and all of the food was bought in, except that she made mini beef Wellingtons, each one about the size of a large egg, from scratch. They were absolutely amazing and must have taken ages. (If she does it again we will make her take one at random from the pile first, though.🤔😂)