I’ve been inspired by John Lewis-Stempel’s “The Wild Life“, to resurrect my fascination with wild and local foods. Although I haven’t actually foraged much further afield than Borough Market, I am currently preparing a pot of slow cooked, wild, rabbit stew. I might not have shot it myself but I was rather perturbed when I noticed bunny fur remaining on the quartered carcass. De-fluffing the tea brought me a bit too close to the harsh realities of our carnivorous lifestyle but that can only be a good thing.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to persuade any one else to join me for a serving so I’ve taken the precaution of preparing a backup leek and potato soup.

Back to the book, John committed a year of his life to eating wild produce hunted or foraged within the grounds of a derelict farmhouse that he and his wife had bought to renovate. It sounds like a hell-ish challenge. He started in game season so he had plenty of meat to hand but had to grub around for meager offerings of greenery. He managed to poison himself more than once by over-reliance on dubious quality produce.

His ingredients list for February reads:

Pigeon, rabbit, squirrel, dandelion, corn salad, nettles

He was pretty strict about the source of his food and so beyond the stuff he gathered or shot on a daily basis he would have to rely on foods he’d managed to preserve or dry such as nuts, oils, rosehip syrup and copious quantities of alcohol.

I think I was particularly inspired by his ability to keep himself stocked up with daily supplies of alcohol as well as his ability to stomach some of the concoctions brewed. Home brew wine is rank at the best of times and I don’t think oak leaf wine would fare any better than the usual culprits. Dandelion and Burdock beer sounds delightful though and I was impressed to discover you can turn the brew around in about a week.

The book is illustrated with many historic and authentic hedgerow recipes which must have taken some time to unearth. We have Chickweed soup, Stuffed Bistort Leaves, Fat hen pancakes with horseradish and as I’ve seen them lined up next to the rabbits at Borough Market, perhaps this one will do for next weekend:

Herby Squirrel Burgers
Serves 4

1lb/450g lean minced squirrel
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp hedge garlic, chopped
2 tsp equal parts wild thyme and wild chervil
pinch salt

Mix together the egg, meat, herbs and salt in a bowl.
Shape into flattened patties and fry in goose fat. Serve with a green salad.

I’ve spent a good proportion of the bank holiday reading about food and quite specifically how to eat food.

I started with the seriously irritating Allen Carr and his Easyweigh to Lose Weight. I’ve read this once before and threw it out in disgust but I have to cut Allen a lot of slack as I’m into my tenth year as a non smoker thanks to his EasyWay methods. Still, when it comes to food and nutrition he drives me nuts.

His main premise is that we should look to wild animals for advice on what to eat, after all they don’t get sick or obese. Somehow he manages to jump from wild animals to the instruction to eat a vegetarian diet with fruit and nothing but fruit for breakfast. I can cope with all of that and resist the temptation to argue the point of predation and age-related conditions but when he starts on slugs and snails I’m afraid the book has to go into the charity pile again.

I know about slugs and I’m not too enamored of them. Allen likes to use the example of the slothful slug and snail to illustrate his suggestion that exercise is overrated. You don’t really need to exercise as, after all, have you ever seen an obese snail? That sets me wondering. If I match sluggy slime trails to body length, I reckon our squidgy friends are really quite active critters, especially of a damp evening and if we are going to be critical, I’m not sure I’d consider them the slenderest of creatures either. Quite podgy I’d say.

Next on my list was Savor, a Buddhist guide to mindful eating. This book attempts to fuse nutritional advice with the buddhist concept of mindfulness through the discussion of the four noble truths and a series of exercises or meditations that encourage a focus on the present. Mindfulness is not restricted to eating and Thich Nhat Hanh takes us through mindfulness for eating, exercise and living.

The eating messages I’ve taken home are:

• Eat at the table
• Avoid multitasking – so no TV, work or magazines
• Appreciate your food by use of all the senses
• Chew and take it slowly
• Quality not quantity

There is a particularly useful exercise on appreciating the apple and I’d encourage anyone to spend 10 minutes with a Discovery apple, reacquainting yourself with its joys.

I’m a big fan of food and this time of year is particularly conducive to appreciating food. The plot is so productive that I can’t help but serve up meals that are at least 70% home grown and it is such a delight to look at the plate and remember the soil turning, seed sowing, weeding and watering that led to the harvest.

We’ve snuck a few yellow courgette plants into the flower border at home and I find their unexpected presence on the plate extremely satisfying.

Not content with the first two books on food, I’ve turned now to Michael Pollen for the down to earth advice succinctly wrapped up in the title of this post: Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants. Homespun advice that would make your mum and grandmother nod their heads in appreciation.

In Defense of Food, contains Michael Pollens manifesto for eating and attempts to find the commonsense lost in the nutritional world that has become hijacked by commerce and the food industry.

In addition to the above advice you’ll find tips such as:

• Only eat food your great grandmother would recognise as food
• Avoid products with unpronounceable ingredients or more than 5 ingredients

I’ve been overdosing on common sense, so now it’s time to set the table and enjoy the products of our labour.

The plot and the hedgerows are so productive at the moment. It seems about two months too early but the sloes are already plump and juicy. I’ve just had to polish of the last remaining drop of slow gin from last year so that I can re-use the bottles for this year’s vintage. Extraordinarily tasty and potent stuff!

This year we remembered to take carrier bags for a trip around Mitcham Common and have collected enough apples and blackberries for about 30 pies. The trees were almost breaking under the burden of fruit, it’s a shame more people don’t take advantage of the free crops.

Back on the plot we’ve found ourselves overrun with beetroot and I’m in the unusual position of trying to find creative ways to cook and store it.

The Preserves book from the River Cottage Series has a fabulous recipe for sweet beetroot relish. I made slight adjustments, replacing creamed horseradish for the requested home-grown pickled variety and I also cheated with the tomato puree which I couldn’t be bothered to make from scratch. Here is my cheats version:

Sweet Beetroot Relish

1kg Beetroot – roasted at 180′C
250g Sugar
150ml cider vinegar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
large onion finely chopped
2 tbsp creamed horseradish
4 garlic cloves crushed
1 tbsp tomato puree

Put all the ingredients except for the beetroot into a preserving pan and boil for 5 mins.

Peel and coarsely grate the roasted beetroot. Add this to the mix and cook for another 10 mins.

The juice should be syrupy when ready to transfer to the sterilised jars.

It should last up to a year.

Last weekend I became a forager, this weekend I quit.

It started at 11am this morning in the pouring rain, we’d just had to vacate our lovely weekend Yurt and the warm safety of the wood burning stove. All for the sake of a haw, or two.

Having shredded our hands on blackthorn and rosehip bushes we returned only slightly damp and deflated, with a bag of hedgerow berries. Now all we had to do was trim them of stalks and rustle up a bottle of ketchup.

It started well enough but 45 minutes in, the bowl was not getting any emptier, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t give a flying wotsit about hawthorn ketchup and Lynn was glaring at me and burping. Apparently the stress of it all had brought on her indigestion.

Having boiled the trimmed berries up in my lovely stock pot I got to while away another hour or so squishing fruity vinegar juice through a colander and then a sieve. I have purple pulp from one end of the kitchen to another and Lynn will get indigestion again when she spots it.

I now have two bottles of ketchup and a lovely book on hedgerow preserves that I will probably never use again – life is too short!

It is a marvelous book actually and here’s the recipe I used for the Hawthorn Ketchup, I had to double up on quantities as Ihad 1.2kg or berries:

500g trimmed Haws
300ml cider vinegar
300ml water
175g sugar
salt and pepper

Boil the haws up with the vinegar and water for about 30 mins, so that the berries go brown and soft.
Allow to cool for a while and then push the pulp through a colander or sieve to remove the stones and skin.

With the juice and pulp back in the pan, add the sugar and heat til it has dissolved. Cook for a further 5 mins, seasoning with salt and pepper. I also added finely chopped chillis at this point and then bottled up.

I just need to work on my labeling now.

You know it’s been a great evening when you finish off with a couple of empty bottles of fine ale and a bucket full of fresh produce. Days really don’t get much better than this.

We sat in the sun and ate Ratte potatoes boiled with freshly podded peas and pondered over the mystery of carrots. Yet again I managed to produce just 3 carrots out of 3 assorted packets of seed.

I don’t understand how you can grow 3 fine specimens and then about 300 abject failures.

The peach tree has proved to be the most exciting feature of the plot. We transplanted it in  the snow and had concerns for it’s future but it has bounced back and covered itself in fruit. Each week I rush up to check how much they’ve grown and confirm that no one has nicked them yet.

They are looking particularly peachy at the moment but are still rock solid. This is my most eagerly anticipated crop, I can’t wait to try it.

We took a mid-week opportunity to visit the plot to tend to the runner beans that have been causing me some anxiety. For some reason our beans are turning crinkly and growing in an ugly branched fashion. I initially thought they had been caught by a cold spell but I’ve been growing them in succession and every little seedling that pops up proves to be a disappointment.

Not quite every seedling – some shine.

I planted two varieties of seed, a hand me down from Lynn’s dad that has been in existence for decades and a saved variety from the Sheen plot which is probably a version of Wisley Wonder. One of them seems to produce half way decent plants and the other doesn’t.

I’ve planted loads more seed and now can only hope for the best, or perhaps try and buy some plants in from the garden centre.

Lynn in the meantime was down on her hands and knees trying to capture the wonder of the onions with her phone.

It’s hard to do justice and this photo just doesn’t evoke the same sense of pride.

Lynn has claimed the onions as her own, along with the other plot success – peas. The plot failure on the other hand is always referred to as “Angela’s carrots”.

Hardly fair.

The peas are pretty wondrous though. The plants are vigorous and healthy and the peas are a delight.

A lovely sweet pea must be about the best thing to come out of an allotment (maybe second to purple sprouting broccoli?), and they cook up marvelously with a handful of Arran Pilot, prepared in the garden shed trangia and eaten on the plot while surveying our land.

There’s been some degree of performance anxiety in the house since the great marrow jam disaster of August 09.

We made a minor error of judgement when we told the whole, sorry, sloppy tale to the mother in law. Having triggered a nostalgic memory for jams of old she’s been threatening ever since to pull down her preserving pot and demonstrate culinary majesty over the humble squash.

Of course I am just too stubborn to roll over and admit that I’m plain useless in the conserve department. Instead of looking forward to a xmas present of beautifully presented preserves, I’ve been hoarding marrows for a future jam off. Not wanting to play my cards too early, they’ve been sitting in the veg rack going musky while I’ve been researching alternative routes to beautifully set jam, courtesy of Mrs Beeton.

Today we got to find out how the mother in law did with her entry into the challenge.

Courgettes are obviously quite popular in her house. By the time she came to prepare them, most had already been roasted and stuffed and the recipe needed to be halved. By the time the peeling, chopping and reckoning had been done it needed to be halved yet again.

Sugar, courgette  and lemon were left to marinade overnight just as I had done a couple of months earlier. The veg was then boiled and potted and left overnight.

Having just disposed of our runny mass of lumpy syrup, Lynn knew to cut straight to the chase with her line of questioning: “Did it set?”

Did it set?
Set?!
It was like flipping concrete.

Apparently Sheila (said mother in law) couldn’t make an impact on the concrete and unable to remove it from the jar she ended up throwing the whole thing away. The pan took her 2 days to scrub clean and that was after spending the previous 3 days trying to rub away the remains of burnt beetroot.

Maybe now I can relax and consign the flaccid marrow to the compost bin, pride intact.

I got quite carried away last year and came very close to investing in a £100 dehydrator for converting my courgette glut into dried stock granules. As it happens the glut never really arrived so I had a lucky escape and am happy to plough my money back into seeds for next year.

The harvest has been a bit light again apart from the chilli peppers which have gone positively nuts. I don’t have quite enough to go in search of a cheap Stockli but I do have enough to try out my new freebie dashboard dehydrator.

I spotted the idea on lifehacker but it originally came from the tangled nest. Seattle dashboards probably get to higher temperatures but despite pretty overcast conditions for the last few weeks the chillis do appear to be drying out. They also look pretty jazzy.

I’ve been coveting the great round marrow for at least a month, collating assorted round marrow recipes and gathering together the necessary ingredients for marrow jam.

I’ve never tried marrow jam but my Dad informs me that it’s “evocative” and the whole notion made the kids squeal with such horror that I just had to make it.

So the other evening I gathered every knife, saw and axe in the vicinity and set too with courgetty gusto.

I fought valiantly over the first slither but as it fell out onto the chopping board my crest was fallen. Deep orange fleshiness, indicative of a marrow impersonating pumpkin, threatened to scupper my child tormenting breakfast preserve plans.

I remained slumped for a while as the kids hooted and hollered but then I began to perk up some. I had a whole sack of squashy wonders that were earmarked for unsuspecting neighbours and surely a yellow courgette and patty pan jam would be at least as “evocative” as the absent marrow.

Most of the marrow jam recipes available on t’interweb require between 6 and 9lbs of deseeded and peeled squash. That’s way more torment than I required so I began to modify and combine the available combinations and techniques. This could very easily have been my undoing.

I warn all potential jam makers to skim read any recipe like instructions that slip into this post.
Do not repeat.

I started following the methodology from allotment.org.uk, chopping the squash up smallish and covering with a kg of special jam making sugar (complete with pectin) before leaving to do something over night in the fridge.

They came out pretty wet.

I then switched over to bbcgoodfood and continued with the latter stages of their instructions. This involved bagging up lemons carcasses, pips and peel in muslin and boiling away with the sugar and squash mix.

I got called away for an emergency Ikea visitation which delayed the boiling bit for a few hours but I wacked it up high on our return and let it bubble furiously in attempt to turn the courgette chunks mushy. The sugar appeared to caramelise under the assault but the courgettes remained unscathed.

By this point I’d been cooking the jam on and off for 20 hours and I was getting a bit desperate. The gloop wasn’t even remotely interested in setting and the internet suggested I may have destroyed the pectin in the special sugar by over heating. Curses!

I bottled it up regardless and it now sits in the fridge, taunting the children.

Two days later it still hasn’t set.
The yellow courgette slices spin happily in a golden yellow amniotic fluid, I think it is taunting me.

I can report that the taste is pretty good actually. Very marmaladey. A sharp gingery lemoness, that is really quite appealing. I may have another go soon but in the meantime I need to concentrate on getting rid of the pumpkin.

I think I wasted my time this morning lighting a new stick of patchouli and lemon incense. The mornings trip to the lotty resulted in a monstrous glut that could only mean an afternoon spent preparing chutney and a house oozing the homely charm of hot spicy vinegar.

There are a couple of cauliflowers in that shot but I’ve deliberately avoided a close up of them. I think cauliflowers are designed to be picked the moment you spot them, flush with their juvenile tight white heads. I was a little greedy and hoped for huge curds to rival my dads. I chopped a stray outer leaf off to protect from the sun and left for another couple of weeks to swell. Inevitably the severed leaf rotted and formed an ideal pied-a-terre for numerous detritivores which did their best to make me weep.

I’m not wasting them though, deep cleaning with a tooth brush and a heavy handed shave, left the heads in good enough nick to form the basis of a piccalilli chutney.

I’ve doctored the recipe from Greenforks who made a far more appealing looking sauce than me but then Waitrose had run out of turmeric powder – there has obviously been a run on piccalilli making.