Playing with plant fibre

I enjoy spinning and live in an area full of sheep. I could easily get hold of a fleece, so what's stopping me? Well, fleeces don't come off the sheep ready to spin, they need washing and carding first. I don't have the tools for carding, which is a fairly major obstacle, but the washing puts me off almost as much.

Wet wool is heavy and hard work to handle, and there's a big risk of felting while washing. Then I'd have to dry it afterwards, which in this climate is a serious challenge. All in all, I'm not greatly enthused about the prospect of preparing fleece for spinning.

On the other hand, there are fibres around that look a lot more attractive.

Rosebay willowherb has spectacular flowers and spreads its seeds on the wind with little downy parachutes. As the seed pods open in the sun, bundles of fluff are released.

It's this fluff that attracts me. It's so beautiful! By way of experiment, I gathered a few pods full of fluff. It was so soft that I couldn't even feel it on my hands.

It wasn't too difficult to pick the pieces of pod out of the fibre, apart from the gravity-defying property of the little parachutes. I'd be trying to put fluff down in a pile, and little bits of it would detach themselves and float up past my face.

After a while, though, I managed to get a bundle of fluff without bits of seed pod stuck in it, though I didn't manage to remove all the seeds.

Ideally, at this point, I'd card the fluff, which would not only line up all the fibres in the same direction, but hopefully also comb out the remaining seeds. As I said above, I don't have carders, but I found that by pulling the bundle apart with my fingers, the fibres aligned themselves quite nicely.

The big question, of course, is whether it would be possible to spin this fibre? One critical factor is staple length, i.e. the length of individual fibres. I tried to look up the typical staple length of wool, for comparison, but it turns out that this question is rather like, How long is a piece of string? Anyway, it's upwards of two inches (50 mm).

A more sensible comparison, perhaps, is cotton, as that also comes from seed heads. There is considerable variation here, too, but it seems to range from about half an inch to about one and a half inches (13-38 mm). I measured a little clump of fibres, and it was about half an inch long. That's right at the bottom end of the range for cotton, which is considered poor quality, but perhaps it's just about long enough to be feasible.

Having concluded that theoretically, it should be possible (just) to spin this, I decided to try a bit. Not with the wheel, as I'd need a larger quantity for that. I just teased out a bit and twisted it with my fingers to see whether I could persuade it to form a thread.

Yes. Yes, I could get a thread, of sorts. It's not at all strong, but then it is very fine. I don't think I'd be aiming for such a fine thread, so with more fibres running together, hopefully it would be a bit stronger. It would probably be better if I had the right tools, too.

This brings me back to the question of carders, which is a bit of a sticking point as they're expensive. Like, fifty quid expensive. That feels like a lot of money for something that might not work. Furthermore, not all carders are alike. The ones for cotton are much finer (more teeth per inch) than the ones for wool. If my daft idea of spinning willowherb fibre didn't work out, I'd have an expensive set of carders and no use for them. I'm not sure what to do now: Do I risk the money on something that may turn out to be useless?

A good year for samphire

It's interesting looking back to see that I wasn't that taken with pickled samphire the first time I tried it. That was before I discovered this combination:

A biscuit* topped with mascarpone cheese and pickled samphire

This is divine! With samphire thus elevated to the status of a delicacy, I consider it well worth the effort of gathering it.

There's also vinegar to consider. Last year I attempted to make vinegar. There's a brief note of the result hidden away in this post. Having looked at the relative prices of decent vinegar and pickling vinegar I bought the cheap stuff. It was pretty dreadful but even with that, pickled samphire was good. This year I have kombucha, which will make vinegar from sugar if left alone for long enough. I fed it some of the too-sweet oak leaf wine and now I have some pretty awesome (and very strong) vinegar.

Last Saturday I was in town around lunch time, so checked the tide times and as luck would have it, low tide was about 1pm, so I went up to the estuary (town is kind-of on the way) to check out the samphire.

I could see it - at least I thought I could, as soon as I parked the car.

That bright green strip across the sand was - I was fairly sure - marsh samphire

Closer inspection confirmed this.

Yep, definitely samphire.

I haven't seen such big plants before - these are fantastic. I think maybe I've been later in the season in previous years, after sheep have been allowed to graze here. I spent an hour and a half foraging, and collected rather more than I usually do in in two or more hours. After that, I walked down to the beach.

That's really not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Of course, once I got all that samphire home, I had to process it. That means carefully picking it over, rinsing off the sand and any seaweed and small shellfish that I'd missed when picking, and pinching off only the tenderest pieces for pickling, leaving the parts that have a woody core. It took ages, but it's worth it.

A few notes on pickling: For a crisper result, I now know to use cold vinegar. The tannin from the oak leaves should also help with crispness. However, I did heat the vinegar first to kill it. I want an inert pickle, not one that's going to eat its way through the samphire. I also mixed the vinegar with some beer that had been flavoured with rosebay willowherb tips. The vinegar was so strong that it could do with diluting a bit, and this beer adds a complementary flavour. During the heating phase, I infused some garlic mustard seeds, too. Then while I was making a cup of tea and looking at a pan of hot pickling liquid, I poured milk into the pan. Don't do that.

The best thing to do at that point was, I decided, to leave the kitchen and drink my tea. By the time I came back, the milk had separated somewhat, so I strained out the curds, left it to settle, carefully poured off the clearer liquid... repeated. There's a slight cloudiness in the bottom of my jar of samphire, and no doubt there's some whey in the pickling liquid. In that much vinegar I doubt it'll have any impact, but I repeat, I don't recommend doing that. Even so, pickled samphire is still worth it.

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*It's a digestive biscuit, just for Cat ;-)

A walk in the woods

The sun was shining this morning, so I abandoned the housework, ignored Ian's sensible advice to get some firewood in before the forecast rain this afternoon, and drove out to some nearby woodlands. These are mostly coniferous plantations, but there's an area of beech trees where I've found oyster mushrooms before, and I was hoping I might find some today.

As well as recent logging, some trees have blown down at the road edge of the woodland. Not all of them actually fell over.

The ones that were down have been tidied up, and I see that they've cut one of the stumps into a seat.

The view from this seat isn't great at the moment, but I'm sure it will be in time.

Walking through the conifers, I catch my first glimpse of the beech trees.

Now to start looking for oyster mushrooms, and any others I can identify. These might have been oysters once, but I don't fancy them now.

These are not oysters...

... which is fine, because they're all the way up there.

This is more like it!

They're not in the first flush of youth, and are a little nibbled round the edges, but they'll do nicely.

After this, my finds were of photogenic, rather than of culinary value, and no, I don't know what most of them are.

First forage of the year

I have a craving for fresh greens, as often happens around this time of year, so I went out and picked a few:

Greens, not all of them wild.

As well as the baby leek (in two parts because it broke when I tried to pull it up), I have sorrel, celandine leaves and hairy bittercress. I'll make them into some kind of sauce to go with root vegetables, which I'll probably mash up into potato cake-type things. Hearty winter food.

Foraging vs. gardening, and our place in nature

A discussion on a facebook foraging group the other day has prompted me to write about something that I've been thinking about for some time, now. The discussion started with,

Not to open a can of worms as it were, but I thought this site was to help promote the sustainable collecting of wild produce, as well as edible plant identification. By sustainable I mean taking enough for us humans to enjoy as a treat but leaving enough for wildlife to eat as an essential to survive winter. Some of the posts though show such large quantities being collected which will quite possibly impact on wildlife survival, including birds, squirrels, mice, voles etc. Do we humans always have to be greedy at the expense of other creatures?

and towards the end included suggestions about heating up the can of worms on a bonfire, but being sure to leave some worms in the can for the blackbirds, and whether it's best for a blackbird to learn to use a can opener, or simply train a human to do it as and when required.

Chestnuts. Should I leave these for the woodland animals?

While I'm all for respecting and supporting wildlife, I have several problems with this position (the original post, not teaching blackbirds to use can openers). Firstly, while this point of view is common amongst foragers, it's very rare amongst gardeners. It may just be that there are two groups of people with very different standards, but I suspect that the concept of ownership has a lot to do with it. In my garden, where I have toiled and nurtured, the plants are mine and I'm entitled to harvest all of them, with no regard to what the wildlife might want. Indeed, gardeners go to great lengths to protect their crops from being eaten by other animals, and it's very rare to hear any disapproval of this behaviour.

Squash. How about these? Should I have left these too?

It's not just the inconsistency that bothers me; this highlights what the alternative to foraging is. Gardening is akin to farming: Deliberate cultivation of crops on land designated as being for that purpose. One viewpoint expressed in the facebook debate was that we don't need to forage if we can afford to buy our food from shops, implying that this is the default, neutral position.

Let's think about that, shall we? Food bought from shops is farmed, almost universally. There's a spectrum of farming practices, but they all involve identifying pieces of land as farmland and making efforts to keep wildlife from eating the crops on that land. People may debate the methods used, but does anyone say to a farmer, You must leave those caterpillars alone, they have as much right to the cabbages as you do!? Actually, it's possible that some people might say this, but I think you'll agree that this is an extreme point of view. It's generally accepted that farming involves keeping as much of the crop as possible for humans, not caterpillars.

If the default, neutral position involves, at the very least, displacing wildlife, what then of foraging? Taking wild food certainly deprives other animals of it, but otherwise doesn't disturb them much, unlike farming. Foraging, then, surely has a lower impact on wildlife than farming.

The next question has to be whether foraged food supplements or replaces farmed food. In other words, do we eat just the same amount of farmed food when we forage, or do we eat less? The answer to this is not straightforward. One possibility is all the food that is necessary for survival and good nutrition comes from farmed or home-grown sources. In this scenario, any foraged food is additional to this, treats and luxuries that we simply wouldn't have if we didn't forage.

Another possibility is that when we forage, we reduce the amount of food we eat from other sources. Even if the type of food we forage ends up as luxuries, for example sloe gin, we would have bought some equivalent luxury, perhaps another liqueur, if we didn't have the foraged food. This second possibility also covers cases where foraged food replaces more essential food items, such as foraged nettles or fat hen substituting for spinach or spring greens.

If the first possibility was mainly the true situation, then foraging really would be an additional impact on wildlife. There would be a simple choice between taking wild food and not taking it. However, I think the second possibility is much more likely to be true. We do not add to our diet with foraged food, we replace some of the farmed food with wild.

The person who started the recent debate, who is far from alone in this view, considers wild food to be treats for humans, but essential for wild animals. Even for those whose foraged food is only sloe gin or blackberry and apple crumble, which are certainly treats, I think this misses the point if - as I suspect is usually the case - these treats are substitutes for alternative treats. Even with treats, foraging is an alternative to farming, not additional to it.

What really bugs me about this point of view, though, was expressed by another member of the facebook discussion. It reflects a view of human beings as separate from the natural world. The bounties nature world are not for us, they are for wild animals. We have other sources of food, other than what we might forage.

This treats the farms where our food is grown as being apart from nature; as having no impact on it. Of course, people who express this view are not thinking about the farms, but that's part of the problem. When you think about it, farmland obviously has a huge impact on wildlife. Everything we do interacts with nature, because we are part of nature. Just like all the other wild animals, we have to eat, and that food has to grow somewhere.

From the point of view of being one animal amongst many, and needing to feed myself as much as any other animal does, I feel that I have as much right to nature's bounty as the next animal, especially when the next animal happens to be a slug.

One mushroom - a cep, I believe - that I didn't get to first.

Mushroom season has started!

I know that the serious mushroom hunters find 'shrooms all year round, and many are lucky enough to find the spring varieties - St George's mushroom, dryad's saddle, morels - but I've yet to find any of those (apart from the one I found growing in the store room), so mushroom season for me starts late summer/early autumn. From a couple of online groups, I knew that they're coming up early this year, so I've been on the lookout for a week or so. Yesterday, George came out for a look with me, and...

George, not entirely convinced that these mushrooms are interesting

... the greencracked brittlegills are up! I see from a previous post that these were up in late August a couple of years ago, so they really are early this year.

It's just possible to see the green dusting on the side of the mushroom in this picture. I tried to point it out to George, but he wasn't paying attention.

These are very mild tasting mushrooms. Fried in butter, they're very nice; they taste of butter. They're useful for padding out stews and suchlike, but there's a limit to how much almost-tasteless mushroom I have a use for, and they do come up in huge quantities. However, I had an idea.

I had great success pickling oyster mushrooms last year, following John Wright's instructions. I added some herbs - rosemary and bay - and the result was delicious. I wondered whether the very mild brittlegills might take on some herbal flavours with similar results.

The procedure starts with cleaning, chopping, and salting the mushrooms.

Salting the mushrooms

The purpose of this is to draw out some of the moisture. As it happens, this variety is very dry, so almost no moisture came off, so I'm not sure this part was really necessary, but I didn't feel like cutting corners this time. I duly salted, left for a couple of hours, drained off the non-existent liquid, salted and left again, drained (there was a little this time) again, before rinsing quickly to wash off the salt.

The next stage is to boil the mushrooms for a couple of minutes in vinegar, then leave them in the vinegar for a couple more hours. After this they can be bottled, but first I rolled them in chopped herbs - wild garlic (previously frozen in oil), lemon balm and thyme - before putting them in the jar and covering in olive oil. John Wright doesn't include the next step, but I did heat the jar in a cool oven (everything was pretty warm to start with) so that it would form a vacuum to seal it.

One jar of pickled brittlegills, infusing in herby oil

I'll leave these a while for the flavour of the herbs to infuse, then let you know how they turn out. As a bonus, the vinegar is converted into a delicious stock* as it has swapped some of its acidity for mushroom flavour. Similarly, when the pickled mushrooms are gone, the oil has taken on mushroom and herbal flavours.

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* I'm not sure that's quite the right word, but it's a savoury liquid that's a good basis for sauces

More uses for ground elder

I recently learned that the larger, tougher leaves of ground elder can be good to eat if you cook them the right way, and that some people consider the stalk to be the useful part.

I wrote a blog post about it for Selfsufficientish.com.

We have been eating a lot of ground elder recently.

Signs of spring

All over the blogosphere, there are signs of spring. From snowdrops and crocuses, little white dots and fluffy cuteness, to wetter snow and daylight saving time. I guess you take what you can get if you live in Denver! Here, I have beer:

Clear signs of fermentation going on there

To be precise, I don't even have beer yet, I have fermenting wort, but it will be beer before too long. You may be wondering why this counts as a sign of spring. It's not even my first beer of the year. That may be true, but it's the first batch of heather ale of the year, made with the early flowers and new growth of the heather in my garden.

Flowering heather

I'm experimenting with a different yeast this time, so I'm not sure whether it will end up the same as last year's or not. Of course, I hope it'll be better but it might be worse - I'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the increased daylight, flowers, and occasional sunshine.

Mouli review

I spend quite a lot of my time pushing stewed fruit through a sieve, especially at this time of year, when there's so much fruit in the hedgerows. It's very hard work and I've broken several sieves in the process, so as the most recent victim parted company from its handle, I wondered whether it might be time to invest in something that's actually designed for the job of pureeing fruit whilst leaving skin and stones behind.

Discussion on the selfsufficientish forum had alerted me to two possible options, a mouli and a passata maker, originating in France and Italy respectively, the latter being designed for processing tomatoes. I sought advice on which would be best, and found that our local cookshop had a reasonably priced mouli for sale. I discussed it with the shopkeeper, and neither of us thought the screen fine enough to sieve out blackberry pips, so I went back to the forum to ask and, reassured, returned and bought the mouli. I do love that shop - I wish I could afford to buy kitchen equipment for often, but perhaps it's just as well I can't, for the sake of my cupboard space.

Anyway, here's the new gadget:

Mouli, in pieces

It comes apart into three pieces, or five if you count the spare screens with different sized holes. There's a bowl part into which the to-be-pureed food goes. In the bottom of this is a disk/screen with holes in, and this is held in place by a third piece, which fits into the bowl and includes a spring to hold the screen down, a blade (not sharp) to push the food against the screen, and a handle to operate it. This might be clearer if you see it in action:

Stewed damsons in the mouli. I chose the medium screen for this.

One feature of this particular mouli is that it doesn't have legs on the bottom for standing it over a bowl, just hooks at the top. This means that if fitted over a bowl, there isn't much room for the puree to come out at the bottom. Luckily, it fits very nicely over a ten litre bucket, though it is a little difficult to find a comfortable working height.

My first attempt was stewed damsons, as shown in the picture above. The stones are relatively large, which I find difficult to deal with in a sieve. Recipes often advise taking the stones out before pushing it through a sieve, but that takes ages. So how did the mouli handle it? Brilliantly! This is definitely the right tool for the job. It's still a manual tool, so it's not effortless, but it's a lot easier than the sieve, and it does the job very effectively. I found that the handle needs turning in both directions; clockwise to push the mush against the screen, then anticlockwise to lift it away again. It's also necessary to use a spoon to push stuff down to the bottom, especially as it gets drier.

My next attempt was mashed potato, as I've heard people say how much nicer it is made with a mouli (I'm skeptical). Optimistically, I wondered whether I might be able to boil small potatoes with their skins on then have the mouli extract the skins as it mashes them. No, it doesn't. Oh well, it was worth a try. I also found that, for a meal-sized quantity, transferring the potato to a metal mouli, and then into another container, cooled it a lot. On the other hand, if you have a quantity of blighted potatoes that you want to mash in large quantities to freeze, it's just the thing.

Mouli'd potatoes, through the largest screen

For the third test, another batch of hedgerow fruit for fruit leather, this time crab apple and blackberry. Can a mouli really sieve out blackberry pips, even using the finest screen?

Fruit leather, drying on the rack in the conservatory

Yes. Yes, it can. At least, I haven't found a pip in the pulp I've sampled so far.

EDIT: Now the leather is dry, it's clear that a few pips got through, but I still think it's not bad.

A few blackberry pips got through

The only problem I've come up against is that this gadget processes such large quantities (the one I bought is big; smaller ones are available) that I don't have enough baking sheets to spread the pulp out on.

As you can probably tell, I'm very pleased with my new gadget. It takes more washing up than a sieve, but with just three parts it's not too bad, and it more than makes up for it in labour saved. It might even make it worthwhile to pick haws, as I'm curious to try hawthorn ketchup.

Mushroom season

Autumn arrived here last week. One day it was warm and sunny, the next there was a distinct chill in the air. We can't complain, because we've had a glorious summer, but it's a bit early, and it was very sudden.

I've always loved autumn, and now I have another reason to love it: Mushrooms! There's a field near our house where the occasional field mushroom can be found. Coming home with a couple of these last week, I got chatting to a neighbour, who told me where he used to pick field mushrooms in great quantities, about thirty years ago. A few days later, I set off in search and sure enough, found field mushrooms. Not vast quantities, but a reasonable haul. I ate quite a few fresh and dried the rest.

Field mushrooms on the drying rack.

They were drying pretty well on the rack in the conservatory, but then the weather changed. Surrounded by humid air, the dry mushrooms started absorbing moisture again. Luckily, this only lasted a couple of days before the sun came out again, but I didn't want to risk that happening again. Once they were nearly dry, I brought them in and finished them off in a cool oven, which only took a few minutes.

Look what I found the other day:

Cep

Isn't it a beauty? Over a couple of days I found four of these. One went on pizza (not the best way to appreciate its delicate flavour), two went into mushroom tarts that I took to a party, and one is drying.

This morning I went out again, and found all of these:

Basket of wild mushrooms

That's two more ceps, two greencracked brittlegills, two redcracked boletes, and three blushers. Not bad for twenty minutes' foraging. The ceps have joined the other one on the drying rack, and the rest I chopped and cooked with a few lentils, spring onions (I don't have any of the other kind at the moment), celery and a bay leaf. This should make a good mixture for padding out meat in stews or pie fillings. Of course, it would make a pretty good veggie stew in its own right, but my husband is not a veggie. Don't tell him I'm feeding him mushrooms, will you?

How to eat acorns

Acorns didn't make it into my foraging challenge last year, but they were something I'd been meaning to try. The trouble is, they have so much tannin in them that they're inedible raw. A typical guide to eating acorns calls for lots of soaking and drying to remove the tannins, and then further drying and grinding to make acorn flour, so I never got round to it.

Then this spring, while digging over the garden, I kept coming across sprouted acorns. I discarded a lot of these before I started to wonder whether sprouting might improve the flavour. I know that many seeds turn their starch into sugar when they sprout. I cautiously nibbled one and sure enough, it was sweet. Furthermore, the winter weather had done the job of all that soaking, and leached out most of the bitter tannins.

After that, I started looking out for sprouted acorns and collected them. Some had sprouted quite a lot.

I left them sitting on my kitchen counter for quite a while, so some of them dried out a fair bit, and those were pretty tough. I decided to boil them to soften the hard ones, and judging by the colour of the water I discarded, that removed some more of the tannins. I sliced them into a couscous salad, and they were really nice. Still a little on the chewy side, but that's no bad thing. I think those squirrels are onto something when they bury nuts - it's not just storage; it improves the flavour too.

Alexanders

I know I'm well overdue for a gardening post, but first I want to tell you about this foraged plant. In my foraging challenge last year, I tried and failed to find alexanders, though I did find the somewhat similar fennel instead. On Tuesday of this week, Ian and I went for a walk by the sea, from Aberaeron, which is a little further south than our closest bit of coast, at Aberystwyth. Whether the latitude makes a difference, or whether it's just where the plants happened to get established, I don't know, but alexanders grow in great abundance around Aberaeron.

Having had such trouble finding them last year, I couldn't resist picking a bunch, as they were there...

A bunch of flowers, also stems and leaves.

Having conveyed my booty home, I then had to ask myself, What do I do with an armful of alexanders? This is a strongly flavoured vegetable - tasting something like both fennel and celery - so simply eating all that as a side vegetable was a bit unlikely. Some form of preservation - possibly several forms - would be in order.

My first effort was crystallized (candied) stems, following a River Cottage recipe. This is a slow process in which the stems (first cooked to soften) are soaked in sugar solution that is gradually strengthened by pouring it off and boiling off some of the water once a day. After three days of this, the (very sticky) stems are taken out of the syrup and dried. I've put them on the drying rack in the conservatory, though unless we get another sunny day or two (it could happen!) I suspect I'll need to finish them off in a low oven. In the meantime, they're delicious, if very sticky.

I did clean and oil this grid before spreading syrupy things out on it.

Next, I wondered about a pickle. Specifically, I thought I might try a lacto fermentation. The blackcurrant bushes are covered in little leaves, so I picked a few of those to kick start the fermentation. I decided to use the flowers, then after I started, narrowed this to the tight flower buds that look a little like tiny cauliflower florets. I kept things simple and added only salt and blackcurrant leaves, then covered with water that I'd left standing for a bit to let the chlorine evaporate. I'm not at all convinced that's necessary, but it's no bother to fill a jug of water before I start filling the jar, rather than after. I had my doubts about whether this would work, but it had started bubbling by bed time. Blackcurrant leaves are obviously quite potent!

Sadly, the acid lime green is fading in the presence of actual acid

I tried one today and was surprised to find that the dominant flavour is not aniseed, but lactic acid. That not quite such an interesting pickle as I expected, but will probably be quite good. I'll give it a bit longer.

Next I made a drink from the leaves. I considered a liqueur recipe in the River Cottage book, but as I don't really drink liqueurs, passed on that one. I'd picked a handful of Japanese knotweed and wasn't sure what to do with that, either (apart from NOT putting it on the compost heap), so I chucked that and a load of leaves in a saucepan and boiled it until the knotweed was disintegrating, then strained and added sugar. It's not as strong as a cordial - it need 1:2 or 1:3 dilution with water, but it's a very pleasant soft drink.

I still had a big bowlful of leaves that were only slightly limp after sitting on the kitchen counter for three days. My next experiment was jam: I had some plain crab apple jelly that I don't find terribly interesting, so I thought I'd try adding some flavour. Using the syrup from the crystallized stems, I soaked some finely chopped leaves, also including a few sprigs of mint. Some hours later, I heated this up with the apple jelly then when it was all melted together, poured into jars. I didn't boil for long because the flavour of alexanders is much reduced by cooking. That was a mistake, and I had to do it again the next day. I now have a fairly subtly flavoured jelly, which is quite a lot more interesting than the apple jelly I started with.

Finally, I added chopped leaves to a white sauce that I had with fish for dinner this evening. That was disappointing - very bland. Either I should have used a lot more, or the cooking just destroyed all the flavour.

There you have it: Many uses for an armful of alexanders. I'm so glad I found some this year.