Foraged Food Friday: Crab apples

In the field behind our house there's a crab apple tree that was ever so pretty in the spring.

Pretty spring-time blossom

Now it's laden with fruit and as I sit on the terrace with my cup of tea, I can hear little 'plops' as the fruit falls to the ground. I couldn't just ignore it, could I?

Isn't this a cute little basket? Ian rescued it from the tip for me.

Crab apples are small, very sharp tasting, and have rather manky looking skin. However, they're also high in pectin, which means they make excellent jellies. A jelly is distinct from a jam in having all the fruit strained out, which means there's no need to peel the tiny apples or remove the pips. I've made several different kinds; with blackberries, rowan berries, herbs (sage and rosemary, separately) and some plain, because I ran out of ideas. All are good, but they're the kind of thing I fancy occasionally, rather than wanting a lot of, so I scrounged some tiny jam jars from the local hotel and now have lots of little pots of apple jellies. I also have some bigger pots, because if you're using tiny jars, you need an awful lot of them!

Also harvesting this week
Dulse
Gutweed
Caragheen
Common yellow brittlegills
Nettles
Leek (first one of the season!)
Parsnip (ditto!)
Broad beans (just a few - mine don't set seed very well. I may try a different variety next year)
Runner beans
Bay leaves

Also eating
Courgette and mint soup (from freezer)
Peas (also from freezer. That was the last of this year's crop)
Potatoes
Damson jam mixed with...
Blackberry vinegar
Fairy ring champignon (dried. Used to make stock)
Kelp (dried. Used in stock with dried mushrooms, bay leaves and leek top)

Also drinking
Blackberry wine
Blackcurrant wine (both last year's, both now finished)
Blackberry and apple cordial
Bay herb ale
Heather ale

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Hazelnuts

The time to gather hazelnuts is when they're just ripe, before the squirrels get to them. Unfortunately, such a time is mythical, as the squirrels get going well before the nuts are ripe.

Hazelnuts (Corylus avellana), still green

It's been windy recently, so many nuts are on the ground already, together with the broken shells that indicate the squirrels have been active. This year, in order to get any nuts at all, I'm in there with the squirrels, gathering the unripe nuts. They're small, white and moist, but delicious nonetheless. Some I ate as they were, some I crushed and added to biscuits. It would be nice one day to gather some ripe hazelnuts but in the meantime, these are pretty good.

Also harvesting
Vetch
Sorrel
Cep
Greencracked brittlegill
Common yellow brittlegill
Chanterelles
Runner beans
Potatoes - the rest of the harvest
Crab apples (mostly windfalls, for jellies)
Rowan berries (used in both jelly and for wine)
Blackberries (in jelly and cordial)

Also drinking
Rhubarb cordial
Elderflower champagne - last bottle, to accompany wild mushroom risotto. An appropriate way to mark the transition from summer to autumn.

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Foraged Food Friday: Hogweed seeds

I did write this yesterday, but technology didn't behave as expected and I lost it, so here goes the second attempt. I have Mark at Galloway Wild Foods to thank for this one. I hadn't even thought about the possibility of finding spices in the wild but he knows of lots, including hogweed seeds.

It seems that the only photo I've got has the seed head inside a paper bag, which isn't terribly helpful. The seed head looks much like any other umbellifer seed head, so you have to check the leaves to make sure you've got the right one. Also check the seeds aren't seven foot up in the air, as that would be giant hogweed, which is best avoided.

I picked a couple of seed heads a few weeks ago, added some to pickles and drinks - I'll tell you later - and dried the rest. This week, I decided to use some as flavouring in biscuits. That required grinding them to a powder first, which was more difficult than I anticipated, as my wooden pestle and mortar didn't touch them. I have a spare set of salt and pepper mills, so my next attempt was to try using one of those. This wasn't terribly successful either, as most of the seeds - that is, the little round, papery disks that the seeds are attached to - either didn't engage with the grinding teeth at all, or slipped straight between them. The next step was to try chopping the seed disks first before putting them in the mill, which task got diverted by the discovery of tiny caterpillars living in some of the disks. I then checked each disk individually for caterpillar occupancy before returning to the task of chopping them. Thankfully, once chopped, the seeds did get caught by the grinding gears and I was able to produce a teaspoonful or so of ground hogweed seeds (there are plenty more in the mill).

Having prepared my spice, I got to work on the biscuits. I'm never much of a one for recipes, and this was very much a case of adding things to the bowl and mixing until the result looked like biscuit dough. A key ingredient was stewed rhubarb, of which I had a pot in the fridge left over from making cordial, and it needed using up.

A word of advice here: Don't use stewed rhubarb in biscuits. It can be good in cakes - I've tried - but it's just too wet for biscuits. I may have been a little stingy with the butter, too, as there wasn't much left in the dish and I couldn't be bothered to work the cold butter straight from the fridge. The result of this excess water (in the rhubarb) and insufficient fat was very hard biscuits. They were tasty, but required a strength of teeth and jaw that food doesn't usually call for.

Good biscuits for dunking

I may not be trying rhubarb in biscuits again, but I'll definitely be using ground hogweed seed (and whole, whenever I can get away with it). The flavour's difficult to describe - I'd say bitter orange and Mark also has, ginger, liquorice and burned cedar. It's a warming, Christmassy kind of a flavour. I'm sure I'll be using more of this over the coming months.

Edit: I managed to offload the rock-hard biscuits on our pub philosophy group (after 'hogweed' was misheard as 'Hogwarts' it was suggested that these biscuits should be called Philosophers' stones) and baked another batch. This time I used an actual recipe for simple, vanilla biscuits and substituted the spice for the vanilla. They're very nice, but the distinctive spicy flavour isn't evident. They're not as plain as they would be if I just left the vanilla out (I know, because I've done this by mistake in the past), it's just not obvious what the flavouring is. That was with one teaspoon of spice to eight ounces of flour. I guess two or three teaspoonfuls would be necessary if you wanted spicy biscuits.

Also harvesting this week:
Runner beans
Snowy waxcap mushrooms
Greencracked brittlegill mushrooms

Also eating:
Potatoes
Lacto fermented courgettes

Also drinking
Bay herb ale
Dandelion and honeysuckle ale

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Potato harvest part one

I've written more about wild foods than cultivated ones this year, but the garden has been ticking over. In spite of an encouraging start, my seed-grown potatoes came to nothing, sadly. The young plants just weren't tough enough at the time I planted them out and either died in the cold, dry weather or got eaten by slugs. It was probably slugs - they're usually to blame.

However, my conventional tuber-grown crop has done very well. I've been harvesting them for some time, and noticed last week that some of the leaves are yellowing, meaning there's no point leaving them in the ground any longer as they've done all the growing they're going to do this year. Time to dig!

I tried a few different varieties this year, so I have...

King Edwards - a reliable old favourite

I think these are Charlottes...

... and these Sharpes Express, but they might be the other way round

I've left most of the Desiree, but dug up a few by mistake...

... and a few more

The rest of the Desiree plants are still looking green and healthy, so I'll leave them to grow a little longer before digging those up. Most of the spuds are going into storage the traditional way (I even found the sacks!) but I used up a jar of tallow to make...

Chips!

Three trays of chips are as many as I can make at one time, because that's how many trays I have. I actually made five trays-full altogether, and these are now in the freezer.

Foraged Food Friday: Speedwell

I'll take a break from mushrooms this week, though I did find a huge cep this evening, which I ate for my dinner. I also had a very successful foraging trip last Sunday, but as all the things I gathered are being preserved one way or another, I'll tell you about those another time. This week I'm returning to the easiest source of foraged foods: Garden weeds.

I've always loved the pretty little blue flowers of speedwell, so I'm quite happy that it grows in my garden. I transplanted several pieces to my terrace, and it's doing well there.

Pretty little blue flowers with white centres

Some gardeners try to get rid of this, but I'd be quite happy to have a lawn of it.

There are several varieties of speedwell, but the most familiar (to me, at least) is this one, the Germander Speedwell. As well as the flowers, it can be distinguished by the two lines of hairs running up the stems (and other features - you can look them up if you're interested).

Hairy stem of Germander Speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys)

As well as being a pretty ground-cover plant it is, of course, edible. At least, the leaves make quite a good tea. It's mostly regarded for its medicinal value - I learnt last year that it seems to effective at shifting a chesty cough. I'd forgotten until I looked up that post just now that I drank the tea with honey last year. Today I had some neat and it was OK, but probably would have been nicer with honey.

Also harvesting this week
Sepia bolete mushroom (probably best avoided in future)
Cep mushroom
Elderberries (for wine)
Blackberries (for wine)
Hops (drying, for future brewing experiments)
Golden plums - just a few, but they got buried under elderberries and played with by Pebble, so they weren't much good after that
Sloes (unripe, for an experiment with brine and vinegar. Apparently they'll do a passable imitation of olives. Distressingly, these sloes were too far from home to go back when they're ripe - there were loads of them!)
Potatoes
Runner beans
Broad beans
Tomatoes - just a couple, but they're coming!
Vetch
Oregano
Basil

Also eating
Lacto-fermented courgettes

Also drinking
Blackcurrant wine (still last year's)
Elderflower champagne (this year's, and almost finished)

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Lacto-fermented courgettes: An update

A couple of weeks ago, I told you about my first attempts at lacto-fermentation, with a promise to tell you more in a few months. Well, um, it's not a few months yet, but here's an update anyway.

Both jars of veg bubbled away happily, with the courgettes being particularly vigorous. As the bubbles formed, of course they headed for the surface, and if there happened to be a piece of veg in the way, they tried to take that with them. Thus, veg that had been under the surface to start with headed out into fresh air. This is a common problem, and I'd read many suggested solutions for weighting the veg down, from clean rocks to smaller jars to bags of water. The only idea I could see that would fit through the neck of the jar and still hold down the veg at the edges was the plastic bag of water (or marbles), and I'm not terribly keen on leaving plastic in contact with the food for a long time.*

Without a weight, other alternatives include pushing the veg back down into the water from time to time, or leaving it well alone and relying on the carbon dioxide (formed by the fermentation) to exclude oxygen at the surface. With a simple, loosely-closed lid arrangement, I didn't have much confidence in the carbon dioxide staying put** so I went for the pushing-down option, aware that every time I did it I risked contaminating my ferment. The real reason was that I couldn't leave it alone!

Sure enough, a white film formed on the surface:

Beginnings of mould on the surface of fermented courgettes

People who use this basic method of fermentation are usually quite happy to scoop the mould off the top before taking out their pickled vegetables. I can go along with this - it's my usual approach to mould, in any case. I was a little concerned about the white substance appearing lower down in the jar, though. Surely mould couldn't be growing there?

Quite a lot of white stuff in there

Searching for information on this, I eventually found the Wild Fermentation forum (tip: Include Forum in your search terms if you have a question like this) which assured me (and the questioner there) that this is fine - in fact it's a good sign. That white stuff is the bacteria we want in there (well, dead ones, anyway). So that's OK then.

I first tasted the courgettes at about three days after starting and they were definitely tangy, but a bit odd. Since I now have signs of mould, I've decided to eat up my courgettes (scooping off the white film every time) rather than leave the mould to grow. Now, at two weeks, the flavour is delicious, bit like pickled gherkins (I think - it's a long time since I tried any). The texture is good, too - quite firm, with a bit of a crunch. I'd read about this, but it was still surprising, especially as courgettes are a soft vegetable, and I'd squished them when I put them in the jar.

In spite of the mould, this is definitely a success. I'd like to persevere with this - now I just need a surplus of veg.

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* I'm not paranoid about plastic and food, but I do bear in mind that some plastics degrade over time and that food-grade plastics are tested for safety in certain situations. For a plastic bag, this might or might not include sitting in a salty, acidic environment for several months. I don't know, so I'm wary. On the other hand, any potential harm caused by the plastic might be less bad than potential harm caused by the mould that it would have prevented. Again, I don't know.

** But I did come across instructions for improving on this arrangement, which I plan to try, so I'll tell you about that when I've done it.

Foraged Food Friday: Greencracked Brittlegill mushrooms

I was going to tell you about blusher mushrooms this week (disappointing, but I think that was a result of the way I cooked them) but then I found these:

Mushrooms spotted in a field

They had a grey-green dusting that gave the odd impression that the mushroom itself had gone mouldy.

A closer view

Not put off by the mouldy appearance, I picked one and took it home to look it up. I'm thoroughly enjoying learning about all these new mushrooms, both edible and poisonous. It's fun just acquiring new knowledge. Also, if these are edible... they're big and there are lots of them!

Thanks to my friend Gill for alerting me to the ludicrously good deal available from the Book People, I am now in possession of ten River Cottage Handbooks, including one on mushrooms. This is an excellent book to learn from, with a limited selection so you don't get overwhelmed, but extensive enough to include most of the things I've tried looking up so far, including this one. There's plenty of helpful general advice, including the point that since mushrooms are essentially fruit, you don't harm the parent by picking them, especially as they've almost certainly dropped their spores by the time you see them. If you leave some, it's for the benefit of other animals (including humans), not the mushroom itself.

Back to today's find: It turns out that the unappetizing green dusting is a key identifying feature, as there are very few green mushrooms. I found my mushroom in the book, then followed the author's advice and consulted a few other (online) sources as well. Having identified this as the edible greencracked brittlegill, I headed out again to harvest them. Some hid...

... but I hunted them down.

A basket of Greencracked brittlegills (Russula virescens)

What a haul! I could hardly believe my luck at finding all of these, especially as it's not a common mushroom. These can be eaten raw, but I generally prefer my mushrooms cooked, so I fried one to see what it was like.

Looking a lot tastier, and less green.

No great claims are made for the flavour of this mushroom, and it was indeed very mild. In fact, it mostly tasted of the butter I cooked it in. This is fine. Lack of strong flavour makes it much easier to sneak it into things without Ian noticing. This evening, several went into a pie filling - undetected as far as I know - padding out some leftover bolognaise sauce. Excellent - free food!

The rest of the haul are sliced and drying on the rack. Hopefully they'll keep well for future use.

Also harvesting this week
Fairy ring champignon (drying)
Blusher mushrooms
Runner beans
French beans
Rhubarb (not mine), made into cordial
Rosemary
Oregano
Basil
Thyme
Sage

Also eating
Potatoes (can't remember when I dug these up - could have been a week ago)
Courgette puree (from freezer)
Crab apple and rosemary jelly

Also drinking
Elderflower champagne
Heather ale
Dandelion and honeysuckle ale
Sloe wine

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

On the rack

Currently drying, I have...

At the top, bilberries. These are too small for even the smaller mesh shelves at the bottom, so I made a screen from a picture frame and what I thought was net curtain fabric. It wasn't, it was something stretchy, which made the job somewhat more difficult, but I got there in the end. I picked the bilberries nine days ago, and they're drying nicely.

In the paper bag on the next shelf, I have a couple of hogweed seedheads.

On the third shelf, I have small mushrooms. I had to move the bilberries up so I could use the finer mesh shelf. These are fairy ring champignon, which I picked today. Apparently they dry and rehydrate very well. Some specimens are younger and paler than others.

The bottom shelf is mostly full of laundry equipment. This is meant for drying woolly jersies so they don't get out of shape, but is currently occupied with black currants. These have been there for ages (I hadn't made the picture-frame screen when I picked the currants) and are now nicely dried.

Under and around the net thing, I have another paper bag with umbellifer seeds in; in this case parsnip seeds. I must remember which way round these two are, because I don't particularly want to grow hogweed in my garden. I also have a few pea seeds and potato fruit. I didn't have much luck growing potatoes from seed this year (the slugs ate all the seedlings when I planted them out) but I might give it another go next year.

Foraged Food Friday: Field mushrooms

On the same foraging expedition that I wrote about last week, I spotted a couple of white disks in a field.

Are those what I think they are?

Closer inspection, including flipping the caps over and poking the stem to check it didn't turn yellow on bruising...

Field mushroom (Agaricus campestris) in a field

... confirmed my initial suspicion that these were indeed field mushrooms. Even better, they're so close to home that I took them back to put in the fridge (leaving a couple of others intact in the field) before setting out on my walk again. This is the first mushroom I learnt to identify and I thought it was the same as the commonly cultivated one, but Wikipedia tells me that it's just closely related. Either way, it's very similar and tastes much the same, only fresher.

Having found these, I returned a couple of days later in the hope that more might have come up. Sure enough, I found another two, of which I picked one to use as pizza topping (with baby courgettes. That was the best pizza I've had in ages!) Two days later again, there was another. There might not be a huge quantity here, but it's so close to home that it's worth popping over there just to check whether there's another one or two - always being careful not to over-pick, of course. What a find!

Also harvesting this week
Courgettes (fruit and flowers)
Broad beans
French beans
Hogweed seeds (some of which are drying, others have gone into various preserves)
Fairy ring champignon (you remember me saying I was going to take mushrooms slowly, study carefully, and learn one at a time? I may have got slightly carried away...)

Also eating
Kelp

Also drinking
Elderflower champagne
Sloe wine

Foraged food challenge summary page here.

Experiments with lacto-fermentation

I'm fascinated by traditional methods of food preservation, from pre-freezer days. I grew up thinking* that winter food was all dried, or heavily salted, or both, and pretty grim in any case. As I've learnt more, I've come to appreciate that it probably wasn't grim at all, and in some cases preservation actually enhances food. Alcohol is an obvious, if debatable, example, and there's another kind of fermentation that's been marginal for many years, but may now be making a comeback.

In the same way that yeast converts sugars into alcohol, lactobacilli bacteria convert sugars into lactic acid, which then preserves the food. After an era of, Kill all the microbes! we're now more familiar with the idea that some bacteria are friendly and are increasingly eating foods such as live yoghurt and lacto-fermented live pickles. Indeed, many health claims are made for these foods. I can't be bothered to investigate these claims thoroughly, but even if these pickles are no better for us than vinegar-based pickles I still think they're worth making. After all, if I can get the acid from fermentation then I don't have to buy it!

In spite of my interest in this topic, I've never had much call to try it before now, as I've never managed to grow anything resembling a glut of vegetables. This year, though, I have my neighbour's courgettes at the same time as French beans and broad beans in my own garden. I don't think either courgettes or French beans are particularly good frozen, so I decided to try fermenting some of each of them, leaving the broad beans to eat fresh. This gave me the perfect excuse to buy a couple of Kilner jars that I happened to spot in the supermarket.

I won't go into detail - you can find plenty of information online if you look for it - but I found this article helpful. In particular, the information about using blackcurrant leaves as the inoculant - the way of introducing the right bacteria - was valuable. I have blackcurrant leaves! I kept my recipes simple, with fairly small quantities of salt - probably a heaped teaspoonful per half-litre jar - and minimal spices. For the courgettes I added hogweed seeds (recently discovered, and hence my current favourite spice) whilst the beans got just salt and blackcurrant leaves. I sprinkled salt and pressed the veg down in the jars as I filled them, which released almost enough liquid to cover the veg. There were still bits sticking out of the top, so I topped up with a little tap water (ignoring advice about avoiding chlorinated water. I've just dissolved sodium chloride in it, for goodness sake! I'm sure a little more chlorine won't hurt.)

Jars of fermenting veg

I did the courgettes on one day and the beans on the next. As you can see in the photo, there were already bubbles rising in the courgette jar by the time I had the beans packed. Fermentation is happening! They'll sit in my kitchen for a few days with the lids on loosely (to let the gas escape) before going down to the cooler, darker store room. I'm not sure how long I'll need to leave the lids loose - I think I'll be monitoring closely for some time. I understand that these can be eaten in a few days, but that the flavour continues to develop for several months after that. I think I'll leave them a while - the point is, after all, to preserve veg while there's plenty available - and let you know when my patience (or fresh veg) runs out. In the meantime, aren't they pretty?

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* That strikes me as a curious fact about my childhood. How many people grow up with notions about how food was preserved in the olden days?

Translations for Americans: Courgettes = Zucchini, Broad beans = Fava beans, Kilner jars = Mason jars. At least two of these are probably obvious from the photos.