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Plants With Purpose |
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We decided to start recording what we forage from week to week (as far as time allows), so the foragers out there can have an idea what to be looking out for - and from our comments decide whether it was worth looking out for anyway! Mind you, we're not giving away any locations - you'll have to come on a workshop to find out that sort of thing! Wild Food Diary July/August 2008 July - First week July - Second Week July - Third Week ENTEROMORPHA INTESTINALIS On Iona, we found some wonderful flowers on the machair, but the only wild food was Crowberry, with black berries, and I couldn't remember if they were edible so we didn't. Apparently, they are - this month I seem to be getting to grips with all these odd "something-berry" plants. July - Week Four 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 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.
August - Weeks 1, 2 and 3. More chanterelles, more wild cherries. We think it's odd that the several fairly old cherries in a hedge line from which we gather the fruits all seem to produce fruits of varying sweetness and colour when ripe. One is almost black, another, barely red. All delicious, though. Any theories, anyone? One long walk on 10th produced in addition to a sack of chanterelles, Plums -and-Custard mushrooms (Tricholomopsis), Birch Boletes and larch Boletes, and tawny grisettes. The chanterelles from this trip we dried, by threading them onto cotton and hanging them as garlands in our warm shed. When they are nearly dry I will de-thread them and spread them on trays over the boiler to finish before putting them in tightly sealed jars for the winter. On the 11th, I macro-foraged! In that I went sea angling from Arbroath with friends, and caught 7 big mackerel. I hadn't been before and must admit the sea was choppy and a tad nauseous, but I got over it and would definately like to go again. As my friends were going on holiday the day after, I managed to "forage" (borrow? steal?) 5 of their fishies too to make a round dozen which I have cleaned, filleted and frozen, or eaten. The same day, Andrew brought home a bag of field mushrooms he'd found at work, which I turned into a delicious soup. Then we went on a week's holiday to Norfolk, and got to try out some wild foods on Andrew's unsuspecting (or suspecting?) family. At Holkham Beach we gathered samphire, oh how I love samphire and it especially nice after being exiled from this East Anglian delicacy for a couple of decades. Steamed for 15 minutes and tossed in butter, this unprepossessing-looking product of mudflats with its fleshy, salty stems is incomparable. We didn't gather any more, no-one seemed that enthused except us, but perhaps we shouldn't have inflicted the seaweed Sea Lettuce on them in the same meal. Filamentous pale green sheets you'd think wouldn't take much to cook, but in fact it was a bit chewy. Next time I would make more of a meal of it, with some flavouring, longer cooking, combined with mushrooms perhaps.... not really a side vegetable with roast pork. The apple sauce, though, was made with a combination of wilding apples from the hedgerow, "scrumped" eaters from an abandoned garden, and wild water mint, and it went very nicely. Likewise, we all enjoyed (I think that's the word) the mind-banditing sharpness of Sea Buckthorn berries growing on the dunes near Old Hunstanton, and Andrew brought the pips home in a hankie..... We kept a supply of fungi going through the week - puffballs, horse mushrooms, gristettes etc. - some of which were appreciated, the rest we just ate ourselves. I was specially excited by the Roman mushrooms - found while exploring the site of a Roman fort at Brancaster. Resisted some big Parasol Mushrooms (Lepiota procera) at Wretham Heath - after all it was a nature reserve - look forward to finding some more before the summer's out.
Horse Mushrooms and Parasol Mushroom Back home, we realised the fridge was empty so went out after more chanterelles and found, in addition, an absolute HORDE of Boletus edulis, the Cep or King Bolete. However, most of them were coated in white and contorted or deformed in a most sinister looking way. We think - but please educate us if you know better - these specimens had been affected by the torrential rain which had obviously been plaguing Perthshire in our absence and fallen foul of some predatory fungus themselves. Luckily there were some good specimens, as well as a variety of other boletes and the first Slippery Jacks. We have cleaned, sliced and set these to dry for winter, but the Ceps are for tea tonight. While out we snacked on some lovely little wild gooseberries, and checked the progress of rowan berries in general. |
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. 
