Just over 18 months ago, photographer Assavri Kulkarni’s days began early. By 3 a.m., to be exact. She would dress in sturdy clothes, heft her 10-kg tripod, lights, and DSLR camera, and travel two hours by car to northeast Goa, to the edge of the deep forests of the Western Ghats. There, she would meet a couple of tribal women in their 70s and 80s and trek for hours, braving leeches and wild encounters with bears and snakes — all to search for and document seasonal foods of the forest.“Sometimes I felt like I would not come back,” shares Kulkarni, as she talks about the days of gruelling research she did for her passion project, Forest Recipes of Goa - Stories of Tribal Food. The 119-page photo book has 65-odd ingredients and recipes, and was published earlier this year by the Goa Forest Development Corporation.Forest Recipes of Goa - Stories of Tribal FoodArmpit mushrooms and fermented jackfruitKulkarni says while she spent around a year and a half documenting forest food, her quest had begun over a decade ago when she met Subhadra Gaonkar from the Kshatriya Gaonkar Samaj (a warrior-agricultural community in Goa), who told her about kakhetli almi or armpit mushrooms. Also known as sondaye (Termitomyces cantoniensis), these wild-foraged mushrooms are collected from the forests of Chorla Ghat, wrapped in a leaf, sprinkled with salt and placed under the arm, where it ‘cooks’ using body heat. “I was blown away when I heard that something could be cooked with body heat,” she says. The ancient technique was used by forest dwellers when they had to trek for miles together.