Foragers Forever

With the first food for free crops merely weeks away I thought I'd write a wee note about some resources which we have been gathering on wild food.

At the end of January, we had a Kitchen outing to a talk being given on foraging in Edinburgh by Xa Milne, who along with her pal Fiona Houston took her family on a yearlong foraging adventure and wrote a book about it. The book, 'Seaweed and Eat It', is an inspiring introduction to urban foraging, and contains tips on where to gather various wild foods and also what to cook with them.
(I'm afraid I'm going to have to link you to Amazon here, but Other Bookshops Are Available!) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seaweed-Eat-Foraging-Cooking-Adventure/dp/0753513412
Dr Pessimist Anticant was really quite enthused by Xa's anecdotes, and both of us fell to considering the possibilities for using foraged food in preserves. At the talk we were treated to some homemade elderflower cordial, hedgerow jam and crab apple jelly. The book contains a catch-all recipe for blossom cordial, because you can make cordial from the blossom of any tree with edible fruits, and even some without. Examples given are blackthorn, crab apple, sweet cicely and meadowsweet. Then there's nettle and dandelion. Then there are syrups of rosehip, dandelion or clover blossom. And a while chapter on edible seaweeds. I'm really looking forward to trying to find some carageen this summer and having jellies and set puddings made from it.

Another resource we have recently acquired is 'The Wild Food Yearbook' (http://www.countrykitchenmag.com/book-club.php) which is packed with recipes and tips for where to find things. It also has useful chapters such as 'Jams and Jellies: The Basics', and pictures which will be more useful for identifying things than in Seaweed and Eat It.

For the most helpful identification guide though, we have acquired the Collins Gem 'food for free' book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Food-Free-Collins-Richard-Mabey/dp/0007183038) which we'll be carrying in our pocketses when out and about.

So, keep your eyes peeled for some nettle concoctions when spring has more confidently sprung!

Easy Peezy Lemon Squeezy (Or, When Life Gives You Lemons...)

Once upon a February evening, two squash novices set about making some lemon cordial....

Having debated amongst ourselves for some time about which recipe to use for our cordial, we opted for one which looked simple and used both citric and tartaric acid. We never quite got to the bottom of exactly what function these ingredients have in a lemon-based foodstuff (citric acid is extraced from lemons anyway, isn't it?) but we reckoned that it would probably be a preservative one. And since we'd gone to the trouble of ordering them in from this website http://www.simplynatural.org.uk/ we thought we might as well use them. WE checked in all the places local to us that we thought might stock these things, but to no avail.

So, the recipe we followed can be found at this address http://www.cuisine.com.au/recipe/lemon-cordial. First, we started with a lovely looking bag of lemons (the recipe calls for 6, but ours were a little on the small side so we used 7 for luck). We scrubbed and zested two of them, and juiced these and the rest.






Meanwhile, we dissolved 2kg of sugar in 1 litre of water. I had been on the lookout for cheaper sugar since it was pointed out to me that lots of preserving means using lots of the stuff, and, happily, I found some in time for this recipe. It's Silver Spoon 'Homegrown Sugar', and the reduction in food miles excited me until I remembered that extracting sugar from sugar beet uses huge amounts of energy. Still, the back of the packet assures me the heat byproduct of the process is used to heat vast greenhouses where tomatoes grow, so at least its not wasted. At 70-odd pence a kilo from our local corner shop I think its about half the price of cane sugar.

So, now we'd made a syrup. To this we added 30g each of citric and tartaric acids and stirred well to dissolve. Once this was cool, in went the lemon zest and juice, and we had a stock pot full of cordial!










So we sterilised a few bottles using the technique we learnt last month for the marmalade, and bottled about 2 and a half litres. Here is a picture of one of the kitchen hands taking the sterilising process very seriously:



















The cordial is stronger than most shop-bought ones, so only a little is needed. It is Very Lemony, which I liked, but the more lily-livered among you may want to add more sugar.

WE'll keep you posted on how long it lasts on the shelf (although it might not get a chance to prove itself, as we seem to be getting through it at a fair old rate)