By opening our eyes and imaginations to the full extent of our wild larder, its perfectly possible to make any spice-led dish from around the world using fungi, seaweeds and the seeds, leaves, flowers and roots of common wild plants.
Its not often a forager enjoys being spotted “at work”. We aren’t doing anything wrong, but for myself, and several other foragers I know, we don’t like been seen when gathering, especially the more finite resources like fungi. Worse, infinitely worse, is bumping into somebody in a treasured foraging spot and realising, with a sense of horror, that they are also foraging. Its like going to the cellar and finding a stranger tucking into that sloe gin that’s just about ready. Or that dread feeling from childhood when you realise your best friend is playing with somebody else.
Finding wild food can be a tricky business. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, how adept your identification skills are or how in touch you are with your ‘inner forager’: if you get too confident or take them for granted, they will scorn you. I ‘relearned’ this valuable lesson for about the 1000th time a few weekends ago
Every year, round about mid July, I start to get twitchy. My driving gets even more erratic, I start to walk with a stoop, and my pulse quickens whenever I catch a glimpse of mossy woodland. This is the onset of Influenza mycologica, or Fungi Fever…
There are two types of foraging. The dictionary definition infers some manner of searching for, or vegetarian stalking of, foodstuffs. The epitomy of this is mushroom picking, which normally requires a silent hunt for an enigmatic quarry. That’s the most exciting and frustrating type. The other kind of foraging is really more like harvesting, whereby […]