River Cottage Style freebies

Sorry, hit post before I had finished! ::)

We live on a towpath which not only abounds with blackberries but also :
Tayberries (Large Raspberries)
Plums
Elderberries & Ederflowers (Good for wine or even flavoured vodka!)
Crab apples (good for Crabapple jelly/jam only, do not eat as apples)
Mint
Sage
Marjoram
Wild Basil
Wild Garlic
Various salad leaves that most people don't know are edible
Rhubarb!
Fishermen who are often happy to donate a spare fish on a good day if you talk to them nicely & offer to exchange a carton of freshly picked blackberries Rabbits (Never actually taken a pot shot myself but know several neighbours who do! Not sure I can face skinning a bunny anyway.)

Am sure there must be tons of other stuff if you don't live in the suburbs like we do!

As the wife of a countryside ranger who deals with identifying fungi as part of his job every autum, I would caution anyone against picking wild mushrooms.  Many many types of fungi look extremly similar, experts have to look very carefully to be sure of what they have, and poisonus & even deadly species thrive freely in UK woodlands & fields.  Please please please do not risk it.

saw a guy last week with gigantic mushrooms as big as a dinner plate, he picks them and sells them to the restaurants aroundhere never seen them before anywhere near that size, he said they were very common if I looked.

This is a subject very dear to my heart.

There's a classic book: "Food for Free" by Richard Mabey which you can find easily at https://www.abebooks.co.uk - this has a full guide to everything you can eat from the countryside. Don't expect to fill your larder regularly though, as the treats are relatively few and far between: mushrooms in particular are the very devil to find, but a great bonus on a nice early morning walk if you find any - obviously go for easily identified varieties at first.

A good plan is to make friends with local farmers - many shoot rabbits as vermin and just chuck them, so will often give them to you for nothing. You do need to skin and gut them, but this is easy enough when you get used to it (hint - do this outside because the smell of fermenting grass can be a little offputting in an enclosed space, and cut the head off first if you want to avoid looking into accusing dead bunny eyes!). Basically it's like skinning a chicken, you slip your hands under the skin and it just peels off - use a large knife or cleaver to cut off the paws. A quick incision with a sharp knife, and you can slop the intestines (the only really nasty bit) into a bowl with a lid and put the lid on before you notice them enough to start retching, and the remainder of the insides just becomes like an O' Level biology class.

One of my favourite rabbit recipes is to chop up the liver, heart, and kidneys and fry with some cubes of smoked bacon, for preference adding some field mushrooms if you can find them, then laying the rabbit quarters onto a bed of blanched cabbage, fried stuff on top, some diced carrots, thyme, any other spare herbs, more cabbage, and a little stock/seasoning. Then you casserole it for about 40 minutes to an hour.

Also on the farmers theme, many have semi abandoned orchards which can provide fruit for bottling or conserving (probably not for eating, as it tends to be a shade on the tart side).

One other tip for blackberrying - if picking in a residential area, pick from at least chest height (because dogs can't p*** that high!).

nope I have a deer in the freezer but it wasnt road kill

It hung on the back fence for a few days mind you