Adventures in Food

I brought camera on sunday and got some pics for you: A woolly blanket for the baby herbs, keeps down the competition and the slugs hate fur too: Nettle roots will be used to dye the rest of the fleece: Lepista sordida growing among nettles - and Alexander seedlings in the foreground: and at home waiting to be cooked: with red onions and butter: giving a simple meal with a beetroot and Alexander salad in the background:

I went down the notment a couple of days ago as its the change of season and its time to check up. I found all the little herbs I planted doing well under their woolly blanket, and the big dominating original plants that were so enormous in the summer, dying back and shrivelling. The Alexanders were fallen, rotting already, but there were masses of baby ones coming which is perfect for harvesting so I got a good crop of those as well as some very lush and think dandelion leaves for a nice salad. The Alexanders are rather strong flavoured to eat in quantity but they were excellent chopped up small with a beetroot salad. As I cleared away the burdock, getting burrs all over my woollens, and the nettles, and the big Alexanders (fallen), I found a big collection of purpley-brown mushrooms. They smelt heavenly, a very strong mushroomy smell like oyster mushrooms and at first I thought that's what they were. Really the scent made me want to eat them right there and then, its was very...

It was chestnut season a week or two ago and now they are over but I still have the pics. Being from the Kew Road, they are probably full of horrible pollutants but they were very sweet and delicious after a bit of roasting.  They went down well in this house and you can see the before and after in the pics. I also put some into a potato mash with Kew Road Walnuts as well. It went very well with the pheasant that Dad gave us from the Richmond Market game stall, roasted and stewed with beetroots and loads of gorgeous veg. Chestnuts come in a prickly casing which you stamp on to pop the nut out so you don't have to get your fingers scratched. The walnuts make a great and very durable dye but I haven't used it because we were moving back into the flat after the New Kitchen and all that, so I didn't have time to do all the processing. I have bought some wool carders however, and will spend the winter processing the fleeces I collected in the summer. The white wool will...

how the notment is looking after a lot of nettle-clearing. I have cleared this area twice now, cropping the baby nettle and fat hen as it crops up so quickly. A pile of breeze blocks under the nettles has been partially dismantled to make small seats in a circle for the herbs - with the help of my Lovely Assistant Collecting fat hen (delicious! like spinach but nuttier) and dandelion using sheeps fleece to protect herbs planted out from my backyard pots. They are doing ok and the fleece also keep slugs away very effectively (they dislike hair!) The fox liked it though and came and dug at it when it first appeared. a large burdock - can be used in dandelion and burdock cordial... collecting the nettle tops pureeing the cooked nettle tops with the white sauce, a messy business. (My old kitchen, soon to be gone, a nasty steel cooker in its place.. it just wont look as good in the pictures any more :-( ) ooh a lovely meal, cheese makes anything taste good! All the details on cooking the ne...

This: http://www.wildfoodmentor.co. uk/x/notify is a course on wild food, I am wanting to sign up but will i have time? can i justify the cost? will i actually follow it? maybe i could do it and report on the results here. your recommendation? xx

I harvested a large batch of nettles the other day. After all the hard work a couple of weeks ago the nettles sprang back incredibly fast and are already a foot high again. I made an enormous quantity of nettle puree from the young tops. Did you know nettles contain more iron and more protein than spinach? It is very very rich, and I think better in small doses. They could be used more like a sauce or herb than a main vegetable. So I froze a lot of it as I doubt we can manage to get through it all. My friend Anna reports a French recipe she tried recently that uses the nettles in a flan, with great results which I must try. I also collected abundant amounts of Goog King Henry which has sprouted up on the cleared ground, and some dandelion leaves, for a salad. There is a huge dock doing well and the herbs I've planted are taking too, the feverfew and calamint are seeming happy under their protective sheeps fleece mulch which works extremely well now that the foxes have lost interes...

On Saturday I was very happy to be invited to join Pudding Mill River at the Greenway in Stratford , running through the Olympics site, to collect some plants with the help of some lovely people who joined the Botanical Collecting Expedition. Marie Briggs at Kew Herbarium was good enough to make the loan of a Vasculum and a press which made it a much more efficient expedition. We collected specimens from herbs and shrubs. The list is as follows: Viper's Bugloss - Echium vulgare Hedge Mustard - Sisybrium officinale Burnet Rose Rosa pimpinellifolia Bird's-Foot Trefoil - Lotus corniculatus Teasel - Dipsacus fullonum Black Horehound - Ballota nigra Treacle Mustard - Erysimum cheiranthoides Common Mallow - Malva sylvestris Oxeye Daisy - Leucanthemum vulgare A Grass - unknown We also saw plenty of apple trees, brambles and mugwort, ragwort, yarrow, various roses including dog rose, three types of bindweed (probably Convulvulus arvensis , Calystegia sepium , and the non-native Calyst...

At Pensford Field there is a hut (the studio) and behind the hut is a bank of earth with a lot of nettles on it. I am amazed to find that I am offered the opportunity to grow things on this bank. I am allotted, not an allottment but an aNottment. I went there yesterday with Graham from the Alpines in Kew Gardens, you could say he knows a few things about native plants. We had a look around and got together a list of plants growing on the patch. Of course it is mostly nettles, but also Alexanders, burdock, green alkanet, horsetails, Black HoarHound, a type of wild lettuce and a mustard, some pretty grasses and a wild barley, mugwort (allegedly useful in clairvoyancy), a buddleia and some buttercups. I may well have forgotten a couple of things too. We also have on the site a pile of breeze blocks, some rubble, a few black plastic tubes and a bird box. With this highly promising collection of assorted plants and objects I want to intervene as a concious and conscientious agent of ecologi...

i got married last week, on May 1st we went to Pensford Field for a 'picknick event' to celebrate, and i wore a cream embroidered top. i also had a white skirt but it was too white so i dyed it with teabags and onion skins.

Who knew? I will try this recipe and let you know how I get on. It will be tricky nicking the magnolia flowers, if mum catches me it will be her eating me for breakfast.

At Kew Gardens on Saturday there was a fab event showcasing various kinds of ethnobotanical research that goes on here and there. I went along and met various friends from life and internet, and discovered some really great new plants to eat from the weed-bed. I've also got all interested in collecting english plant lore for Ethnomedica so if you have some ancient plant remedy to tell me please do. I met some really great people with weeds to eat so I thought I would mention it and then I will go and find the weeds for myslef and report back. One particularly cool thing was eating thistles, speficially in this case, Sow Thistle. Anna showed me how to cut away the spines and gave me the stem to try. Its crunchy and juicy and fresh tasting, vaguely in the same food bracket as celery I suppose. A lot of the plants at the stand were things you know very well from the garden, little hairy things that grow in the grass or along the cracks in the paving. In fact hairs and spines are a g...

I don't have photos this time but have been bee-servicing again. This time we were just scraping honeycomb wax from the wooden frames so they can be reused for the coming year and the new bees. Bees are in a bad way and unlike other creatures in a similar, or worse, situation, People are notcing. This is because a) bees are quite cute b) people like honey c) bees pollinate fruit crops, and the fruit crops are suffering. I saw a little while back a Haagen Daaz campaign to help honeybees - because the bees are not there to pollinate fruits, and this is making it harder for the ice cream manufacturer to source and pay for fruits. It is a very serious problem in the US and also I have rumours from China and the Ukraine that they are losing fruit crops. One of the main threats to British honey bees is a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. Originally confined to Asian honey bees, it has spread across Europe and reached England in 1992. It now infests 95 percent of hives. You can get...

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a...