Adventures in Food

Rupert Burdock and his Wild Things A couple of weekends ago I was in lovely Stroud where I met Rupert Burdock. He sold me a bag of Milk thistle heads and invited me to join his afternoon wild food walk. Sadly I couldn't go that day but we had a very nice cup of tea instead with some poets and artists. Next time!

It's been a while but the plants have moved quickly. A month ago the plot was green and lush and new things seemed to be appearing every day, crowding each other out. Now it looks untidy and shrivelled but I have been collecting poppy seeds and heads for decoration, and some of the slower things are starting to look fat with promise. So by way of an update here are some photos from June: Looking lush in June   Opium Poppies Common Poppy Opium Poppy in July is covered in aphid. The green heads are where opium comes from so I wonder if that is the attraction for these black bugs.   Where the aphid do well, so do the ladybirds Broad-leaved dock I think these are red admiral caterpillars on the nettles in June. Now it's July, I have seen a lot of butterfilies but more in the nature reserve than on this plot. Wild Rocket Pam The opium poppies look pretty but I am not convinced they will be so well used next year. The seeds are d...

One nice thing about this project is learning slowly and developing a deepening relationship with the natural processes. Last year I found wood blewitts growing on the plot and this year they came back. They seem to be rather out of season but I am still fairly sure that's what they are! I ate them and enjoyed it a lot, in fact more than last time. And its very satisfying to see that they came back again. Unless they are different bnut its still interesting. This time the recipe involved frying onions and Alexanders with the mushrooms in rapeseed oil from the local shop (Squire's) and at the end, stirring in the wild garlic pesto my brother and his wife made. And here are the pictures: Baby Blewitts among the baby alexanders Ready to eat - I left about half in to reseed for the next crop Rapeseed oil, wild pesto and alexanders ready Chop everything up and fry with the oil and a squeeze of grapefruit juice. Mix with noodles, top with yoghurt and paprika and settle down...

It has been such a long time, we had so much cold and rain and snow this winter that I have hardly been down to the notment at all. A couple of weeks ago I did go, and collected some baby Alexanders , which went down very well with the family. They are very herbal, like fennel, aniseed or celery but stronger and with a distinct flavour. They work very well chopped up with mashed potato or in an omelette. Then yesterday I went back for a propoer look at the spring life. Many of the fragile little seedlings planted last year in their fleece-poo blankets are still alive if not exactly thriving - including a sage, some fennel cuttings, a feverfew and calamint. Sadly though, the huge ants nest has gone since the breeze blocks were sold to alocal builder who has been able to reuse them. I had been hoping to provide a new home for the ants, but failed to act in time and so now just have to wait and see if they managed to survive or not. I am fairly ignorant about the habits of ants, but...

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:

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...

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 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...

There was a big pile of rose cuttings in the garden and they were covered in rosehips; not being one with a high tolerance of wastefulness I set about cutting them off with plans to make some delicious thing or other. Then the little red hips sat in my fridge for a few days while i was too busy. Eventually I got round to dealing with them but quite a lot had gone soggy and or mouldy so the initial crop was quite whittled down. It was surprisingly difficult to find recipes for rosehips. I found several for rowan berries in my assortment of ancient recipe books, even though rowan is less spoken of generally in life, and i rather suspect, considerably less palatable than rosehip. I did find one however, in May Byron's Pot Luck, an old favourite. And it was very true about how awkward they are to prepare, covered in fine sharp hairs than get under your fingernails and apparently in another recipe ( which I ignored) one is expected to not only top and tail but de-seed and peel them bef...