Tastier Than Bear's 6: Meat on the Menu

A lot has been happening the last few weeks, and I have a so much to blog about, yet very little time. I left you all on a cliff-hanger over 2 weeks ago with my quest to kill a pigeon, so it seems only fair that I start with an update on my foraging antics.

Well................I still haven't killed a pigeon, though I bought Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'The River Cottage Cookbook' (at the carboot sale for 50p) which follows his early antics at River Cottage. He has a whole chapter on Hedgerow, including wild meats, and is informative on preparing pigeon, rabbit, squirrel and ......snails (Hugh and Bear would get on a treat!). So having read more on the subject, I am feeling much more prepared for the pigeon-caught-in-a-net day to arrive.

 

But all was not lost on the meat front. Driving along a country lane I spotted some road kill. It was a cock pheasant and looked in very good condition, considering it had been hit by a car. I quickly jumped out and having some compost sacks in the boot, I stuffed the pheasant inside one and drove off full of excitement. This was it - true foraging with my first road kill dinner!

I was heading to collect horse manure from Suella, who is always very generous at sharing her horses' produce and there was quite a gathering. So I consulted with the wise Suella, Janet and Martha on my road kill and the first question was 'Is it still warm?' Why did that not occur to me? I had managed to bag the carcass without touching it, so I tentatively reached inside and yes it was warm, so very fresh. It was a bit smelly, but as they pointed out 'All living creatures are smelly'. Here it is.

Note to self: Don't stuff it in a bag next time, lay it flat! Nice how David Cameron is thoughtfully positioned to be consulting with my dead pheasant ;-)

Hugh doesn't mention pheasant, so I checked out some simple techniques on YouTube for removing feathers and gutting, but they all had shot birds whereas mine was already a bit damaged with guts spilling out. I was quickly losing my nerve, as a pre-packaged chicken doesn't come with the same smell, feathers, feet and undigested corn falling out. So I just dived in and cut out the breasts and quickly discarded the rest. I know it was such a waste, but I was overcome with squeamishness. Bear just rips off the head, feet and wings and skewers it for the fire, but I am not up to that yet (if ever).

I calmed down once faced with just the 2 pieces of breast and chopped them up for a stir-fry. I then dashed out to the woods (not shops) for some accompaniments - more wild garlic, hogweed shoots and stinging nettles.

I decided to break the rules and use some olive oil for frying as it is much easier than to keep adding dribbles of water. The hogweed shoots are absolutely delicious fried and were the best tasting part of the meal still. I may have forgotten to mention that I ate them last week on a bed of dandelion leaf salad, and they are so much more delicious fried than steamed.

The pheasant wasn't gamey (probably because it was too fresh), but rather plain and overcooked. I had thought to cook the breasts whole, so that I could leave them pink in the middle, but this was road kill and overcooked seemed a far safer option, if somewhat less appetising.

So I have eaten foraged meat and I survived ;-) There may be more meat menus to follow, if I can catch one of those darn pigeons.

Tastier than Bear's 5: Not quite pigeon

Well, Bears challenge has gone out of the window last month. Partly because it has been a busy month at the allotment and partly because I have set my sights higher for the next meal. The last meal had basically composed of a salad, and really I wanted to find some more nutritious food for the next meal. So I decided to target 2 new foods.

The first is pignuts. Not only do these involve a bit more pre-meditation than just pulling a few leaves while I am out walking, because I need tools for digging up the root and permission to dig, but I am having trouble identifying them without digging up the root. There are loads of plants with similar leaves in my woods, but they may also be something nasty like Hemlock, which is somewhat similar. So I need to take a mat and some plant identification books and sit and investigate, which needs the luxury of time and weather.

The second is pigeons. Yes I am carnivore and though I am not keen on eating bitter wiggly worms like Bear Grylls, I am game for some pigeon. A google search for pigeon brings up some really mouth-watering recipes. The wood pigeons we get in the garden have been grazing on locally grown vegetables, bird seed and other delights from the fields nearby, whereas city birds scavenge on rubbish so may not be a good idea. The problem of course is how to catch one and kill it. Road kill is definitely an appealing option, as I am used to dealing with dead carcasses, rather doing any slaughtering myself, but I have not been in luck.

Mr Twit used Hugtight Sticky Glue, pasted on the branches of a tree to trap birds for his bird pie. I must admit that it does seem a simple idea, not requiring any skill in the catching, but it is also indiscriminate. We really get some of the fattest pigeons in our garden, so a couple of years back, son and hubby decided to rig a trap. It involved my washing basket, propped on a stick. There was a rope tied to the stick and the other end was held by my son, who was sat in a camouflaged hide a few metres away. It was very entertaining, and as you might imagine totally unsuccessful! The pigeons were far too wily to walk under the basket. It was also somewhat of a relief because I didn't really think that either of them would be happy with killing their victim, and I did not want to be the one to do it.

So my mind had moved from traps to weapons. Eldest son has offered to shoot them with his bow and arrow, but having such a small garden with a public path along the side, I am scared of stray arrows causing harm. Maybe I could learn to master a slingshot, although I am the most appalling aim, and slow to boot. Look at these fancy ones which you can buy with seedball ammunition! At worst I would scare the pigeons off my vegetables, and if I got lucky, dinner would hopefully be dead from the impact.

But what if the pigeon was just injured and I had to catch it and kill it? There was only one thing for it. I needed help from an expert. The allotment is full of such experts. The netting designed to protect tender plants from the voracious appetite of greedy pigeons, is not always pigeon proof. A couple of times last spring I saw pigeons that had found a hole to get in, then couldn't escape .......the perfect pigeon traps! I have enlisted the help of an allotment friend and the next time a pigeon is trapped she will guide me to catch it and kill it. She seems quite an expert despite being a vegetarian, and has already dispelled my image of breaking it's neck, as apparently it is too easy to pull the head off - yuk! Bashing it over the head is her preferred technique. You really are going to have to stay tuned for a few more weeks to see whether I have the nerve to pull this one off.

There were several foraging successes this month though, although not a completely foraged meal. The wild garlic leaves are out everywhere now, so I felt no guilt in picking a bag full of leaves and making a batch of wild garlic pesto, following the recipe in the River Cottage Handbook No. 7: Hedgerow by John Wright which is shown below.

50g Wild garlic leaves
30g Pignuts/ cobnuts/ pine nuts, lightly toasted in a pan (I doubled this amount)
30g Parmesan cheese grated
80ml Olive oil plus extra to cover
Salt and pepper to taste

Put in a food processor and blitz, slowly adding the oil. Transfer to a jar and make sure the pesto is covered with olive oil. Keep in fridge for several weeks.

Having not found any pignuts, I roasted some of my remaining cobnut stash, but the resulting pesto was like extremely strong raw garlic. I threw in an equal amount of pine nuts, which balanced out the flavour enough so that I could taste it without burning my mouth. A small spoonful added to pasta sauce is great! Or even as a substitute for garlic butter in garlic bread or very sparingly in a salad dressing.

I also picked a bag full of nettle tops. I think I suffer with mild arthritis in the joints in my hands and have found that nettle stings seem to help. I run my hands through the nettles until they are stung all over, then quickly rub some chewed up plantain over my hands to stop the stinging. The stings still tingle for up to 24 hours, but after that scrubbing the bathroom or weeding the garden doesn't make my joints ache.

The nettle tops were so bright and fresh looking. I made them into nettle soup using another River Cottage recipe. It tasted good, though was not thick enough for my liking, so I will add more potato or some swede next time.

Half a carrier bag of stinging nettle tops
50g butter
1 large onion peeled and chopped
I litre vegetable or chicken stock
1 large potato, peeled and cubed (or maybe 2 if you like a thicker soup)
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp. crème fraiche
A few drops of extra virgin olive oil
A few drops of Tabasco

Melt the butter and cook the onion until soft. Add stock, nettles, potatoes and carrots. Simmer for about 15 mins until potato is soft. puree with a stick blender and season to taste. Spoon into bowls with a teaspoon of crème fresh and drizzle of olive oil and tabasco.

I also picked some hogweed shoots and had them steamed with some chicken risotto. They do resemble asparagus in the texture, though not quite as delicious. Certainly very edible and something I will pick again.

I am still learning new plants all the time and keeping my eyes peeled for any delicious morsels, but growing vegetables is more productive and has to take priority for me over spring, whilst there is so much to be done.

Tastier than Bear's 4: Allotment weeds

I am getting a little behind on my foraging challenge, partly because the weather has improved and I have spent more time at the allotment, throwing a ball for the dog, rather than taking her on walks. I have fixed the shed door, spread my remaining manure, planted fruit trees and bushes, and dug up buckets and buckets of couch grass, mixed in with the threads of old carpet.

 

There has also been Transition meetings, including a lovely seed sowing workshop last weekend, led by a very patient and knowledgeable Andy. My youngest daughter said, "How can you do a workshop on sowing seeds - you just get some soil and put them in!" How little she knew! I picked up lots of tips, such as what compost to use and mixing in a little sharp sand for moisture retention. I also had a chance to ask questions about things that had gone wrong for me. And of course it was a very sociable event with home made refreshments too. If you are local you can check out the Transition Loughborough website for upcoming events.

Then this Sunday was the first car boot sale of the season. I decided to have a stall selling, the idea being that I raise funds to spend in following weeks. It turned out to be a very quiet event, so I didn't do as well as I had hoped. Still I emptied a few bags of outgrown clothes from the garage and made £21. Except that I spent £2 on a new basket, £2 on a wheely trug, 50p on a bag and....50p on something else that I can't remember.

I also attended my first ever political meeting, as Amelia Womack, deputy leader for the Green Party was speaking locally. There will be a general election in May, and for the first time we will have a member of the green party standing locally. It was an opportunity to hear their policies and ask some important questions, and Amelia was a friendly and easy to follow speaker. She certainly gave me food for thought. And talking of food.......

It turns out that Couch grass roots are edible. Wish I had known that before I dumped buckets full of them.

Actually they smell quite sweet, so they should make an interesting basis for a meal. So this weeks theme became allotment weeds. Alongside the couch I collected some red dead nettles again as they were so plentiful and pretty, a few stinging nettles as they needed to be weeded anyway, and the two new flavours of chickweed and hairy bittercress. How does this look for a bagged salad?

There was groundsel growing in and around the chickweed, so I brought some home to look up and was shocked that some websites described it as a salad plant whilst others said it was seriously toxic. I wasn't going to take a risk, but it just goes to show that it is worth double checking everything before you decide to eat it.

The chickweed had very pretty, distinctive white flowers, but they had closed up completely by the time I got my camera out. The stem has a single line of hairs down it, which help with the identification. John Wright describes the flavour of chickweed in The River Cottage Handbook No.7: Hedgerow as "...mild and pleasant, not unlike lettuce but with a bit of freshly mown cricket pitch thrown in." I had collected loads, and though it had a nice texture, the cricket pitch flavour was too much for me, so I only used a small handful.

The hairy bittercress was amazing though. It smelled and tasted just like cress and was not bitter at all. I mixed it in with the chickweed and some raw red dead nettles for the salad, but unfortunately the lovely cress flavour didn't come through. Maybe I need more next time.

It would definitely work in egg sandwiches. I will be keeping all the hairy bittercress I dig up from now on, or just nibbling it raw in between digging.

I fried the chopped couch grass roots with the nettles and some of the dead nettles, but I decided to taste them before adding them to my salad. Good job too, because they were really tough, like chewing twigs! The flavour was fine - no bitterness like the dandelion roots, but they were too tough to eat. Luckily I had picked lots of dead nettles, so I chucked the first batch with the couch grass away and fried the rest on their own.

 

The fried dead nettles really were the star of the meal and very tasty. The salad was a lovely texture, but raw dead nettles aren't as tasty as the cooked ones, and the chickweed was the overriding flavour. I won't use chickweed again, or else in very small amounts, because I am not so keen on the grassy taste. Still I finished it all off..... well apart from the couch grass. Glad I did throw bucketsful away, because you would have to be very desperate to try eating it.

 

Besides this week's meal I wanted to make another batch of dandelion coffee. The first attempt weren't roasted enough and tasted vile. The second attempt I followed guidance from River Cottage no.7 to cook them for 30minutes at 200 degrees C. They were burnt within 10 minutes, maybe because I had chopped them quite small and they were very dry to start with. Half of this batch weren't too burnt and it did make rather a lovely drink. Hopefully the next batch will be perfect again.

I also found some coltsfoot whilst I was walking round the local reservoir. It is supposed to be a good remedy for coughs, so I will pick a few more to dry next time, because it wil be good to have some remedies in for next winter. I have just dried a bunch of sweet violets on my windowsill too

Every time I am out, I have brought one or two plants back for identification and tasting, so I am gradually increasing my wild plant knowledge. Where I really think that it will save me money is with herbal teas that I drink regularly, and with herbal remedies. I am gradually increasing my store of little bottles with dried plants, so that I should have enough variety to make more remedies soon. I had better start adding labels too, as I will no doubt forget what each one is! Let me know if you do any foraging or make any wild remedies?

Tastier than Bear's

It is quite fun watching Bear Gryll's torturing teaching celebrities on an adventure in the wilderness. But really for someone so experienced in the great outdoors, the food he provides looks really disgusting! Take a look at the crunchy worm omelette he prepared for Zac Efron in his "Running Wild with Bear Grylls" series. (it is at 22 mins in)

Apart from the fact that the birds eggs could have been old and rotten, just the thought of eating wriggling worms is vile, (Remember wormy spaghetti in 'The Twits' by Roald Dahl?). Surely an adventurer with Bear's experience could provide a better meal from the wild than that?

Anyway, as I walk my dog through our little woods and muddy fields, I see all kinds of edible goodies, so I am convinced I can do much better than Bear does at eating from the wild. And so the challenge begins......

 

 

I am going to cook myself a meal each week that comes solely from food I have foraged that day and the challenge is to make it tastier than Bear's. I have a few books to guide me on what is edible or not. All I need is for you guys to be the judges and luckily for you I won't be asking you to taste mine or Bear's dishes! You can base your judgement on how appealing each meal looks and which you would rather eat...... if you had to.

Please feel free to join in with ideas, foraging tips or try the challenge too and send me descriptions of your meals to share, or post them on your own blog and I will re-blog them here.

It is tempting to use nuts foraged back in autumn or frozen fruit picked last summer, but it wouldn't be a fair comparison as Bear won't have those to hand. If I were Bear I would carry a few emergency sachets of salt with me, so I am going to allow myself salt and water to cook with, but other than that it is just what you can find on the day. Bear's wilderness probably has a lot more wild stuff available than my semi-urban locality, so I am probably at a disadvantage.

 

Being February, winter in the Northern hemisphere, this is going to be challenging. That is why this weeks challenge is up against wormy birds egg omelette. I think it would be fairly tough finding anything more disgusting than this, so I am hoping for an early win.

So yesterday I headed out into the little woods behind our house to see what I could find. Jelly Ear mushrooms was an obvious first choice because they are really abundant. They grow on the dead wood, and are very difficult to mistake looking and feeling like a human ear. I have picked them before, but never got round to cooking them. The texture is really very odd, and it is difficult to know what to cook them with. But any mushrooms should add some flavour and substance....I am hoping.
 

There were also plenty of stinging nettles starting to grow, so I carefully snipped off a few of the young heads, as a healthy spinach alternative. I was hoping to find something else, but our woods is not very old which means there is not a great variety of species. Apart from loads of poisonous Lords and Ladies springing up and seeing a few snowdrops, it was a dead loss.

The field next to it did have some dandelions around the margins, so I dug up 3 or 4 big ones, so that I could use the roots and the leaves. Even the young flowers are edible apparently. There were also daisies, their dark green rosette of leaves are edible according to my books, and looked quite tasty.

I headed down to the brook hoping for something to add some flavour growing on the embankment. I found some yarrow, which is supposed to be good for tea, some rather discouraging looking plantain, some young white deadnettles and finally some common sorrel.

Thoughts of a lovely green salad were circulating in my mind by now. But I still wanted some more substantial roots. Silverweed roots are reported to be tasty, so I checked out a few spots that are packed with them in summer, but there was no sign at all. The roots must still be there, but without the plant to guide me, I wouldn't know what I was eating.

It took a fair while to sort through my haul and wash all the mud from them. The greens looked quite delicious....... until I tasted them! Below clockwise from the left are white deadnettle, daisy, yarrow, common sorrel and young tips of cleavers.

The daisy leaves were vile and went straight in the compost bin. The dandelion leaves weren't great either, but then the leaves looked old. The common sorrel did have an interesting acidic taste, and might act like a squeeze of lemon. The young cleavers tips or sticky weed as we call it, was actually quite a nice fresh taste, and the deadnettle was a fair spinach like taste. It made me wonder why I didn't just pick the deadnettles instead of bothering with the stingers?

First I made a pot of yarrow tea. It was quite a nice flavour, although a bit weak - I need to pick more next time.

I started a soup by adding the chopped dandelion roots and jelly ears to some boiling water.

After 20 mins simmering, in went the nettles, sorrel and dead nettles for 10 mins. Then at the end I threw in the sticky weed and seasoned with salt. Ta dah!

It really didn't look too bad, and the first few tastes of nettle didn't taste too bad either. The dandelion is not a great flavour, but it did add some texture and felt filling.

But the jelly ear was definitely not the texture I was hoping for. It was still very firm and didn't seem to have softened much at all. Maybe I should have cooked it longer, but John Wright describes in the River Cottage Handbook on Mushrooms, how he boiled it for 8 hours and it still had the same texture! Ignoring the texture, it just had no taste whatsoever. So much for imparting a nice mushroomy flavour!

After all my careful washing of leaves and roots, the soup was still a bit gritty and earthy. Adding salt and more salt made no improvement to the taste. I tried to imagine it with a dash of soy sauce and some egg swirled in and managed to eat a third of the bowl, but it tasted worse with every mouthful so I gave up and had peanut butter toast instead. It was very nutritious and if I was starving I probably could have eaten more. But then maybe worms would look tasty if I was starving.

Ok...eating from the wild is not so easy, or at least not in winter. Part of me thinks this was a stupid idea, but then I am already planning how I can do better next week! What do you think?