Wild Food Night - a guest post!

It was August's Wild Food Night last Wednesday, but Eddie and I were busy, errr, walking llamas!

But that's another story...

My friend and cooking buddy Dave - the one who introduced me to wild food nights in the first place and lets me drag him round woodlands picking berries and stuff - has stepped in to let you know what we missed! Here he is:

With Nome and Eddie indisposed for Wild Food Night this month, I have stepped in as a guest writer (and photographer) for the sake of the blog. So with parents in tow, celebrating a birthday, we sat down to a surprise meal, as the chef had not had time to write the menu!

For canapes we had elderberry 'hot shot' (which helped inspire our elderberry picking the next day! - Nome), crabapple and plum sorbet and a cube of hawberry jelly.  The warm elderberry was lovely - similar to a mulled wine but with a lighter, sweeter taste. The very pleasant smooth sorbet was almost mousse in texture. The hawberry jelly, as the chef put it, 'didn't quite work', and we agreed it was lacking in flavour.

Following this came a warm pigeon salad with crispy onions and a elberberry jus which was lovely.  All good size pieces and worked well together, just leave coriander out of salads please!

Spicy venison meatballs on spaghetti was the main course; not my mother's favourite as I now discover she doesn't like the texture of pasta, but we all agreed the spicy tomato sauce was a good strength - not too chilli hot, but just warm spices.

To finish, the bramble tartlet was good on my part but vanished in seconds with my parents so I think they must have enjoyed it.

All in all a good birthday dinner and we all left happy and well fed. Nome will be back next time and I will return to my blog at Dating World of Dave to continue ranting.

Thank you Dave! I'd have really liked to try the pigeon salad and the meatballs - ah well. Can't wait for next time!

Elderberry Ice Cream!

When I was a small kid, elderberry season meant accompanying my dad through a local woodland, collecting buckets of the purple berries for him to turn into wine. Of course, I never got to taste any... I haven't yet ventured into winemaking, and I don't have the kit to try now, but being in 'wild food' mode this year, and with the local elder trees heavy with berries now, I had to do something with them... And when I found this elderberry ice cream recipe online I knew it was the one!

Elderberries (click for pictures) are somewhat comparable to grapes in nutrition, but contain much more vitamin A, B and C and twice the protein, and have been used as a miracle cure for flu! However, the pips, stems and unripe berries contain a cyanide-producing chemical and should be avoided in any quantity.

We started by collecting about half a carrier bag full of bunches of berries. They're ripe when they turn purple and the bunches hang upside down. We tried not to take too many from any one tree, but took a few bunches from a lot of trees - a good guidleline is to never take more than 10% of what you find in any one place.

Washing and de-stalking the berries was a pretty tedious task. I must have found a dozen earwigs hiding in them, not to mention several spiders. A fork or clean wide-toothed comb is good for popping the berries off their bunches, but it was hard to get rid of every single bit of stalk. We decided that this didn't matter since we were going to be putting the whole lot through a seive later, but considering the cyanide thing it's probably not a good idea to cook too many into the mixture!

We simmered the berries with a little water, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a tablespoon of sugar for 45 minutes until they softened and broke down, then seived them well to get the dark, syrupy juice.

You see those marks where I've got the juice on the worktop? Yeah, they're still there, though much fainter. This stuff STAINS, people!

I tasted the syrup and added three more tablespoons of sugar until I was happy with the sweetness (although it's quite hard to make this judgement about the unfinished product, and I later wished I'd added more) and then folded it together with whipped cream and whisked egg whites. Another warning here: I had a really hard time mixing the syrup, cream and egg whites together - so much so that by the time I was done, I was sure all the air had been knocked out of the egg whites, and the resulting ice cream is much harder than it should be. I reckon it'd be a lot easier to mix the syrup and cream together first, then fold in the egg whites.

The recipe says to just chuck it in the freezer, but with my egg whites deflated that didn't sound like a good idea. I did my best to stir it vigorously every half hour (I didn't always remember...) during the first few hours of freezing to break up the ice crystals.

What a fabulous colour! The ice cream is quite tart - and quite solid - but it's pretty good for a first attempt and went down well at a barbecue last night (and we all had a good laugh at each others' purple tongues and teeth!) The flavour's somewhere between grapes and blackberries, with an unusual dark-chocolatey note that makes me want to pair it with a rich chocolate cake... Next time I'll be sure to add more sugar, and even perhaps a few drops of vanilla to combat the tartness.

Loving my Lovage!

I often cite lovage as one of my favourite herbs - though I'm ashamed to admit I only use it in a very small handful of recipes, I adore the smell and it's such a pleasure to grow. But it seems to have a rather short season - before you know it it's flowering and the leaves are getting tough and stringy (probably something I could delay with some pruning, but we all know I'm not the best at keeping up with these things...)

However, as I was cutting the 8ft flower stalks down earlier this week, and lamenting the passing of the lovage until next spring, I was struck by how deliciously fragrant even the dried-out stems were, and noticed what an abundance of seeds I was just discarding into the compost...

Home they came, and now they're spread out to dry a bit more before going into a jar and onto the spice rack. A bit of internet research shows they can be used much like celery seeds (apparently, celery salt is actually made with lovage seeds, not celery!) and go well with bacon, game, pork, lamb, smoked fish and chicken, with egg dishes, cheese dishes, lentils and a whole range of veggies.

I crushed some seeds and added them to (homegrown) onion and red wine gravy last night, which we had with sausages, (homegrown) mash and (homegrown) runner beans with (homegrown!) garlic, and it was lovely!

I'm gonna have to find me some more lovage recipes...

Summer Harvests

We've harvested our onions recently, and they're spread out to dry at home. A disappointing result, as usual, despite the fact I bought a 'giant' variety this year! There's definitely something lacking in our soil, despite the generous dressing of manure we gave it in the spring; next year I'll have to invest in some onion fertiliser.

I was also surprised that several onions suffered white rot as usual, despite the Armillatox fiasco... (On which note, I'm pleased to report that there is indeed no trace of the Armillatox in the soil now, and no smell or taste of it in the onions! However, I won't be bothering again since it doesn't stop the problem...) Perhaps I'm wrong and it's not white rot but just a few weak plants going bad, but they do seem to have all the right signs; yellowed leaves, white mould underneath, and weak or rotten roots.

Our shallots (on the right above) and garlic are harvested now too - it's a pretty good garlic crop, and there are more to come, although a few bulbs seem to have disappeared!

We've dug up our first few potatoes, and boy, was I surprised! I was pretty concerned about them because when we returned from our holiday the foliage had all died down and I hadn't seen a single flower! I guess I just wasn't paying attention...

These are Kestrel - a 'second early' variety that's particularly good for roasting, baking and mashing. They've got some pretty bad scab in places, but it's only cosmetic. We scattered some potato fertiliser from the Organic Garden Catalogue over the bed before planting and it looks like it did its job! These babies weigh up to 360g each!

Fat hen swallowed our French bean bed while we were away, but as we weeded we found a great crop of beans hiding in the jungle. We also found a surprise late handful of broad beans when we cleared the plants - I thought they were finished ages ago! I pureed them with some lemon juice and a spoonful of fat hen pesto, spread them on toast and topped them with cheese for lunch one day. Mmmmmmm.

And we're now harvesting our runner beans. The beans are setting well in this damp weather and there are hundreds of them! But somehow I don't think we'll be winning any shows with these crazy shapes...

Courgette Loaf

Courgette Loaf
(makes one large loaf, or two small ones)

• Grate 400g courgettes, unpeeled, and place on a clean towel to drain a little. You can use courgettes that are slightly past it - just don't include any overdeveloped seeds!
• Whisk 200ml vegetable oil with 3 eggs until smooth and custardy-looking. 
• Add 225g sugar and 2 tsps good vanilla extract and beat.
• Mix in the courgette.
• In a separate bowl, mix 400g flour, 2 tsps baking powder, 1 tsp allspice, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, and 1/2 tsp salt. (If you wish, add up to 100g mixed chopped nuts and/or dried fruit too.)
• Combine the wet and dry ingredients and fold together thoroughly.
• Pour into a greased 1kg loaf tin and bake for 95 minutes (or until a skewer or knife comes out dry) at 160C, covering the top with foil after an hour if it looks like it might get too brown. (Alternatively, divide between two smaller loaf tins and bake 60 minutes.)

A tasty, mildly spiced teatime treat which looks rather curious flecked with green! This freezes very well - a good way perhaps to store some of the courgette glut until a time of year when courgettes are long forgotten!