Adventures in Food

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...

I do sometimes think "is it ok for me to collect wild food" because surely there are lots of wildlife who cant go to tesco if they dont find any nuts in the woods that day. And generally people like the guys at River Cottage and other proponents of wild food collecting give the answer more or less of "yes its fine, there is plenty to go round, so long as you always leave a bit of it ie dont dig up ALL the truffles you can find in one spot." Now I know the deer in Richmond Park are not a "naturally occurring" species in a "natural" environment but even so I found this interesting. I was up there on an early morning to photograph the deer with a friend and saw this notice. I hadn't seen that sign when I collected the chestnuts last time. I have taken an interest in the past in the idea of eating invasive species so will start to investigate that as an alternative. We could act as a biological control agent, enhancing the biodiversity rather th...