snowed under…

There is a lot of snow. Several inches over the week or two before Christmas, and a couple of massive falls in the past four days. 30cm last night. Temperatures: -11.2 the lowest so far recorded in the garden, -8.5 today. It went up to -4.2 and felt quite warm. Small birds are suffering. I have been feeding them; especially on apples. There are still two crates of random apples in the back porch and birds and possibly small mammals have helped themselves. The apples have frozen and thawed a few times, but seem still usable. Blackbirds love them, and I have had two fieldfares coming to the bird table every day, beautiful, fluffed up creatures looking for fruit and seeds. Sparkly speckly starlings come, too and a wood pigeon joins the collared doves who are resident. James over the road has had a spotted woodpecker.

There is no foraging to be done but we reap the rewards of a year spent squirreling away wild foods. At Christmas we broached the cider – it is sparkling, and not at all bad, but think will be even better in a couple more weeks. Got freshly pressed apple juice out of the freezer, too, and had plenty of rowan jelly for the turkey (yes, succumbed to a turkey even though we have home raised cockerels in the freezer), chutney for the sausage rolls, blaeberries and raspberries for the trifle and more home made wine and sloe gin that we can decently drink. Roasted hazelnuts from the copse, and a late jarring of rose hip syrup to keep up the vitamin C levels. Log foraging has sort of paid off – plenty of fuel for the stove but would be a darned sight more useful had Someone agreed with my desire to build a new log store out the back – wet logs in plastic fertiliser bags that fill with snow are limited in value.

My nursery is covered in snow. I cannot do anything about it and probably will lose a lot of plants in the extreme cold. I am going through the seed catalogues half-heartedly but not counting on an early start to production!

Drowning in Pomes….

It’s not that we haven’t been foraging, just that Andrew KEEPS BRINGING HOME MORE APPLES AND PEARS and I think we are drowning in them, so have scarcely had time to blog. (plus lots work on at college at present).

The worst is, they are all different varieties which he’s trying to identify or photograph or just moon over and there are crates and crates of the b**gers I’m not even allowed to touch, then all of a sudden they are fermenting all over the floor and it’s all a bit mind-boggling really. I am an apple widow.

Anyway that aside I’ve foraged and made these since I last wrote: rowan jelly, rowan berry wine, hazelnuts, elderberries for freezer, brambles, elderberry wine, quince jelly (using japonica quinces) and Andrew has permitted a small selection of the apple bing to be made into cider. It is a disgusting, thick brown soup of a cider at present, emitting a sludgy foam from the top of the demijohn. It is to be regretted that before we made it I had been suffering from a gastric bug (NOT from wild food!), which has affected the way I view the cider jar. Nevertheless, I am sure the end result will be as good as it was last year, and am optimistic His Lord High Appletreeness will eventually permit the remainder of the bing to be thus processed. Maybe even some of the pears.

The biggest problem we have with cidermaking is crushing the apples. We have a lovely little press, but unless the fruit is well mashed you don’t get the juice from it and it is a long, slow process. A 10lb weight into a bucket is OK but broke the bucket; James’s mechanical chip-maker is a start but we really have to get a proper mincer. The off-putting brown colour comes from tannin, and won’t do any harm, some apples just have lots in them. Keswick Codlins made up the large amount of the apples we used, but there were others – James Grieve, Lord Derby, Grenadier, Bramley and “various Laxton type things” (quote). No real cider apples – told A he needs to develop a Scottish cider apple.

The Quince Jelly also benefitted from a dose of Bramley for setting quality – and it is an exquisite jelly. I know Japonica quinces aren’t strictly wild food but they might as well be, as so many people grow the things as ornamental shrubs with never a clue they are cultivating a valuable food source.

Not been much on the fungi front – we have had a few weeks of dry weather and haven’t found anything new or in remarkable quantity or quality for a while. A very interesting mushroom is developing on a log in the garden; yet to be identified. More later!

PS. Sloes about ready to pick….

Blaeberry Harvest

We’ve been entertained since last weekend by a huge caterpillar on the willow herb outside the kitchen window – an elephant hawk-moth. S/he is still there, on the second full stem which is being systematically stripped of leaves, but is getting fatter and slower. The cat is scared of it.

We also had visitors, Tim and Gill and their daughters Lucy and Alice, and as is customary they were pressganged into picking blaeberries (bilberries). This absorbing task yielded enough of these tasty and nutritious fruits for jam, cakes, puddings, breakfasts and the freezer…. and there’s plenty more if we are back in the right habitat, which is acid woodland. Lucy was quite revolting with her blaeberries – squashed them to a mush in their plastic bag, bit off the corner of the bag and sucked the pulp out. Ugh! Fruit Smoothies the rustic way I suppose. Tim and Andrew were sidetracked by some nice big chanterelles, and Tim and I collected honey fungus on the way back – a big show of these and more to come. They were delicious in omelettes. There are a few other mushrooms about just now – several of the Russual genus are showing their faces, but not enough to get a selection of edible species, and in the Millenium Wood Tawny Grisettes (much chewed by slugs) mix with The Blusher (Amanita rubscens). We don’t eat the Blusher. It’s said to be edible, but a. it looks a bit like the poisonous Panther Cap which is also about just now and it wouldn’t take much of a deviant Panther Cap to get mistaken and b. so many creepy crawlies have already eaten it by the time we get there anyway.

Hazelnuts are swelling and becoming obvious in our local copse.

And more wild garlic…

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) is commonly called Wild Garlic, even though several other wild plants also have this name. It’s the broad-leaved, glossy plant that carpets old woods in April and May, and bears heads of starry white flowers. Both the leaves and the flowers are edible. Last night I made Ramsons pesto with a bucket of leaves.

I just liquidised the washed leaves with the water that clung from washing, together with a packet of pine nuts, a small bag of other undistinguished wild nuts that needed using up, and olive oil. I don’t know how much olive oil went in because I just slurped it in till the consistency was right, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of eggcupsful, maybe less. Then I tasted it, and decided it needed a wee bit of Maldon Sea Salt (this isn’t advertising, just supporting a local industry from way back home, being an Essex Girl). Andrew said it was too bitter and to add some honey, but I didn’t – these days I can’t stand anything to be too sweet and I thought it was perfect. He added some honey on his oatcake but still didn’t like it, so it’s all for me. Excellent! Strange how the garlic flavour comes through really strongly – individual leaves in salad are very mild, but this is good and strong. The colour is absolutely beautiful too.

What else? Lime leaves are nice now, before they start to lose that spring-green flavour. Wood sorrel remains magnificent, and ground elder has reached the point where it’s better steamed/cooked rather than raw. Flowers appear in salads – cornflowers, violets, broom buds, chives and of course ramsons. We were down at the coast in Fife last weekend and failed to collect because we forgot to go back for it lots of the seaweed Enteromorpha intestinalis, which is rather nice. However my stomach rebelled against a rich diet badly enough on Monday, so maybe it was just as well.

More St. George’s Mushrooms made their way to Saturday’s breakfast, and burdock stems onto dinner. I have only so far eaten the fleshy leaf stems of the Great Burdock (Arctium lappa), although I am assured other parts are edible too. It’s delicious. What you have to do is carefully peel away the slightly hairy outer skin on each stem – it doesn’t matter if you don’t get all of it. It’s a bit like peeling rhubarb. You’ll notice the interesting, musty but rather pleasant smell. Cut into sections and steam or lightly boil. You can serve it as a vegetable; I used to add butter but don’t feel the need to these days. My tastes really have changed!

Noticing the buds on elder bushes; the rowans are out and may (hawthorn) about to blur the distinction between late pear and early apple blossom. Eyeing up this year’s wine and cider sources. I racked off last years elderberry and sloe and blackcurrant wines this weekend – the last before bottling. As usual the elderberry tastes the more promising!

The “Humble” Potato and Respite from Spinach

Ian from the church (who has previously cheered my dietary life with a bag of apples) has given me a big bag of potatoes from his farm! Suddenly I don’t have to eke out tatties for the rest of Lent – I have plenty. This is reassuring, and potatoes aren’t known as versatile for nothing. Having an abundance of them and very co-operative hens just now, I made a pile of savoury potato bubble and squeak “pancakes” – mashed potatoes, combined with beaten eggs, herbs, seasoning, onion and assorted greens, and fried. Very tasty – as a meal, accompaniment to breakfast, or a snack. Cottage pies of various  types come to mind – had I enough fat left I could even make crisps (but then I’m forgetting I don’t actually like crisps).

Things running out:
All freezer vegetables
home made soft cheese
hazelnuts
Fresh onions and leeks (beetroot and celeriac already gone)
Venison fat

Things still plentiful:
Meat (alive or otherwise)
Frozen soft fruit
Donated apples and potatoes
Herbs, dried and fresh

New foods appearing:
Comfrey, Ground Elder and other weeds for greens
Orpine, wild garlic and other wild plants for salads
MINT!!!!  and other aromatic plants at last for teas – which have suddenly become more palateable

The now rapid growth of spring greens (even seedling brassicas that I’ve sown are coming on now) means that I can have a rest from spinach. There’s still some in the freezer, but not much else veg wise, so I’m ekeing it out. With four weeks to go, I am nearly half way through Lent, and I think my body has now adjusted to the change in diet. My thinking has changed a lot – no longer panicking about what I am going to eat, no longer really thinking about it very much either. Sometimes I manage to make something really enjoyable like the potato pancakes, sometimes I think “oh no not another egg”, but I’m not craving other people’s food all the time now. I just know I can’t have it and so long as I’m not hungry Im not bothered. This is a new experience for me!

I realised I am still eating apples in mid-March from last autumn’s harvest, and enjoying them. OK so they have to be peeled and are a bit wizened and spotty – but perfectly edible. Normally I’d have fed any apples still hanging around by now to the hens. Now I value them and will be looking for varieties to grow that are good keepers.

Confess your sins Margaret. I nearly slipped today – the other half asked me to test his rice to see if it was ready and it got right to my mouth before I realised what I was doing. And then I needed to fry a potato pancake to go with my vegetable stew, and as the venison fat is running low, I decided it was both practical and allowable to fry it in the pan in which HE has just cooked a chop….. well it saved some fat, but the pancake did taste faintly and delightfully of pork…..

Live to eat, or eat to live?

I just realised I am now eating to live. And predominantly in our society we live to eat. Which I don’t have a problem about. I like food and enjoy experimenting, savouring and sharing the experience of good food.

However, now that food is more than a bit repetitive, has to be eked out and includes no real treats, I’m becoming aware how much more than physical sustenance food has always been in my head – comfort, reward, healing, social interaction, social belonging, reassurance, substitute – to name but a few! When you think that most people in the world have no choice but to eat purely to live, and don’t have the choices in what they eat that I have even during this fast – well, you have to wonder. Someone sent a comment advertising a weight loss programme – do you know what I’m thinking, it’s no wonder so many of us need to lose weight when we are using food to do so many jobs for us! What do you think?

I did have a lovely salad yesterday – the last half beetroot, half a potato and an apple, with pickled ash keys, roasted hazelnuts and a variety of weed leaves, garnished with Calendula  (marigold) petals (I’ve had some flowering away in the greenhouse all winter). Some nice garlic mustard coming up on the edge of the car park at Perth College, which went in. Back to chicken and spinach for dinner!

Second batch of curd cheese much better than the first; but the sap has stopped rising in the sycamore because its uncompromisingly cold still. Negotiating with one of my students who’s a keen fisherman for a fish in return for the ruff feather from a cockerel (for fly-tying). Starting to hate herbal teas with a vengeance! TINY little shoots appearing on my white peppermint – hurry up! it might not be rooibos, but I can live with it…

Predominantly spinch soup for lunch. Hmmm. Well it was OK for Popeye.

Feb 25th-27th

Lent begins. On Shrove Tuesday, there was a pre-Lent good life banquet at the church, with everything donated and home grown, or wild. The main course was a wild deer – very fat he was too, and I brought back the fat for rendering, as well as the bones for stock. The fat was easily processed; it is very hard and white, and gives a good flavour in cooking. It solves, at least for now, the issue of whether I am allowed cooking oil during my Lent challenge. As for the bones, after boiling for stock I got four portions of meat from them.

Ash Wednesday, the hens having begun an untimely strike, I breakfasted on a fruit compote consisting of home grown raspberries, blackcurrants, strawberries, with brambles and elderberries from the freezer. I didn’t eat again till about four, then used a portion of the venison and some stock to make a sort of stew with a Jerusalem artichoke, a carrot and an onion from the garden, and some spinach. It did me for lunch on Thursday too. Later, I sorely missed my evening snack, but could only find a few hazelnuts I couldn’t really spare to scoff.

I am finding having to go in the garden to find an edible herb every time I want a hot drink a bit of a pain – especially as hardly anything is really growing yet – and also boring! Tried gorse flower tea on Thursday – tastes like hot water. Cleavers (known here delightfully as Sticky Willy) is about the best; sage is OK but not very flavoursome at this time of year. Passed a garden with a healthy clump of Sticky Willy growing in it. When the householder came out of his door, I only just avoided saying, “Scuse me mate, can I have a bit of your sticky willy?” This kind of thing can get you into trouble. As an alternative, I’ve spun the fruit compote into smoothies – astonishing number of pips! I am allowing myself home-made wine, but have been too wobbly so far to dare drink any.

By today, Friday, I need a rest from venison, good though it is. Hens deigned to lay some eggs, so omelette for breakfast (with half a leek) and a sort of Spanish omelette (the other half of the leek, carrot and defrosted runner beans) for dinner. With which I had roasted beetroot and artichoke with mixed herbs from the garden. Not too much wild stuff yet, but I did have a brilliant salad for lunch – miners lettuce, sorrel, garlic mustard, rocket, spinach leaves and the first ground elder, chopped finely with half a cooked beetroot and a chopped apple. Made a sort of dressing with Rose next door’s accidental cider vinegar that was meant to be apple wine and my redcurrant sauce. It offset the bitterness of the leaves and I really savoured every mouthful – something I’ve noticed that’s different in my eating experience!

Also I can feel myself becoming, of necessity, much more resourceful. As I write, the first bucket of sycamore sap is reducing gently on top of the stove. A gallon of raw milk donated to the banquet that didn’t get used is curdling in the kitchen, hopefully to become curd cheese. Ian at the church gave me a bag of apples from storage from his orchard – as I am badly missing snacks, I intend to dry some as rings to carry to work with me. Traded one of Rose’s spare cockerels for some venison, and it’s stashed in the freezer. And I am noticing the emergence of every weed – today I saw the first shoots of Ramsons or wild garlic – and remembered I have some rather rubbishy cultivated garlic in the veg plot – suddenly reject vegetables and the tops of leeks become highly desirable!

As the warm weather continues, I hope to see an acceleration in the wild food options in my diet. I am hungry, and craving bread, oatcakes and biscuits especially. But so far, so good – even when I had to go to the pub quiz on Wednesday and drink a pint of water -  on the rocks.

September and October Catch-up

September passed in a bit of a blur, to begin with – as always the start of this month dominated by the Dundee Flower Show and its pre-math and aftermath, coupled with the start of a new term at the college, which was more complicated than usual!

So what follows is by way of a summary for a month that is actually a good one for foragers usually – just needed a bit more time in our case.

On 10th, I foraged along Crieff Road in Perth for fruits and nuts for purely educational reasons, but noted some excellent elderberries on campus, and some tedious municipal planting yielded a nice bag of Japonica quinces (Chaenomeles japonica). These fragrant fruits (they are pomes to be exact) make a lovely addition to fruit pies and puddings. Blackberries ripe trailing over our back wall from the neighbours – started to harvest and freeze them.

 

On 14th, we went fungi-foraging and netted some Slippery Jacks, one Cep, Bay Boletes and several Angel’s Wings. Angel’s Wings are Pleurotellus porrigens, related to Oyster Mushroom but subject to some doubt in internet circles as a couple of folk in Japan once were ill on them. We’ve eaten them regularly for quite a while, and so have many others, so I am suspicious about the identification in the case in question. Worth bearing in mind, though that people can react differently to individual species, hence the confusion when one book says “edible” and another says “best avoided” or similar ambiguous verbage. The other find on the 14th comes into this category – Plums and Custard (Tricholomopsis rutilans). It’s easy to identify because Plums and Custard perfectly describes the colouring, so is good to eat on that score. Can be slightly bitter, but we eat it anyway. Braised it with shoulder of lamb and cranberries from our garden.

 

On 19th, it was rowan berries day. Collected a big heap of them and made rowan jelly – delicious. That week, the boletus and chanterelles I dried in July and August were put into jars for winter use, and noted the rose hips were looking good. Shaggy Ink Caps were spotted at the college, but turned to ink before I could pick them. On 26th, we raided one of our usual haunts and found, apart from the usual fungal suspects which we rounded up, a new one – Hydnum (or Sarcodon) imbricatum – a type of Hedgehog Fungus. They were tea-plate sized, scaley fruiting bodies by the edge of the path, quite spectacular. As we had never seen it before we only took one for identification, and I’m glad because they are apparently quite rare, pinewoods in Scotland being the preferred habitat. Edible though – and delicious!

Puffballs were taken with roast beef on 28th, and a dessert of blaeberries, brambles and cranberries completed Sunday Dinner.

October

Now I look at it, October is also at an end!

On 4th, we harvested a large crop of wild hazelnuts from the plantation, and so did our friends. There were plenty left for the two wild food workshops we held this month, but I seriously think it is time to coppice the hazels – the nuts are getting too high to reach! We gathered rosehips too and made syrup, and brambles continued to provide sustenance and desserts.

Removed a large Sweet Cicely that had seeded itself in the wrong place in the garden, and turned the large fat roots into soup, along with other vegetables. The aniseedy flavour when cooked is mild and enticing, blending well with other tastes.

The two workshops found plenty overall to forage, but fungi were not so thick on the ground as we might have hoped – a cold dry snap had temporarily put a halt to fruiting. Nevertheless, one high point was a massive fruiting body of Grifola frondosa which our neighbour Geoff served as a starter on the evening of the first workshop. Andrew and I squabbled over identification, I thought it was Cauliflower Fungus (Sparassis crispa) to start with, but we all realised it was just too “chunky”. Next week we found Cauliflower Fungus as well and were able to compare them side by side. Geoff found a very young Beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica) – this is significant because it didn’t have any maggots in and we all got a small mouthful. Yum. A range of other edible fungi have been eaten – some good – no excellent – crops of Honey Fungus in the Forest Enterprise wood, plenty of Lycoperdon perlatum puffballs and when all else fails, Common Yellow Russula. (All else did fail, for a brief spell last week and I bought some chestnut mushrooms, reduced. Then honey fungus appeared on the lawn). We normally get a reliable crop of Shaggy Ink Caps in the hen run, but not this year, I suspect the ducks of eating them.

 

Nut front – Bankfoot chestnuts produced niggardly little nuts, no use to man nor beast, but James next door brought back some fat Surrey ones from Bisley, which we are roasting on the stove merrily, with the hazelnuts. Andrew went on a cider making course and has been scrumping furiously the apple crop of our other neighbours (with permission!), along with any others he can find. I went to Northumberland and found a great apple tree right in the middle of the sand-dunes at Bamburgh. We have got out our old cheese press and are also producing fresh apple juice, which is astonishingly good. Pete, who came on the second workshop sent us a tiny, but perfectly formed, pear to identify that he had found while scrumping. We were stumped, but Andy my colleague at college identified it as the Plymouth Pear, Pyrus cordata.

On 19th, I gathered elderberries and made a gallon of wine, and froze two boxes of them. Fished some out last week and made Elderberry Muffins. More Plums and Custard found on 26th.

Wild weather has seen off the rest of October – firstly howling gales and cascades of rain, then snow, followed by a big freeze. Time to stay by the stove and roast chestnuts!

July – last weeks

July – Week Four
Ah, now we’re talking. This weekend, Andrew and I, having spotted some growing by the A9, went cycling after Red Elderberries. These are the fruit of Sambucus racemosa, a non-native but commonly naturalised sister of the familiar Elder (Sambucus nigra). They ripen earlier than the native berries and don’t taste quite as good, but can be used for the same things. Being in the midst of a glut of soft fruit, we wanted to pick some to mix 50-50 with blackcurrants for a red wine. After picking them we thought, it having rained copiously last week (especially on Mull of course), that we should just check for fungi….. and YES!! the first Chanterelles, and a couple of Brown Birch Boletus, and a few fairly chewed Russula lutea. These all went into a delicious pie for dinner. Pointed out we still have last years dried chanterelles to use up. On the way back we picked wild cherries and wild raspberries (inexplicable as the garden ones are coming out of our ears at home but we couldn’t resist….. we ate them as a TV snack to accompany Midsomer Murders (well, you need something..)

Today I sampled the pickled ash keys I prepared in March – and they were good! I seem to have perfected the timing and recipe (well it was John Evelyn’s recipe to the letter actually).

July – Week Five
We’ve both had a week more or less off work this week – though spent much time in the garden.

We decided it was time to see what was happening in a local Forestry Commission wood which gets a good range of autumn fungi normally…. I wanted Tawny Grisettes especially, and there were quite a few. This is an un-nerving fungus for the beginner, being in the same family as Death Cap and Destroying Angel (Amanita). But once you know it, you can’t mistake it for anything else, even from a distance. It stands on a tall stem, no ring around it unlike the death cap, and the reddish-brown cap, conical at first but soon flat, is edged with little striations. Slugs love them (regrettably) and so do I. We also found a single Bay Boletus (Boletus badius), and a relative we hadn’t tried before – Suillus variegatus. This was nice, though not over-tasty. There were quite a few edible Russula atropurpurea, but the slugs had largely had them already! But there were MOUNTAINS of chanterelles….. kept us going for days…..

Dimly aware the English school holidays were starting, we also gathered several pounds of blaeberries (bilberries) by the River Braan. The connection here is that the English hols is when we are most likely to meet up with Tim and Gill and their daughters. Tim is a compulsive and exhausting forager even by our standards, and we have fond, gooey memories of Tim’s blaeberry muffins! Anyway, as usual we spent ages filling a bag with small, sparse and hard to find berries on ankle-high plants, only to get round the corner and find big juicy ones a dozen to a stem on nice tall bushes, which took no time at all to pick. The moral is never start picking till you’ve found worthwhile quantities! The blaeberry is good wayside snacking; they have kept us going all week on walks and cycle rides, here and up at Braemar where we went camping.

Cep (Boletus edulis)

On Monday, Andrew spotted a perfect, un-maggoty, classic Cep (Boletus edulis). They’re called King Boletes on the continent, and they taste magnificent. This one did both of us for breakfast. To finish the week, I’ve just come back from a bike ride. I had no intention of foraging so didn’t take a bag. Instead I ate all the big juicy wild cherries there and then (pig). But when I saw the chanterelles in the wood…. well, did you know you can stuff the sleeves of a cardigan full of fungi, tie it round your waist and get them home in perfect condition? Good timing, I was seriously thinking of buying some mushrooms.