Food from the wild

groatie_queen

Happy 2007 everyone!

Please feel free to merge if appropriate - couldn't find anything on this topic but it must have come up before....

Ray Mears has a new series starting this Thursday, 4 Jan, BBC2 8.00pm, about what our stone age ancestors might have gathered from the wild to eat - and must till be available to us.

I haven't done a huge amount of foraging, but can recommend young dandelion leaves in salad, nettle soup, sloe gin :j, elderflower fritters, and of course brambles for jam/jelly, all were yummy, but an attempt years ago to make elderflower champagne was a disaster - the recipe book said we would either have muscat or tomcat..... 5 gallons of pure tomcat went down the loo! :eek:

Been too nervous to try fungi.

What have others tried and what was the effort/reward ratio?

Pandora123_2

Elderberries (jam with blackberries)
Blackberries (jam and in applesauce)
Apples (applesauce, with blackberries/lemon and orange/lemon/lime)
Cherries (ate most fresh, used a few for cherry brandy)
Chestnuts (roasted)
Raspberries (ate them fresh)
Nettles (as a cooked green)
Wood ear mushrooms (sauteed with cultivated mushrooms)
Sloes (in gin)
Wild strawberries (ate them fresh)
Violets (sprinkled atop salad)
Wild garlic (in salad dressing)

Blackberries have probably the best effort/reward ratio, so easy to pick and delicious. We didn't care for the nettles. Strawberries... I doubt we picked more than about a tablespoon, will have to try and find a better source this year! Same with the wood ear mushrooms, only found a few. Violets... so small it takes a lot of picking to just get a few, can't see getting enough even to make jelly. Everything else easy to pick and well worth it.

We're pretty leary of mushrooms as well, the wood ear mushrooms are very distinctive and there was no mistaking what they were, but a lot of the others seem to have doppelgangers in poisonous varieties.

We also picked acorns, but accidentally burned them when trying to prepare them.

We got a new wild foods book for Christmas, so hopefully can expand our use of wild foods this year. Would also like to learn to make wine from wild foods (like blackberries).

:A

Pink.

Hi groatie queen,

We have a couple of older threads on similar subjects that might interest you too:

Foraging - Natures Food

Free Food Challenge

Cheap food if you aren't squeamish

It's also worth checking out the Foraging forum on www.downsizer.net

Pink