Celebrating seasonal, homegrown, and wild food
As much as I love whiling away an afternoon, or indeed an entire day, cooking something elaborate, I tend not to want to take forever making lunches during the week. The flip side is that I still don’t want lunch to be boring, and so I have a few recipes up my sleeve that I [...]
Wild plums are often smaller than shop-bought varieties, more alike to the size of a cherry hence one of their common names being "Cherry Plum", but what they lack in size they make up for in sweetness and flavour. They're also known as Mirabelle plums in France and are incredibly popular there, particularly in the [...]
First of all apologies for my lack of blog posts in the past little while. If you've been following me on Instagram lately you will know that last week was a huge week for Mark and me - WE MOVED HOUSE! After the tense legal process and trying not to let ourselves get too excited [...]
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 [...]
