Danda and the dock leaves

Before I proceed with this story, I would like to remind you all of what happened last summer when I picked a blackberry for Danda. It was the first blackberry of the summer and I picked it for Danda and trekked up the biggest hill in the world to give it to him. You’ll have to check the post for his reaction.

So last week, I went foraging. I now have a book about foraging, called Food For Free by Richard Mabey. It’s fabulous and I’m cautiously working my way into new types of edible plants. It started with nettles…

…and has now expanded into dock leaves and dandelion leaves too. On the river near Ham House, there is an abundance of greenery for the taking. It’s like a forager’s paradise….

Nettles on the left, dock leaves toward the middle then dandelion leaves on the right. Dandelions are really good for you, apparently. And the whole plant can be eaten, from flower to root. Things like dandelion leaves and dock leaves were collected constantly and steamed and eaten like spinach but when spinach started to be grown more, we got away from eating these things.

Along I went, on my foraging mission, collecting lots and lots of greenery and thinking what lovely things I would make with it.

That evening, I decided to make a chilli with venison mince and lots of tomatoes and onions and fresh red chilli. As all these things are quite rich flavours, I decided to add the greenery in right at the end, just until it wilted a little, to lighten the whole thing up. So in it went, I stirred everything round, seasoned it and put it in bowls for Danda and I.

We dug in, munching away. I was feeling all at one with nature, eating my recently foraged greens in my dinner. I looked at Danda, knowing he was feeling the foraging love.

His face was a picture of uncertainty.

“It’s quite bitter,” he said, looking at it nervously.

“Put a bit more salt in,” I advised. He did so. He tried it again.

“O, it’s really bitter, Laura…. Do you want mine?”

And so I had two dinners and Danda ate toast. So that went well.

*I have since worked out how to counteract the bitterness. I need to put the greens in earlier, so the bitter taste is dissipated and the other tastes are allowed to come forward.

Madame Forager strikes again

And so the foraging fun continues. There have been lots more nettles, which have found their way into soups….

… But there have also been dandelion leaves, which went into a lamb stew. Apparently, you can eat every bit of a dandelion plant, from root to flower, and it’s really good for you.

The next thing I’m about to tell you I’ve ‘foraged’ is a bit of a cheat because I’ve been growing it myself. I got the kit from Hen and Hammock and planted it shortly after getting back from Italy at the end of April. You ‘plant’ it in the pages of a book you have soaked with water. Then you wrap the whole thing in plastic for a few weeks, until it starts to grow a white fluff. Then you cut the bag open and let the little mushrooms start to grow.

Within three or four days, they have swelled up like some alien GM food and the dark pinhead cups have faded a little…

… With just two or three more days of growing, they are getting pretty big and ready for eating.

The plan is to harvest them tonight when two vegetarian friends arrive for dinner. I’ll probably fry them in a bit of truffle butter.

So I haven’t even eaten them yet! So most of this post has been a lie. I told you I ‘foraged some mushrooms’ when I should have said, ‘I am growing some mushrooms from a kit I bought and I will eat them this evening.’

If there is another post tomorrow morning, you will know I have survived the ‘foraged’ mushrooms.

Why don’t I have a Michelin star yet?

Ok, so who is organising this nonsense? Where’s my bloody Michelin star? I shake my proverbial fist at you, food gods. It’s not like I don’t try. I do try. Very hard. Look (those breadsticks and crackers are all homemade)…

And look….

And look…

Yes, Mr Michelin, I made that. And no, your eyes are not deceiving you. That is homemade walnut and honey semifreddo you can see on the far right there. It’s all homemade, Mr Michelin. Including the cantuccini.

You want more? I got more.

And more…

All homemade. Even the pasta.

Now, Michel Roux and Rene Redzepi, because I know you’re both reading, it’s no good pretending you don’t, could you two sort this thing out for me. I honestly don’t get what’s taking so long.

Rene, I’m right up your street. I’d fit in perfectly at Noma. Did I tell you I foraged some nettles the other day?! Yeh. You see? That’s changed your mind, hasn’t it? I even bought a book about foraging today. A book, that’s right! Shit just got serious.

Now go get this thing sorted, people! I’ll keep an eye on the post.

Thanks, guys.

Vegetable chat

Pretext to this conversation = I have been foraging once. Once.

This is a conversation I had with some of the other volunteers yesterday at Ham House.

Volunteer 1: “Oo, this asparagus is huge! Is it from the kitchen garden?”

Me: “Yeh. The gardeners just brought it over. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Volunteer 2: “I don’t know how they’ve got it so soon either. The warm weather hasn’t been here long.”

Volunteer 1: “The cabbage in my vegetable patch has only just put in an appearance and my cherry tomatoes are yet to arrive.”

Volunteer 2: “Mine have only just started to grow and are still really small.”

Me: “I know what you mean. The long cold winter has meant hardly anything has grown.”

Volunteer 2: “Yeh.”

Me: “I mean, the best thing I’ve found has been nettles, because the winter doesn’t affect them.”

Volunteer 1: “Nettles?”

Me: *all knowledgeable* “Yehhhhh. They’re great. I make nettle soup with them or steam them and have them as a vegetable with my dinner.”

Volunteer 2: “That sounds interesting.”

Me: *super casual* “O, I’m always doing it. It’s so easy. I just come to the river with a glove and a tupperware box. I love it. I forage loads of stuff. Some people call me Madame Forager, actually.”

Volunteer 1: “O, right. What other stuff do you get?”

Me: *panic* “O, there’s loads of things about. Loads. Edible flowers… Sorrel…. Nettles….”

Volunteer 2: “Wow, that’s brilliant.”

Me: “It is, yeh. I love it.”

Musings on a fabulous day

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of the challenges from my save-the-world-in-a-day type books. Don’t worry, it’s not because I don’t want to be a world-saver anymore. It’s simply because some of the things I’ve been asked to do have spun off in different directions and I’ve gone with the flow and followed that new path, rather than leave things after a day and start a new thing.

I’ve started volunteering at a stately home on the river, which has been the best thing to come from following the book so far.

As Going Green by Simon Gear encourages people to avoid the air miles involved with supermarket shopping and grow your own etc, I decided to give this a proper go. So I got some thyme and some chives and decided I would start small and try turning my back garden into a mini farm. The continued cold weather hasn’t been a huge help, neither has the difficulty with finding a space in the garden where I can make a proper vegetable patch that will actually get the light. The best place for the patch only has sunlight for a short time and the other side, which gets more sunlight has tons of lavender plants, which we grow specifically to help the bees, as their numbers are declining.

I gave it some thought and remembered that when I was last at the farm, while I made sorrel soup, someone else was making nettle soup and Adrian, the chef, was talking about picking them and using them instead of the spinach as the cold weather meant the spinach hadn’t grown yet.

And so, thought I, I shall go and find some nettles! That is what they would do on the farm so that is what I shall do here. I will become… Madame Forager!

Off I went, with a bag and good intentions, to the river to pick nettles. I wrapped a tissue over my fingers to prevent stings, I looked for plants about two hands height and picked just the very top leaves, the younger, greener looking ones. And I felt like a real explorer, surviving off the plants in the jungle until I managed to find other human beings (in actual fact, I was surrounded by them, they were passing every minute and looking at me strangely, as I foraged away).

At some point, a man asked me what I was doing and we had a long chat about food and how to eat nettles like spinach. He was walking to Ham House so we walked and talked and I ended up going in and looking around the kitchen garden there and admiring their lovely huge asparagus.

With my nettles in a bag and a large amount of garden envy, I then headed to Twickenham to meet a friend for early dinner/late lunch. We didn’t really ever work out which is was so we plunged straight into panini time at an Italian deli before walking into Richmond to go to a little tea room near Richmond Green for a spot of cake and tea.

While walking to the bus stop afterwards, I saw a neighbour on her way home so went over for a cup of tea and some nettle-related chat. Equipped with her advice about whether to wash my nettles and whether to keep the stalks on, I ventured back home to my kitchen to cook my first ever meal with foraged ingredients!

I chopped a potato or two, a leek, an onion and a few leftover oyster mushrooms and fried them in a little bit of butter. Then I added stock and cooked til the potatoes were soft. Then I destalked my nettles and put them in, cooking for another three minutes until the nettles had wilted a little. Then I took my whizzer to it and whizzed like my life depended on it.

And it was lovely. It stayed a really vivid bottle green and had a light fresh taste that only needed a hint of seasoning to bring it alive.

The light isn’t too good on this picture so you can tell about the colour.

And that, my friends, was my first foraging experience. All in all, a success, I’d say. Anyone got any foraging experience and can advise me what to pick next? At the moment, I’m sticking to nettles because I don’t know sorrel well enough to identify it and I’m scared of the whole deadly mushrooms scene.

So I guess now you can just call me MADAME FORAGER! … if you want.

Written by a future Booker Prize winner. Sort of.

Last week, I went to Liverpool to visit friends and family and thought I’d follow one of Rambler5319’s walks as the recent one, around Woolton, looked really interesting.

I set out in the morning, the threatening drizzle making me worry slightly but I kept going, hopeful despite the obvious. By the time I reached John Lennon’s house, my view through the car window was this….

Still I continued to Woolton and thankfully, by the time I wanted a photograph of me at the highest point in Liverpool, the rain had stopped….

I then got out and visited the church graveyard where two gravestones bear the names which gave inspiration to the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby.

Over the road from here was, what looked like, a community centre which was part of the church and I realised in a flash, I came to Weight Watchers here when I was 17! I had been a teenager with some extra ‘puppy fat’, I would like to call it. And my friend Nicki and I came to Weight Watchers together. We would drive into the car park and in front of it was the entrance to the Weight Watchers group while behind it was the hall where John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met! And I’d had no idea all that time. I was big into The Beatles as well. That is a fact I would have liked to know.

There is so much interesting history at your fingertips in Woolton. For example, just the little hall where I went to Weight Watchers had been there for almost two hundred years…

(I don’t know if you can see but it was built in 1823.)

There was also, at the furthest point on this walk, a little school which was build in 1610….

I also realised, with fond memories, that as I walked along a small path with two quarries falling away either side of it, I had walked this way many times before when my brother and my Dad and I used to walk to my Nanna’s house every Sunday for lunch. I remembered my brother and I having nettle stings and finding some really good dock leaves at the end of the path to rub on the stings to stop the pain.

As an aside, I checked in the window of a small shop which had been on Rambler5319’s walk and, sure enough, they’re still looking for a paper boy/girl, if anyone’s interested.

I walked back to my starting point through Woolton Woods, from where there is a fantastically clear view over Liverpool, (it’s hard to see it on a photograph though).

On my way back from this walk, I stopped off at 192 Booker Avenue, where the Liverpudlian writer of a book I’m currently reading grew up.

Her name is Linda Grant and her novel, The Clothes On Their Backs was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And no, it not just a coincidence that the name of Booker is the road where she grew up and the prize – it’s the same man! He was a business man based in the area who, among many things, had spent time in Demerara in the West Indies and was responsible for bringing Demerara sugar to England.

I grew up in a little cul-de-sac off Booker Avenue and spent eight years of my life attending Booker Avenue Infants and Junior school. I think that means, by default, that I will have a Booker Prize-winning novel out soon?

P.S. Due to my slight telling off by a fellow blogger, for not having any Christmas decorations up, I asked my favourite 5 year old to make me a Christmas tree, which is now in living room. See?