Celebrating seasonal, homegrown, and wild food
With May being so cold this year, a lot of things have been a little slower to appear than usual. One example is the St George's mushroom, Calocybe gambosa, which as its name suggests usually starts to appear around St George's Day, 23rd April. This year, however, they didn't seem to start appearing until much [...]
Lilacs are a real highlight of late spring, bursting with fragrance and colour all over the place. They come in a range of purple hues as well as some pink and white varieties too, and all are edible and delicious. Care should always be taken not to confuse them with superficially similar horse chestnut flowers [...]
I'll get one important thing out of the way: "Ground Ivy" is a very different plant to English Ivy which is poisonous and definitely shouldn't be eaten. Ground ivy is actually related to mint and is has also been known as creeping charlie, alehoof, gill-over-the-ground, and many more names. In a similar way to mint, [...]
Radishes are one of the quickest foods you can grow, from seed to plate in just 4-5 weeks, and they are a great spring food with their crisp, crunchy texture and hot, peppery yet fresh flavour. I've gone from hardly liking them at all to considering them a bit of a wonder-veg. Now is the [...]
It's wild garlic season and the culinary world is, once again, obsessed with the fresh, pungent deliciousness of these wild greens. Walks in the woods over Easter weekend in the glorious sunshine were made all the sweeter by being able to share it with family and soak up the delectable scent of all the yummy [...]
A little while back I would have been the first to complain that foragers seem to be obsessed with making everything into a syrup - especially flowers. However, I've gradually learned that it's one of the best ways of harnessing and preserving the flavour of many of nature's best, and most fleeting specialties. Making syrups [...]
I've loved magnolia trees ever since I was a child visiting my grandmother's cottage in spring and seeing the beautiful Magnolia soulangeana in bloom in her garden. There seem to be a lot of magnolia trees where we live - I feel very lucky to be able to walk down nearby streets and see them [...]
At this time of year there really is a sense of emerging as the blossoms and bulbs begin to flower. Saturday 20th March was the vernal/spring equinox which marks the final transition out of winter as the days and nights are of equal length. We spent the day outside on our allotment in the fresh [...]
I was inspired to try this combination when I came across a few chefs on Instagram playing around with celeriac in sweet recipes or cooked in a sweet-savoury way. Gill Meller's celeriac fudge ice cream was weird and intriguing to me, and then I came across someone using combining celeriac with frangipane (unfortunately I can't [...]
Wild garlic shoots have been spotted in the south and it never takes Instagram long at all to catch on to the start of wild garlic season. As soon as the young shoots emerge across the south of England there's a frenzy of photographs and recipes and the excitement for a new year of foraging [...]
