fergus the forager

Catch 22

2009-09-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

Catch 22 (wild food year week 9)

Nature's abundant treasures, the heart's treasures as well as the infinite wealth of time - both everywhere and nowhere, throw up a reality at once both as rich in meaning and significance as in the solidified phantoms of an anxious mind.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner: What will they be? Where will they be found? How long will it take - today, tomorrow, the next day, next week, next month? Relentless! Relentless! Relentless!

Catch 22: I have no money. Foraging takes a long time. I need somewhere to live: I can't afford the rent and am in debt, therefore I have had to put on extra foraging courses and write more magazine articles in order to pay the rent. Having put on more foraging courses to pay the rent I now have no time to forage. Not putting on more courses and writing more articles would, of course, free up plenty of time for foraging but, then, no money and, hence, nowhere to live. Catch 22. The project is over.

A Buddhist parable.
Sometime long ago there was, there still is and, sometime in the future, there will still be, a poor and very troubled man. He had grown so deeply and inescapably in debt that in sheer mad frustration, exasperation and desperation he ran away to hide in the wilderness. One day while wandering there in search of food he came upon a large chest that had been filled with rare, beautiful and exquisite treasures. Whoever had placed the treasure inside the chest had also attached a large and brightly polished mirror to the inside of the lid. When the poor man saw the chest he was overjoyed. Without hesitation and with great excitement he immediately set about opening the chest, but as he lifted the lid and pushed it to rest upright on its rusty hinges he saw his own face and become agitated and extremely frightened. He nervously wrung his hands together and said to the face before him, "I thought the chest was empty and did not belong to anyone. I didn't know that you were inside. Please, sir, I beg of you, don't be angry with me. I shall leave you in peace with your amazing treasures and be immediately on my way." He then dropped the mirrored lid and with even greater desperation than before, fled further and deeper into the impenetrable wilderness.........

The Mirror in the Treasure Chest, adapted from the Bayu jing - the Chinese Buddhist One Hundred Parable Sutra

A year eating 100% wild and foraged food: week 7

2009-08-17T02:21:00.000-07:00

Raining Flesh and Blood

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness, - to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hallow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially at night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organisations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp' - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood!

- extract from Walden; or, Life in The Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1854).

No tortoises or toads on the menu as of late; and yet, after not seeing any serviceable roadkill for months - since 25th Dec 08 to be precise, last week I broke my vegan wild food challenge - a month that became 40 days, in a veritable torrent and macabre freshet of roadside flesh and blood.

The Wild Recipes of Young Werther

2009-08-03T04:52:00.001-07:00

The Wild Recipes of Young Werther
(Eating nothing but wild and foraged food diary, weeks 4-5 ish, 19th July - 3rd August)

Nick Cave's favourite seeds: Yew Taxus baccata

Recipes for success, for disaster, for life and death. What will be the recipe of the day today, tomorrow, next week?

Reflecting on my current situation, as well as on other peoples situations, I often wonder what comes as given and what is created or, rather, what is the scope for manoeuvre, the scope for creating outcomes different from those that existing conditions, perhaps conceived as limitations, would seem to render inevitable? There are many ingredients contributing to the arising of this present moment and the way it is experienced: Individual psychology, level of emotional and spiritual maturity, physical and mental health, diet, immediate surroundings - including both its sentient and non-sentient aspects, underlying geology, climate, plus an almost infinite number of other contributing factors. How do they interact this instant and over time? Right now, is one factor the defining contributor to the current situation in which I find myself? For the past 33 days I've eaten nothing but wild vegan fare. How do I feel? Different, yes; good, no. For the past 16 months I've felt the joys but mostly pains and sorrows of unrequited love. How do I feel? Perturbed and contracted as opposed to feeling expansive and joyous, miserable, stuck in an emotional quagmire, wanting to move on but spell bound, drugged and weak? In July 2007 I carried out a trial run for this year living entirely on foraged wild food. That month was also vegan. Both vegan and, more to the point, a great success. After that month alone the effect on my mental state was profound. Not deep, just profound. 'Deep' would imply long-lasting effects of which, unfortunately, there were few. The profundity resided in the degree of change, the qualitative change to vibrant mental clarity, emotional stability and general joy and positivity. In part I think I gained some insight as to why such changes were so short-lived. The reasons involve long-standing habits of mind and behaviour. Bad habits indeed; habits so ingrained to the very core of my being that they lurk unseen, colouring every thought, action, dream and desire with the blackest shade of personal bondage. Can they be undone and if so does the answer lie in extreme behaviour; after all, eating nothing but wild foraged food for an entire year is certainly somewhat extreme? Indeed, whilst believing that extreme situations require extreme solutions, I could, nonetheless, simply be believing this according to the dictates of underlying and dysfunctional patterns. In that case, I live merely to dig a deeper and darker hole from which there is truly no escape. Conundrums! Sisyphus here we come.

This fascination with uncovering the most significant contributing factors to the experience of the present moment lies, in part, due to what I consider to be the influence of two factors that, on the face of it, are both extreme and both happening right now: 100 % vegan wild food diet with its unique challenges, stresses and strains, and love in its cruelly unrequited aspect, again with its own unique sorrows , stresses and strains. Everyday now I burst into tears at random moments and am unable to function effectively if at all - in spite of taking even further extreme measures, about which I'll probably write in a later blog. Today it was Alexander Pope's poetic Essay on Man that set the tears flowing, touching as it does on themes that have always struck me deeply.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Between heaven and earth we reside in the absurdity of being, so wonderfully described here, yet also given astute philosophical expression by Thomas Nagel in one of my favourite books - that offers very little in the way of answers: The View from Nowhere. And yet one (absurd) escape from the absurd 'between' is to live at the extremes ? Today's recipe then is an extreme one taken, perhaps, from an imaginary cook book entitled Last Supper Recipes of the Sorrowful Young Werther: Yew Berry Tart.

If you know anything about the toxicology of yew, you might consider this recipe as being the plant-based wild food foragers version of the notorious Japanese Fugu or blow fish dish. Hence, careful preparation is everything.

Makes two individual tarts

Ingredients
For the pastry:
5 oz (150g) arum flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) sweet chestnut flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) wild oat flour
1 1/2 oz (50g) mixed wild grass seed flour
3 ½ oz (100g) walnut oil or badger fat (or a mixture)
1 tbsp 3x concentrated yew berry juice
1 tbsp of garden-wall-overhang verjuice or stag's horn sumac extract
a little water if necessary

For the crème Patisserie:
1pt (570ml) cherry plum kernel milk
3 pt (1.8 L) water
1 large handful dried sun blanched carragheen seaweed
3 ½ oz (100g) 5 x concentrated wild pear juice
2 oz (60g) arum flour
For the fruit topping
10 ½ oz (300g) fully ripened yew berries
5 sweet wild apples
a cup of wild apple juice
a heaped teaspoon of hedgerow jam and a tablespoon of water to make a glaze

Method

Pastry:
Thoroughly sift the flour into a bowl. Add in the fat/oil and work it all in with your fingertips until you are left with a crumb-like consistency. Make a well in the centre and pour in the sumac/verjuice and yew berry syrup. Gradually mix with the flour to form a smooth dough – but don’t over work it. Add the some chilled spring water if necessary. Roll into a ball, wrap in cling film or put in a plastic bag and cool in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Crème patisserie:
Boil the seaweed in the water for 30 minutes, allow to cool slightly then stain through muslin. Simmer gently until you are left with about1/2 pt. Set aside to cool. Grind 2 large handfuls of prewashed and dried cherry plum stones. Transfer to a bowl with 2 pt hot water. Stir for a minute and allow to stand for 15 minutes. Strain off the liquid and boil down to reduce by half, mix in the pair juice concentrate then leave to cool. Once cooled whisk together with the seaweed extract and chill.

Take the pastry and form into two separate balls. Roll each one out in turn by first slightly squashing down on a lightly arum floured work surface. Roll out until it’s about 2 mil thick and large enough to line a 4”/10cm greased flan case; I use the ones with detachable bottoms – much easier to remove when cooked. It’s also just under an inch (2.5cm) deep. Line each case leaving about a 1/2cm overlap. Then line the other case. Press the index finger and thumb of one hand together. Squash the overlap into this with the index finger of the other hand, working around the top of the tarts to create a regular pattern. Allow the bases to rest for an hour in the fridge or even freezer. Then, prick the bases several times with a fork. Bake for 15 minutes at 180 deg.C until they are just very slightly coloured. In the meantime, juice 3 sweet wild apples. Peel and core another two and cut lengthways into thin slices. Stew these in the apple juice for a couple of minutes. Then remove from the juice, set aside and allow to cool. Rewhisk the chilled crème patisserie and spoon into the tart bases, leveling it out to leave enough room for the fruit.

Fruit topping:
Remove the seed from each yew berry using a pair of tweezers without damaging it in any way. Working in from the outside place individual berries on top of the crème patisserie forming ever smaller concentric circles of berries. Keep doing this until you are left with a 1 ½ “ (4cm) circle of exposed crème patisserie in the centre. Peel and core the apples and cut thin slices approx 2 mm thick. Boil these in apple juice for 15 seconds, remove from juice and set aside . Once cooled arrange the apple slices in an over lapping and circular fan pattern. Heat the jam with the juice in a small saucepan reducing it to thicken. Use this to glaze the top of each tart using a pastry brush or carefully dripping on with a spoon.

Tips and WARNING

It is easiest to collect yew berries by laying a sheet or blanket under a fruit laden tree and then giving the branches a good shake. ALL parts of the yew are extremely poisonous EXCEPT the flesh of the berry - so they say. This, then, includes the seed, which must be very carefully removed. Also, when making the yew berry syrup, remove the seeds this way first rather than crushing the whole fruit first. This tart also works very well with bilberries and wild strawberries in particular, but also with many other fruit.

Although this recipe is both somewhat extreme and absurd it does serve to illustrate some important points. Firstly, trying to mimic more conventional dishes using entirely wild ingredients is extremely challenging, time consuming and prone to failure. Perhaps more importantly, the more determined one is to utilize the full range of food plants potentially available, the greater the chance of poisoning. This point is quite obvious; in the case of yew berries and other such foods (cherry plum kernels) though the problem lies in their toxicologically ambiguous status.

.I have never seen conclusive scientific proof that the flesh of the fruit is 100% safe to eat in quantity. Information in the literature is often contradictory and confusing on this specific point - and often poorly referenced. The toxic substance taxine found in the leaves bark and seeds, but reportedly absent from the red flesh of the fruit (aril) may, for all I know, still be present in trace amounts in the fruit. If that is the case then making concentrated yew syrup would be problematic as would consuming a large quantity of fruit. I like to dry them to concentrate the sweetness so would dearly love clarification on this point. About 10 years ago after making my first batch of yew berry syrup I contacted Kew gardens in London to get clarification on this issue. After a month with no response - and somewhat frustrated, I imagined what response I'd get if I wrote again telling a rather twisted porker. Would it elicit immediate clarification? Describing myself as a cook working at an old people’s home, I'd mentioned that it was a lady there called Grace's 100th birthday. The staff and residents, I'd explain, knew of my home wine making and were keen for me to bring some in to celebrate the occasion. Only having a few bottles of elderberry wine and yew berry wine, I'd explain that I was planning to take in both, although I wanted to know for absolute certainly if the yew wine was safe to consume. Of course, I didn't do this! Nevertheless, I have just written to the relevant department so will hopefully have an answer within not too long a time?

Wild food wise, what else have I been up to apart from picking lots of fairy ring mushrooms?

Of course, the main thing has been trying to eat 3 wild food vegan meals a day. It's difficult. The challenges are made clear by nutritionist Simone Food (no joke, real name) who has been helping me recently. Read her comments and analysis here.

A typical dinner at the moment might be something like the following.

Roasted burdock root, apple and chestnut stuffing, fairy ring mushrooms, sea beet and a mixed seed/grain roti. The roti consists of chestnut and wild oat flour, mixed grass seed flour, ground walnuts, and the seeds of the following plants: love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena), sea sandwort (Honckenya peploides) and sharp rush (Juncus acutus).

Inspecting hard rush and wild asparagus after jogging 5 miles - hence the tracksuit bottoms

Hard rush seeds (tiny seeds within the individual small seed pods shown here) - edibility unknown.

Sea sandwort with seeds

Love-in-a-mist seed pods and seeds

Apart from this I've set myself a new goal: to make 150 fruit leather rolls by 1st November. There is a very good reason for this that I will explain later. So far I've made 12.

Fruit leather rolls

Cherry plum fruit leather composition No.1
(click on picture for surface of Mars effect)

Finally, and importantly, I've been admiring the local wild life. The deductive method can be most satisfying when the conclusion deriving from fairly basic knowledge proves to be correct.

What is this beautiful caterpillar, I thought? It has a 'tail' so must belong to the hawk moth family? It's feeding on some sort of spurge. We're by the sea so perhaps it's sea spurge. Perhaps then this hawk moth caterpillar feeding on spurge is a spurge hawk moth larvae (Hyles euphorbiae)? All correct I think! OK, I didn't deduce the Latin!

Eating 100% foraged food for a year. Week 2-3: July 6-18th

2009-07-19T02:40:00.000-07:00

Mermaids and Munchies

It's been a really difficult few weeks, what with the mermaids AND the munchies. I feel hungry quite a lot of the time especially when I cycle - which is most days. Well, it's day 18 of this year-long attempt to eat just foraged food and so far I've only felt like packing it in 18 times. That's quite good/bad - delete as appropriate. The truth is I'm not sure. Certainly it represents a heavy dose of realism that seems to inform my thought of late - friends call it negativity, but what do they know, they're not realists. Even if it was bad it would still be good or rather irrelevant because I'm taking this a day at a time. After 24 hours the day is forgotten. Lucky then that my memory is like a goldfish. I forage around all day in my bowl, go to sleep and voila, clean slate, what a fascinating goldfish bowl - never been here before.

I survived my first social occasion with flying colours - at least I think so. This was a barbecue last week. I knew that it would be possible to knock up a half descent salad by rooting about the large garden - actually, as it turns out, probably easier to do in deepest darkest February than at the height of summer - but given that it was a BBQ I didn't want to be left out with nothing to stick on the grill. I was delighted then to find a perfectly dried cluster of Pale Oyster mushrooms on a beech log. OK, perhaps fresh would have been a little better, nevertheless sometimes you can come across large fresh specimens only to discover that they're full of maggots. So, climatic elements had conspired to perfectly preserve this particular young specimen at its absolute best. Only 20 minutes of soaking in spring water was needed to reveal its full potential. What had seemed like a small quantity soon filled the bowl. BBQed till crisp on the outside but hot and succulent within, it was delicious. This was served with a salad the notes on which can be seen in the picture below. I lost the pad so will have to zoom in to see what was in it. (note: clicking on all these pictures makes them huge - that's how I could read it).

It consisted of ground elder, perennial wall rocket, sea purslane, smooth sow thistle, prickly sow thistle, crushed nettle tops, nasturtium leaf and flower, wild rose petals, immature crow garlic seeds, brine pickled cherry plums, walnuts, garlic mustard and Duke of Argyle's tea plant (goji leaf). This was served with a not entirely successful dressing - because the seaweed wasn't processed properly giving rise to off flavours, made with spring water, carragheen seaweed, wild garlic bulbs, sea water, dwarf quince juice and dittander flowers.

A typical day/meal's forage produces the following sort of medley right now: things to eat and a few items for experimentation. On a daily basis I'm pretty much just copying the menu of my trial run for this two years ago - with a few improvements.

As a thunderstorm broke outside, rather than stay in snug and warm, a friend and I decided to dash out and become imbued with a spark of that primal energy. Did that happen? Certainly it provided the opportunity to find my first Boletus mushroom of the year, an Oak Bolete (Boletus appendiculatus). True it looks somewhat decrepit but was nonetheless quite edible.
Served with a rustic acorn and wild garlic leaf curd pasta it was quite tasty - especially with a little fat hen and a few dried morels thrown in.

Breakfast itself has improved as well courtesy of the Bristol community allotments and council flowerbeds that I liberated a few excess dandelion roots from in the spring. Actually, 3 hours of digging allowed me to gather enough roots for three weeks worth of dandelion root coffee - two teaspoons per mug. At the time I air dried the roots, only getting around to roasting and grinding them the other day: 20 minutes at 220 degrees Celsius, turning over once.

At the same time I took the opportunity to try something new - roasting some of my dried breakfast chestnuts. Yet another excellent wild coffee was discovered. Of course, chestnut coffee is a very traditional wild roast but, in the past at least, I've considered that it's a bit of a waste of good, plump, sweet and nourishing chestnuts.

As for the cherry wine I started two weeks ago, I can only describe it as rampaging - the yeast that is. Of course, this is most likely down to the secret ingredient. I've decanted the infant wine once already - cooking the excess yeast with salt and wild greens. "That doesn't sound very nice", you say. You're right! After decanting I added 1 litre of genuinely wild cherries to provide additional sugar and nutrients for the yeast, but also to balance the acidity (the previous cherries supplying the wine were foraged from a hedgerow but were a cultivated variety nonetheless). On the next decanting I'll boil up a few oak leaves with some cherry juice to round the flavours off with some additional tannin.

There are several reasons for making wine. In the first place it's a good source of calories, in the second place it will allow me to drink occasionally when going out. Also, after a touch of unmentionable tweaking, I will be able to use the alcohol as a preservative for all sorts of things - fruits, roots, fungi etc. That's just a few of the positive reasons for producing some alcohol, sorry, wine. The negative and potentially dangerous side of the equation comes in its calculated use as a sedative to lesson the pain of ambiguously unrequited love. Falling head over heels, heels over head, falling, falling, falling...... in love with a mermaid is both tragic and beautiful, dangerous but wicked magic.

Above and below: Genuinely wild cherries (Prunus avium)

Genuine wild love (Amo insania)

Until my dream is realized then I must bathe alone or with watercress and pretend I'm having a good time. No need to waste good water after all.

A bath tub full of watercress combined with 15 burdock roots, some red goosefoot, oak-leaved goosefoot, spear-leaved orache, fat hen, goji leaf, a kilo of hogweed flower buds, wild garlic bulbs, dittander, spring water and sea salt makes quite a good soup - especially when served with wild seed bread. Ah, wild seed bread and, as I expected to arrive at the beginning of this journey, the first of many toxicological conundrums. Below is a picture of sea buckthorn seed collected last year. The berry is incredibly nutritious and the seed a valuable source of oil and other vitamins, minerals, amino acids etc. This was what was left over after one particular method of juice extraction. Seeds, bits of twig and very fine sand.

The problem is two-fold. First, how can one separate - on a small scale, i.e at home - the seed from the thin outer sheath to reveal the seed. Below you can see the black seeds after removing the outer sheath - one seed still enclosed within.

The second issue concerns the possible toxicity of the black seed casing itself. Information is hard to come by. Basically it's impossible to efficiently separate the two so they must be ground up together. Last week I ate 200g.

Of course, my wild bread didn't consist only of sea buckthorn seeds but, additionally, comprised escaped rye grains (infected), ribwort plantain seeds, tall fescue grass seeds and false oat grass seed (infected) - although not absolutely sure on the latter's identification. Grass seeds are something I've always steered clear of due to the risk of ergot poisoning.

False Oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius) showing both seeds and ergot formations.

This year seems to be especially bad. Of course the ergot can be separated from the grain with relative ease during winnowing and sieving, Nevertheless it means that grasses with tough husks can't be rubbed to aid there removal before all the ergot is manually picked out. Also the question remains as to whether the washed grain is impregnated with the Claviceps fungal mycelium and, if so, is that toxic also? So far I've eaten about 500g grams or ergot infected wild grass seed (after separating the obvious Claviceps fruiting bodies and washing well). There have been no symptoms of poisoning.

Another area of concern is the fungi. Of course, many are both edible and distinctive such as the beautiful Dryad's Saddle (Polyporus squamosus). The one I found this week was interesting for it's ability to correct a mistaken belief on my part. No, it wasn't that 'one shouldn't eat ergot infected wild grass seeds' but, rather, that the fungus can fruit generously from the same tree more than once in the same year.

On the first occasion back in late March I cursed after coming across the mushroom when it was huge and maggot infested. There hadn't even been a small piece I could wrestle from the squirming mass for the pot. Basically I 'd thought, 'Oh well, there's always next year'. But then a few days ago there it was again. Even more splendid and magnificent than the first time. I needed a bigger basket!

I served this (cooked) with steamed sea beet and roasted burdock root. As a treat I followed this superb meal with wild grass, sedge and various-other-things seed bread with added blackberries and hot birch sap syrup! Ummmm, my first real treat. Comfort food indeed!

These blackberries, from my first real harvest of the year, set me thinking: Why don't we eat unripe blackberries? Is it because, as my mother informed me the other day, I'd most likely get a case of the .....actually, I can't remember what she called it now.....but some strange word that meant stomach ache. Anyway, that didn't put me off an experiment: unripe green and unripe pinkish blackberries treated in different ways. Below you can see them in brine. Later I'll put them in vinegar or oil - if I can get it. The second experiment involves candying them. This I've also begun. Unfortunately because I've used conventional sugar I won't be able to try them - unless I come off this 100% foraged diet.

Another experiment. The immature seeds of Tilia species (Lime trees). Richard Mabey in his classic food for free mentions that during the 19th Century a French chemist used them to created a chocolate substitute, "by grinding up a mixture of lime flowers with lime fruits, the spherical capsules that follow in July and August." Mabey goes on to say that, in fact, "the paste tastes nothing like chocolate but is an intriguing confection for all that." On the basis of this I experimented a few years ago. Nothing like chocolate indeed. Eventually I turned the paste into lime 'chocolate' biscuits which, actually, tasted very good. Nevertheless, this chocolate theme needs more exploration.........

Breakfast on a trip to London.

The stress I feel at present is so great that I really think I might have a nervous breakdown. My worries are all, ultimately, financial. I can't afford to pay the rent or do anything at all other than paint flowers with fungal spores, reedmace pollen and cherry plum tree resin and hope the problem will magically go away. It won't. That is why I feel this project is doomed to failure from the outset. No funding, not enough income to pay the rent, no time to put on extra foraging courses or write more magazine articles because foraging requires enormous commitments of time and energy.
I feel very sad but, of course, this is just the welcome of what most people call 'the real world'.

2009-07-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

The year-long wild food adventure begins!

1st-5th July
Bee The Change

I'll define the terms of this wild food project in a later blog. I'm too busy right now as I need to start thinking about dinner - what will it be, where will it be found, how long will it take to process the particular ingredients that may or may not be found? Is there a magical tree where I can harvest more time?

I woke on the first day of this month, the first day of my year-long endeavor feeling utterly famished at the daunting prospect of the year to come whilst gasping for a coffee - my main source of sustenance of late. My recent diet, for the past 6 month at least has, to put it bluntly, been utter crap. But love is an illness and I've suffered deeply. In short, my preparation for this challenge has been a disaster - at least emotionally and mentally. But I don't really want to say too much about that.
No coffee but, fortunately, a good supply of that headache banishing miracle plant feverfew. Caffeine withdrawal headaches can be as bad as the acutest migraine for which feverfew is renowned as an effective herbal treatment. Still, no caffeine jolt to shock me awake.......

Feverfew Tanacetum parthenium

...........but then I began blending up some sweet chestnuts from my stores to make some chestnut porridge. Fortunately or unfortunately -I'm really not sure which, because the blender was standing in a puddle of water and the usual toxic mess that invariably accompanies my cooking, after shaking it a bit I screamed and dropped it. Why? Because I received a massive electric shock! Who needs coffee!!

This put me in a good mood, hence morning playtime with the porridge's accompanying stewed cherry plums.

Actually, I discovered something very interesting about the pan scrapings that make up the eyes here. But that's another story with some exciting culinary possibilities.

No coffee but shocked into life nonetheless my mind turned to thoughts of my favourite tea: lime blossom tea or, strictly speaking - for the pedantic, tisane. I have moved to Boughton in Kent for this project and have only been here a few months. You can imagine my delight then at discovering that lime trees line the playing field just a short walk from my front door.

Tilia europaea

I picked this for hours as the blossom season is short - usually only a week or two at the end of June and begining of July. Up north, of course, it will be later. Here's the freshly gathered blossom lying on my table prior to drying. Spreading it out this way for allows the hundreds of tiny black beetles to fly off and congregate around the window to await release.

Then came something unexpected. Bees love to forage for lime blossom with its fragrant pollen as do I but the general buzz from the tree was that from large bumble bees. It became louder and disconcertingly louder but was not the bumble bees........ A huge humming, buzzing, swarming amorphous cloud had descended upon the playing field. After about an hour the swarm headed, surprisingly, not for a lime tree but for a lone sycamore. There it settled into a heaving noisy mass of bees.

I was in for an educational treat because cometh the hour cometh the man. Bee man!

......with his tools.

And he sets to work.

First he tries to bring the swam within reach by pulling down the branch. He attaches a rope to the branch to aid the process. But who will hold the other end? Finding his small audience too scared to come any closer, lateral thinking was required.

A wheelie bin from the adjacent row of council houses should do the trick although, having just been emptied perhaps that won't be heavy enough?

It isn't but there are plenty where that one came from. So he adds another to increase the weight. Who would have thought a humble bin could cause such a buzz with its amazing pulling power? But then, of course, these are no longer bins, rather they have become essential tools in the hive capturers trade.

With the swarm in reach from the top of his ladder there's no need to cut down the branch, just carefully but with vigorous intent, he shakes the congealed swarm into a temporary box of a hive........

.....brings it down and places it on a ready laid out sheet.

The open side of the box faces the ground, one side being wedged up to allow the rest of the swarm to migrate down to join the rest of the bee colony.

Job done? Bee man isn't so sure as he looks back up amongst the sycamore branches.

It seems that half the colony is still up there, perhaps including the all important queen bee?

Time to carefully cut away the branch after all.

Now most of the colony is contained the successful results of all this activity can bee displayed.

The all important wedge.

It takes several hours for most of the bees to join their boxed brothers and sisters - the perfect opportunity to sit, chat and learn from the bee man himself. Then it's time to spray the wings of the last few stragglers. That adversely effects their ability to fly so rather than buzz about they just give in and head for the box. Time to wrap things up.....

......literally.

It's a wrap!

Bee man makes off with his haul after a successful day.

The temporary hive goes in the boot of the car for a short ride. I'm kindly allowed to go back to the house to follow the story.

First, the bees are left as they are overnight before being transferred to a small temporary hive.

Some days later they are placed in a bigger hive with more racks.

Far too soon to see the next stage but I was curious as to how the honey is separated from the honeycomb. One whole side of the waxy structure is carefully cut away with a sharp knife to expose the honey in the honey cells. Then, the racks are placed one or several at a time in the manual spinning contraption shown below. The honey spins out and is left at the bottom of the bucket for collection. Fascinating.

Back to the foraging. I gave the above a lot of attention because many people have asked me if, during my year eating solely wild and foraged food, I'd be eating honey? My answer has always been that if I knew how to capture a wild swarm and had somebody to instruct me in the art of bee keeping then perhaps I would. Nevertheless, I have always added, not only have I never seen a wild swarm, even if I were so lucky I would not know what to do. Well......

Not being vegan I need not address the issue of honey consumption that divides some of them. Is it or isn't it a vegan product? I mention veganism simple because for the first month of this wild year my diet will in fact be 100% vegan. To that end I will not be ravenously gorging on pots of honey a la John Lewis-Stemple (The Wild Life - A Year of Living on Wild Food) nor, again a la Lewis-Stemple, will I be roaming the land with a shot gun in an orgy of hunting and butchering. For me the predominant interest is in the utilization of plants in creative ways that can bring forth their full culinary versatility and varied sustenance.

Over the past few days I've made a couple of different soups - 15 portions of each. The first one is rose hip soup. These where rehydrated from my dried stores. I boiled 15 kg (their fresh weight).

Once cool enough to handle the cooked pulp was pushed through a sieve to leave the seeds.

The resulting liquid was quite thick as, apart from the pulped flesh of the hips, it still contained all the little hairs that can act as an irritant to the skin and throat if consumed.

Nevertheless, for the first time I decided not to further strain this as to do so in order to remove the hairs would also remove the lovely pulp. Instead I added 2 kg of wave exposed seabeet roots.

Below the root can be seen in cross-section.

These were boiled in spring water for 30 minutes. And mixed with 300g of cooked and blended wild garlic bulbs.

A large handful of Herne Bay sea salt was added. To be mixed in when serving I prepared some dittander flower seasoning.

First the flowers where stripped off the stem.

Then they where air-dried for two days on a windowsill.

Once fully dried they where ground to a powder. Half a teaspoon is quite sufficient per bowl of soup. This pungent spice is quite wasabi-like in flavour.

Last year I made spicy rose hip and beetroot soup - now one of my favourites.

The one I've just made is the nearest equivalent I could come up with but using only wild sourced ingredients. Indeed, much of what I'll be doing will involve trying to adapt more conventional recipes to 100% wild/foraged versions.

Then came my first disaster: Seaweed soup.

Seaweed soup in itself is fine but a combination of dulse, laver, kelp, carragheen and serrated wrack seaweeds proved impossible for my liquidizer to cope with. Consequently, after cooking the above seaweeds, I was forced to chuck them on the compost heap and start again. At least I did manage to squeeze out all the liquid after cooking for a few hours in spring water. This became the stock base for my second attempt. On that ocassion I gathered about one kilo of each seaweed, sun-dried them until crisp before grinding them to a powder. This I mixed with a combination of spring and sea water and cooked together with 1.5 kg of burdock root.

That's 30 portions of soup put aside. Perhaps I'll do another to keep things varied this month - nettle, fat hen and watercress maybe. For each soup though I need to find some sort of nourishing and sustaining potato substitute. Not that easy. To that end I began collecting and processing reedmace rhizomes this week. Collecting them is a messy business as they need to be prized from the most noxious smelling pond or ditch mud. A good wash was in order of both the rhizomes and myself - in the bath of course, just not at the same time.

Once scrubbed clean the starchy core needs to be extracted. Below you can see a cross-section of the rhizome showing the starchy but, nevertheless, fibrous core.

It took me about an hour to remove these from their outer casing.

The stringy cores were then pulled apart and dried in the sun.

Then ground and sieved....
...to give reedmace rhizome flour.

Actually, for quantity of starchy material, the height of summer is the worst time to do this. The winter is best when the starch content is higher. This flour will not be going in my watercress soup. For that, once the core has been extracted, it will be boiled and mashed in spring water then strained to leave the fibres behind. These can be discarded (actually, I've a better plan) whilst the vegetables can then be cooked in the starchy liquid. I'll do that next week. This week must be, and has been, all about gorgeous ripe cherries and their daily harvest.

The cherries shown above and below are a cultivated variety that just happen to be in the hedgerow along a footpath. Genuine wild cherries are just about ripe but I'm leaving them for a week to sweeten up.

After gathering about 20kg of mixed variety cherries from about 5 different trees I went to wash them in spring water. Not, of course, because I plan to wash everything in such a wonderful way but, rather, simply because I needed to get a few gallons of the vibrant stuff.

Viva my local spring!!!

With such a good haul of cherries there lay many possibilities, the first being simply to boil some, extract the juice and bottle it.

Without overloading the pan and letting it all boil over - honestly.

Two bottles for this month and three for my winter store cupboard.

Much more fun - unbelievably intense fun, lay in the making of my wild year's first wine, in the traditional style. First crush the cherries.....

....then bottle in a suitable sterilized container. I found three of these put out with somebody's rubbish in Brixton a few years ago. They have proved to be invaluable. Well worth the mutterings and cursing I received when trying to squeeze onto an already packed tube train with them.

But what about yeast? Should I try for a spontaneous wild fermentation or help the process on its way somehow? I think the latter will produce just marginally less unpredictable results. A few years ago I made a completely wild bullace plum wine that fermented out really well. I used the skins, which had a really nice looking yeast bloom on them, to start an initial culture. Unfortunately they aren't available right now so I had to look elsewhere. The following picture shows the fruit of what I think - but am not absolutely sure - is Berberis darwinii. Clearly though the skins reveal a promising looking bloom.

I put these together in some cherry juice sweetened boiled and cooled spring water. This was then left in a warm place for three days. As you can see the yeast had become fairly active.

Time to add to the juice. (Below; only two days after adding the starter culture fermentation appears to be going well). Fingers crossed. Later I'll introduce a little tannin and greater acidity by way of some staghorn sumac berry extract.

Some of the other cherries were boiled and squashed through a sieve to make fruit leather. This is the first time I've done this in my recently purchased food dehydrator.

The results were excellent although rather too sweet. Genuine wild cherries are much better for this as the sweetness is counter balanced a delicious acidic twang. But, hey, sugar rush here we come!
I also stoned and dried some of the fresh cherries and put them to dry with the fruit leather. Stoning these took 4 hours!

Mind you, the results are excellent

Now I have my first ingredient for my 100% wild foraged Christmas pudding. "Pucker", "happy days", as a well known chef would probably say!

The Pearl of Great Price

2008-06-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's been a strange week, or should I say weak? This strange week has a recipe, the ingredients are purely verbal and can be found in condensed form amongst the following quotes - beware though, it's a very potent and potentially dangerous recipe:

"Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. 'Co-incidence' means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time..." Milan Kundera

"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents." William Burroughs."

"People who ingest the wild, whether plants or landscapes, do something civilized people never do, they take inside themselves the wildness of the world; they eat the Wild Redeemer. In that moment something unique happens, some invisible thing enters inside them. And when that happens everything changes. They become aware that there are intelligences in this world far older than the human and that the human and the older intelligences of the world are intended to make contact" Stephen Harrod Buhner

Within an eight-day period I found beauty, pain and death. It started with a beautiful pearl,

(encased within the hidden confines of a Herne Bay oyster)

a visit to the Dalai Lama in Nottingham, whilst often immobilized and utterly crippled by pain,

and pulling a dead man from the river Stour - an event that has left me feeling unexpectedly traumatised.
Given that all these events occurred within an eight-day period it offers, I suppose, a fairly condensed narrative history, a merely curious story perhaps, but certainly a history bound by fortuities and magic that unnerves me, even scares me or - to reflect that sense of uneasiness in another way, in my most neurotic of perennial questions - a question become mantra: does it mean anything at all; does it mean nothing; is the spontaneity of complete chaos and randomness the architect of such happenings or magic the true creator? Where does truth and meaning lie - in the realms of objectivity or in the dynamics of mutual co-creation beyond the bounds or divisions of subjective/objective?
Buhner speaks of the Wild Redeemer - capitalizing Nature as the supreme spirit in contrast yet not necessarily opposed to Christ - Christ the pearl, Christ as the traditional Redeemer - as the one to save us all from the state of hopeless sin and its consequences:
"....the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."
The implied analogy was that the Kingdom of Heaven was of such worth that his disciples should gladly be willing to give up their wealth and comfort to obtain it. Christians typically take the parable to mean that heavenly riches are far greater than the full sum of all worldly riches. Though the idea is not present in the text, some also teach that Jesus is the pearl that some men found, and sold all for, and became his disciples, hoping for an eternal kingdom." Wikipedia
Today I know two things: my health is so bad and I'm in such diabolical pain that, although not being gladly willing to give up wealth and comfort, it has been forced upon me. In the last few days I've lost several thousand pounds (and am set to loose more) due to my physical inability to run foraging courses and events that I have been forced to cancel. Things are so bad that I can no longer afford to pay rent on the house where I was supposed to be living (but never actually had time to move into) and have, today, been forced to move out off. The vicious cycle or, perhaps more aptly, the downward spiral, has meant that being physically unable to gather wild food I am becoming weaker, becoming weaker I am less and less able to feed myself. Weakness compounds weakness, pain compounds pain and restful healing has become a mere cherished dream. All the Wild Redeemer can do for me now is, not save me from a state of sinfulness and its consequences but, rather, save me from a state of stubborn stupidity and its particular dire straits. First let me explain more prosaically about pain, pearls and death.
PAIN
About seven weeks ago a friend (plus something more) asked me to help her move from Canterbury to Bristol. She hired a van that I was to drive; we loaded it up with the accumulated stuff of life and set off, driving for 4 1/2 hours without a significant break. That night my back muscles - I expect the Longissimus muscles running down either side of the spine, went into painful spasms that kept me awake all night. Over subsequent weeks up until today the pain has ebbed and flowed - although the last few weeks have punished with nothing but a continuous high tide of ferocious pounding wave upon stormy wave of agonizing pain. I've spent over £400 on chiropractic, acupuncture, shiatsu massage and various other therapies - some providing short-lived temporary relief, others merely aggravating the problem.
Initially, after a month, the main problem was sleep loss due to the continuous wakeful inducing and cattle prodding nature of the pain's sheer relentlessness. Not wishing to take any conventional medication I turned to wild lettuce for its sedative properties - this amounted to about 300g of fresh whole plant or the extracted juice from the same quantity.

(It is the bitter white liquid that has the sedative properties.)

It worked a treat and I could finally slumber in peace. The temporary respite that I mistook for healing led me to do something very stupid: I ran two back-to-back 12 1/2 hour foraging courses over one weekend - finding six hours between the first and second to prepare for that second one when I ought to have been sleeping. Being so busy attending to the class I skipped dinner after not having allowed for time to prepare a completely wild alternative. That was a terrible mistake. The day after both (very successful) courses I really felt so exhausted I thought I might die (terribly ironic given comments in an email I received from one of my weekend foragers: "We wish you all the best with your 'wild food year'; may the energy levels continue. On the amount you ate on Sunday that must surely be an advert for foraging.") From that day on (5th May) pain became my increasingly vocal and irritating companion.
Six months earlier I'd bought tickets to go and hear the Dalai Lama speak at the Nottingham Arena so like the stupid Transcaucasian Kurd in one of Gurdjieff's stories, having paid my money and in spite of my wise friend Lucy's sound advice not to bother going but to stay and rest instead, off I went to be enlightened. Here's the Kurd's tale:

This Transcaucasian Kurd once set out from his village on some business or other to town, and there in the market he saw in a fruiterer's shop a handsomely arranged display of all kinds of fruit. In the display, he notice one fruit, very beautiful in both colour and form, and its appearance so took his fancy and he so longed to try it, that in spite of his having scarcely any money, he decided to buy without fail at least one of these gifts of Great Nature, and taste it .Then, with intense eagerness, and with a courage not customary to him, he entered the shop and pointing with his horny finger to the fruit which had taken his fancy he asked the shopkeeper its price. The shopkeeper replied that a pound of the fruit would cost two cents .Finding that the price was not at all high for what in his opinion was such a beautiful fruit, our Kurd decided to buy a whole pound.
Having finished his business in town, he set off again on foot for home the same day .Walking at sunset over the hills and dales, and willy-nilly perceiving the exterior visibility of those enchanting parts of the bosom of Great Nature, the Common Mother, and involuntarily inhaling a pure air uncontaminated by the usual exhalations of industrial towns, our Kurd quite naturally and suddenly felt a wish to gratify himself with some ordinary food also; sitting down by the side of the road, he took from his provisions bag some bread and the fruit he had bought which had looked so good to him, and leisurely began to eat .But.....horror of horrors!......very soon everything inside him began to burn. But in spite of this he kept on eating.
And this hapless biped creature of our planet kept on eating, thanks only to that particular human inherency which I mentioned at first.........
And so, just at the moment when our Kurd was overwhelmed by all the unusual sensations proceeding from this strange repast on the bosom of Nature, there came along the same road a fellow villager of his, one reputed by those who knew him to be very clever and experienced; and, seeing that the whole face of the Kurd was aflame, that his eyes were streaming with tears, and that in spite of this, as if intent upon the fulfilling of his most important duty, he was eating real red hot pepper pods, he said to him: "What are you doing, you Jericho jackass? You'll be burnt alive! Stop eating that extraordinary product, so unaccustomed for your nature."
But the Kurd replied: "No, for nothing on Earth will I stop. Didn't I pay my last two cents for them? Even if my soul departs from my body I shall go on eating."
Whereupon our resolute Kurd - it must of course be assumed that he was such - did not stop, but continued eating the red hot chili pods."
(p19-21 All and Everything, G.Gurdjieff .Routledge and Kegan Paul. London 1973)

On the third day of my visit to hear the Dalia Lama speak I had to miss the whole proceedings and remain, instead, lying on my back all day - well, except for a farcical attempt to gather reedmace stems and a few nettles. This involved taking over an hour to walk the 100 metre distance from where I was camping to the bullrush (reedmace) stream. The journey was punctuated by repeated contortions as I fell to my knees doubled up in excruciating pain. I must have looked like a modern dancer rhythmically contorting to the chimes and clashes of an imaginary so-called cutting-edge musically cacophonous beat! Also, being unable to bend down I had to pull the stems from the top thus leaving behind the lovely and firm water-chestnut-like base. No doubt I expended more energy collecting the food than I gained from eating it.

Unfortunately, in spite of the obvious sincerity and wonderfully down-to-earth rapport of the Dalia Lama, contemplating his words just seemed to aggravate my pain - although, admittedly, not contemplating them would probably have produced precisely the same result. Speaking on the somewhat misleadingly described or translated term 'emptiness' - a term much better expressed by the delightfully lucid and straight talking Thich Nhat Hanh by his concept of interbeing, just led to waking daylight nightmares concerning Zeno's paradox. On the previous day His Holiness the Dalai Lama started down the dead end road of beginning to explain the concept of emptiness in respect to the relative illusion of being as it relates to the concepts of coming and going. Who is it that comes and who that goes? The argument was pure Zeno's paradox. Goodbye Tibetan Buddhism Hello Chan! But don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, merely a grumpy pain-fuelled observation - and besides, perhaps I'm just not ready for such a strong burning chili!
At the end of the five days I was well and truly stuffed - in so much pain I could not go home! Fortunately synchronicity threw me an ace card just as I was leaving Nottingham arena in despair: Carmel. She very kindly gave me a buqi treatment, enabling me to find sufficient pain-free resources to make the 200 mile journey back to Canterbury - but only sufficient for that.

Hence this was my breakfast two days later:

Chestnut porridge made with spring water and Mahonia berries
served with
codeine phosphate hemihydrate, paracetamol,
sodium metabisulphite (E223),
pregelatinised starch,calcium stearate, aerosol OT-B (dioctyl sodiumsulfosuccinate and sodium benzoate (E211)),gelatin,
titanium dioxide(E171), erythrosine (E127)
and indigo carmine(E132), shellac,
soya lecithin, 2-ethoxyethanol, dimethylpolysiloxaneand iron oxide (E172)and diazepam, anhydrous lactose, magnesium stearate and microcrystalline cellulose.
AND LUNCH...
Snail, Oyster and limpet Soup

And for dessert

Elderflower tea
with
..... yes you guessed it....
codeine phosphate hemihydrate, paracetamol, sodium metabisulphite (E223),
pregelatinised starch,calcium stearate,
aerosol OT-B (dioctyl sodiumsulfosuccinate and sodium benzoate (E211)),gelatin, titanium dioxide(E171), erythrosine (E127) and indigo carmine(E132), shellac, soya lecithin, 2-ethoxyethanol, dimethylpolysiloxaneand iron oxide (E172)
and
diazepam, anhydrous lactose, magnesium stearate and microcrystalline cellulose.

I had succumbed to the feeling that there was no other choice but to visit men who push the codeine around: the doctor .

One of the mottoes that guides much of what I do - although if you knew me you'd be surprised (but it does apply equally to making a mess and being generally disorganised as well) is, "Do things properly or don't bother doing them at all." In other words, in many situations it's all or nothing with me. Consequently the all of my wild food diet has been so irretrievably compromised by the inclusion of unpronounceable chemical tongue-twisters that nothing now looms large. True, medication isn't food by conventional standards but to my mind that distinction doesn't really exist. In the untamed world food is medicine and medicine food. So the consequences for my project should be self-evident - but I'll say a little more about that at the end.

PEARLS
The reason I managed to hold out for the whole five days in Nottingham - in spite of the foraging obliterating pain was due to oysters and muscles. Knowing how problematic foraging had become due to my back problems, I took up a large bucket of live oysters and muscles. These stayed fresh and alive in a bucket of seawater for three days. So, in spite of the pain and police (I was stopped and questioned on the banks of the River Trent for photographing oysters due to the inherent security issues involved! - well, last year I was stopped and questioned by police for picking daisies so it really came as no surprise) these served me very well.

But all this is besides the point - I want to tell you my pearl story.

A few weeks after crossing the boundary from eating a purely vegetarian diet by collecting snails (except, of course the roadkill element - but the vegetarian reasoning is sound in my opinion), I thought I may as well turn to the abundance of nourishing shellfish that are readily available. For the first time I gathered oysters - twenty in total, and went to my parents' house to cook them. As they boiled in the pan we discussed the possibility of finding pearls. My oysters came from Herne Bay - only seven miles from Whistable which is famous for its oysters. We considered that perhaps pearls were only found in large non-native varieties of oyster living in warmer climes. My argument for this was that because oysters are harvested commercially in Whitstable, if pearls had been found we would all know about it. Those involved in the harvesting and selling would engage in a frenzy of publicity and we'd hear all about the world famous pearly oysters of Whitstable. Given that that has never happened and that thousands of oysters are harvested there every year, I concluded that the probability of finding a peal in a Herne Bay oyster was virtually zero. Of the 20 oysters I was cooking, nineteen of these I removed from the pan and liquidized. The cooking water tasted absolutely sublime so, not ever having eaten a cooked oyster I decided to keep one back. I bit halfway into it when my teeth encountered something hard: a pearl!

DEATH
Death is something that as a culture we shy away from - especially in terms of any truly deep reflection. Of course we see it in films and on television news bulletins daily, and such classic works such as Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying are readily available for anyone in search of a little positive insight regarding the matter. Nevertheless, when encountered raw and in the flesh death's visceral and decomposing immediacy is deeply shocking and disturbing (I think a link to this story would be insensitive just on the off chance that a relative of the man may read it because, of course, for them it's not just another story).
Last week I was carrying out an early evening reccy of a riverside walk prior to a foraging event to make a detailed list of all the wild plants there (of course, due to ill-health I had to cancel anyway). Shortly after arriving a man approached me from the direction I was heading and asked if I had a phone. To cut a long story short, he called the police as we walked down to the suspected dead man he'd seen whilst attempting to retrieve a punctured and deflated dingy from the river. The police arrived and attempted to pull him out - the poor man was face down in the water, his dead weight hindering efforts to negotiate his movement around a large half submerged tree branch . It was difficult to help because of my back pain but as the police officer tried to pull the man clear his colleague who was physically supporting him slipped and fell. On the next attempt she held her hand out to me for additional support and naturally I helped. Up on dry land and still facing downwards, the situation did not touch me at all. True, his puffed up white swollen hands captivated ones attention - yet more in fascination than in disgust or horror.
Walking back with the police and the chap who had found the man the surreal situation arose - because the police woman asked what I did for a living - whereby I found myself explaining briefly about the wild food plants we passed. Then my phone rang and a lovely young lady I'd met several weeks previously in the Lake District was on the other end. What struck me at the time was how wonderfully alive she seemed. Slightly shocked now by what had happened it took a while for her to explain to me who she was - in spite of my hope she would call. As soon as I understood who she was that's when the image of white puffed up decomposing hands flashed before my mind's eye for the first time: vibrant life and death competing for my attention, also there was a complex sense of shame or guilt. Having been so unwell and therefore physically unable to gather sufficient wild food supplies over the proceeding weeks, before departing that night I had said to my parents, half joking, half serious, that if I didn't find sufficient quantities of nourishing food that night then I might as well just throw myself in the river and die .One thing for certain is that I have a new respect for the police - they may hassle me when I'm out taking pictures or picking daisies but to encounter such disturbing events at a frequency way beyond that of the average person takes a certain courage and commitment - it can't be easy.

Chinese proverbs save the day.
I tend to switch from one perspective to the other with disturbing regularity, nevertheless at the moment I'm in a "in-the-magical-universe-there-are-no-coincidences-and-there-are-no-accidents" state of mind. Pearls, Dalai Lama (and by association a number of Chinese proverbs I've been reflecting on these last few days), pain and death all inform my current decision to temporarily postpone my year-long wild food adventure. As I mentioned in a previous post health is number one; it is the pearl, without which you have nothing, can do nothing. Pain has disrupted my ability to harvest from the wild and my diet has been broken with medication. That is fine, I must just be patient; I wish to pursue my wild food adventure and challenge as thoroughly as is theoretically possible, yet as the Chinese proverb says: If you do not change your direction, you are likely to end up where you're heading, and I have no immediate plans to die. Nevertheless, I must do certain things differently for as, yet another delightful Chinese proverb informs us: Insanity is doing the same thing and in the same way and expecting a different outcome! The Dalai Lama spoke insightfully about compassion and that, of course, such compassion is not just something to be outward directed; one must also have compassion for oneself .So when will I begin the challenge anew? Until a few days ago I considered the 1st of July as being most appropriate. That was before I gathered a 16 1/2 kg chicken of the woods fungus with my friend Kris.....

(Actually, this is Kris with the fungus two years ago which was then 13 kg. Below is this year's fungus that Kris helped me lift from the same tree)

(Next year 20 kg!?)

.........He told me that he's currently reading Karl von Clausewitz's On War, and proceeded to tell me that all my current troubles could be summed up in one word: FRICTION - as described by Clausewitz. Cue two final Chinese proverbs:

When men speak of the future, the Gods laugh!
and
A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials

In Clausewitz's philosophy friction refers to the numerous chance events that influence everything and the numerous difficulties that inhibit accurate execution of any preconceived and precise plans. Somewhere between the realms where these two proverbs point there lies the prize of year-long wild food-living success. True, to decide to live on nothing but wild food for a year is a very precise aim, and its two-month 'success' has thrown up many questions - perhaps the most important of which is: has my inability to heal been due to poor or inadequate nutrition or, worse, due to some unknown and perhaps cumulative toxicity? Nevertheless, perhaps even more absurd is to engrave in stone July the first as the day I will begin the endeavour again. I will begin again but no date is fixed. I will begin two weeks after I have been completely pain free without medication. I hope this will be 1st July but it could equally be 2 months or 2 years from now. I am more determined than ever so watch this space. So, no problem. In a world where everything is relative, why worry?

Visiting the nurse the other day, she left the room to consult with a doctor concerning my prescription. On the computer screen was a detailed breakdown of my past medical history. Reading it, I laughed out loud. When the nurse returned, still hunched over with back pain, I said, "Actually I feel fine, at least relatively speaking. Not just fine, but I think I look pretty good as well!" She looked confused so pointing to my medical history I showed her the following gem of accurate reporting:"Patient had problems with sciatica 112 years ago"! For a geriatric I was more than fine!

One final thought, again on the theme of relative notions, on the first day of this project after having eaten my first completely wild meal, I calculated on the basis of 365 x 3 -1 that I now only had another 1694 meals to go. At the time I thought it a fairly small figure and, perhaps, as a result, started to think the project would be slightly easier than I'd originally imagined. Yesterday my perspective shifted. It's a huge number when you consider that we may be only nine meals from anarchy!

Slow Food

2008-05-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

Slow Food: The torturously slow trials and tribulations of one man's attempt to eat nothing but wild food for an entire year.

It's kind of obvious I know, but blogging for me is futile in the sense that nutritionally speaking its value is worse than zero - resting and typing metabolism must be taken into account as sources of food energy consumption. That statement in itself should give you a good insight into my state of mind. Actually, in describing my anxieties and troubles (all of which seem to flow quite freely from the absurd task I've set myself: eating like a Stoneage man in the modern era - when I have so many other commitments other than just feeding myself) I would like to use the phrase, "perhaps I've bitten off more than I can chew". Yet, although it would be incredibly apt, taken literally it seems to imply a surfeit of, no doubt delicious - all be it challenging - nourishing chewables: Succulent, wholesome and delicious chewables, all reflecting a luxurious abundance which is light years away from my current reality - they reside somewhere on planet supermarket no doubt. I'm struggling. I'm struggling big time! I'm struggling spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, socially, philosophically and physically - amongst the many other ways one can struggle. Chewables abound but sourcing them is a full time commitment. I both want and don't want to give up and the ambivalent tension is quite disabling!

So, no time to blog. Time is at a premium and other resources must be called upon: discipline and faith, they're my current allies - despite my repeated efforts to rebel against them in the past. Now I shall get to know them face to face.

All I can offer is a few pictures from the last few days and a few unusual statistics.

Typical meals:

Pot roast pheasant cooked with chestnuts, japanese knotweed, apple juice and winter chanterelles, served with steamed hogweed shoots and stir-fried alexanders root and St.George's mushrooms.

Pot roast rabbit cooked with boletus fungi, sea purslane and wild garlic, served with burdock root mash and steamed sea kale.

...and slow food!

equals....

Steamed sea kale and reed mace stems with stir-fried morels and immature pine cones, served with wild garlic leaf curd cooked snails on acorn and alexanders root toast!

STATISTICS

777 snails take 1 hour to collect, 40 minutes to cook and 1 hour 5 minutes to shell.

777 snails in shell weigh 5 kg 200g.

777 snails gives 2kg 200g of cooked snail meat.

Also made my first wild vinegar mother from birch sap.....

.....and have been filtering sea water for salt

....as well as krauting the Sandor Katz way with sea kale, dittander stems, wild fennel and sea salt.

.......whilst taking advantage of the sun to dry plants for future teas and beers: lemon balm, yarrow, birch leaf, ox-eye daisy, fennel and fever few.

And finally, today's number one find: some lovely chicken of the woods fungi.

Have also been sampling my first attempts at wild wines - intoxicating!

So let's raise a glass to Fergus Drennan, self-proclaimed vegetarian and say, with glutenous snail-like voices, rest in peace vegetarian Fergus......

Better Bread Than Dead

2008-05-08T14:52:00.000-07:00

Better Bread Than Dead

I won't pretend that the last five weeks have been easy. In fact everything has been far harder than I anticipated. This is all because the number one ingredient of any completely wild food diet is not to be found in woodland, field or stream, not even lying ignored, dead and forgotten by the side of the road. In fact, it is neither plant nor animal, neither fungi nor seaweed and, strangely, has no food value whatsoever. And yet, although always present, it never stands still; in times of sadness and moments of pain, like a ponderous tortoise it tortuously creeps, and in times of joy, like a swallow it sweeps - if one wishes to get poetic about it. Which all goes to make this particular quarry far more elusive. It is none other than time itself and, in particular, its successful management.

The foundations of successful time management lie in the ability to be organized generally and to have a plan. And, given that under normal circumstances I'm completely, hopelessly and unforgivably disorganized as well as usually having about 10 rough plans for the day - when one or two would be quite sufficient, things have not been proceeding quite as smoothly as I would have liked.

Speeding up when attempting to slow life down can have dire consequences leading to enforced slowness. Today, or rather, tonight, is such a time; a night for juggling with noughts and hoping for ones. What I mean here is that, again, before even arriving at the presumed central importance of wild food in my year-long experiment there is something else that ties with time in primacy of importance: health. As I sit here sleeplessly with excruciating back pain and a seriously dodgy foot, the author Adeline Yen Mah's reflections on health chime in my ears with ever-louder tinitustic persistence. Reflecting on being thankful for various things in life, she asks us to think about all the good aspects of our own lives. For each, whether it be a happy marriage, beautiful children, financial security, a fulfilling job or a big fat basket brimming full of wild food, she asks us to imagine that particular aspect as being represented by the figure zero. She then goes on to say that good health is number one and that, basically, if you don’t have this in the first place then all you are left with is a big bunch of noughts: 0000000 0000000uch, 000000000h dear! Well, it's 3am and I can't sleep because of this scream-out-loud diabolical back pain that sends me writhing in spasmic contortions of pure agony every time I move. I certainly feel like zero!

Perhaps, given that the way I do things in the first couple of months of this year-long wild food diet is likely to form the foundations for what follows, it may surprise you, given the time-shaken and ill-health of those foundations at the relative outset, that I have already started making bricks to build my wild food sanctuary. Forget mud and straw, water and clay; for sheer density and structural integrity such rudimentary bricks will never compete with my own. What is more, for the greater good of humanity, I have decided to reveal the secrets of their production, including detailed information as to all the superior materials used and the alchemical skills and magic required to create them.

How to make a brick 1
Materials
200g Alexanders root flour
200g Acorn flour
12g Oregon Grape skins
1 tsp Carrageen powder
650ml Spring water
5g Badger fat
Pinch of sea salt

Method

Gather Acorns in October, shell, roughly crush and place in a pillowcase. Stake this down in a clean flowing river for 6 weeks to remove tannin. After this, remove from the river, rinse, grind to a fine paste and spread on trays to dry. Once dried render down to a fine flour in a coffee grinder or similar. In March dig for the Alexanders roots. Scrub clean, grate and lay out to dry for a few days. Once completely dry grind as for the acorns. At any time of the year gather Carrageen seaweed. Dry thoroughly and powder. When collecting the seaweed also gather some seawater. In the winter this can be placed in a tray on top of a radiator to evaporate off the water to leave the salt. At the height of summer this can be solar-evaporated. In April gather ripe Oregon Grapes (Mahonia species) with a good yeast bloom on the skin. Collect water from a natural spring. Now, to make the brick you must combine all these ingredients in the following way: First, boil a teaspoon of carrageen powder in 2 cups of spring water with 2 teaspoons of acorn flour until it thickens substantially. Set aside. Next, in a large bowl mix the acorn and alexanders flour. Add the grape skins, water, salt and warm carrageen mixture. Knead well. Grease a brick tin with badger fat and spoon in the mixture, leaving to slow prove for three days - just as your favourite Italian baker might treat his best breads. If all is going to bricky plan then, at least in the rising department, after this time absolutely sod all should have occurred. On the other hand, a white blanket of mould ought to be completely covering the surface. Using the appropriate magic words: shit, fuck, damn it, scrape this mould off and bake in the oven at 180 deg C for 45 minutes. Remove from oven, cool on a wire wrack, then start building your house or eat.

Of course, this is really a description of my failed attempts to make and bake my first bread from 100% wild ingredients. In a bizarre twist on the Arthurian legend I do not have the problem of being unable to draw my bread-sized Excalibur from the stone-like bread but actually getting it in there in the first place. And yet, I must indeed set out on my own particular wild food grail quest. It is the quest for that magical substance: gluten. Without this or its functional equivalents leavened bread, cakes, pasta, pancakes etc are all off the menu. I've a discouraging sense that the quest for this particular grail will be long and arduous. Saponinic spirits, tannic terrors and oxalatic ogres all raging and inflamed by the ergot evils of St Anthony's blazing fires are the foes that await me, not to mention a whole legion of potentially organ liquifying phytodemons, unnamed and unknown. If your botanical knowledge doesn't stretch this far, I'm alluding to the most common toxic substances I have so far come across in my search for a useful wheat-flour alternative: saponins (Horse Chestnuts), tannin (Acorns), calcium oxalate (Lord's and Ladies tubers), ergot fungus (wild grass seeds). Phytochemicals are simply a range of substances that plants produce that have no food or nutritional value, often serving to protect the plant from disease. Actually, I've just had a very disturbing thought. What if one of the main symptoms of poisoning from one or several of these toxic chemicals is excruciating scream-out-loud muscular spasms of the back??!! Ummm....then again perhaps it's due simply to a lack of magnesium in the diet???

OK, it didn't rise and did feel almost as heavy as a brick but, even in spite of the mould, once cooked it wasn't all bad. There is definitely a strong correlation between the enjoyment or appreciation of food and the amount of work that has gone into its creation. Anthropologist Karan Hardy at the University of York and co tried the bread. Your can hear their fulsome praise here: Farming Today: 05 May 08 Fergus the Forager

I should have got them to taste some of my elderflower, badger fat and cuttlefish egg biscuits. Would they have received such a favourable appraisal? If you have read my foraging column in this month's Ecologist: Respect Your Elders, in which I have written out the full biscuit recipe, you may have reacted like some of my friends with thoughts and comments such as, "What is the point of it?" or, "But nobody's going to bother making that recipe!" In the latter case that's probably true. Nevertheless, there is a point. The recipe for biscuits there - using 100% wild ingredients, is meant simply to illustrate how difficult it would be to produce or obtain even the very common foods that we take so much for granted if, perhaps, through natural disaster or social collapse the conventional ingredients were unobtainable. The attempt to make such things is not a retreat to war-time frugality - in spite of our current so-called war-on-terror, but is a valuable education in itself. Of passing interest, the other day I came across a bit of filming that channel 4 had done with me for their website - an act of attempted redemption on their part, apparently, after giving unchallenged air time to a climate change denier or some such bogey man. Anyway, I'd forgotten about this as it was filmed over 6 months ago, but if I recall I did talk about the joys of such experimental research challenges - I can't listen to it because the sound doesn't work on my computer.

Right, back to the gluten search, to that very education I have just mentioned. Where to begin? As far as I know no native or naturalized British plants contain gluten. The use of carrageen and its capacity to gell and set in my first bread was an attempt to mimic gluten's ability to trap carbon dioxide in rising dough. The use of Mahonia berry skins was my attempt at getting an active yeast culture that would produce the carbon dioxide in the first place. Both failed - the first may have worked but given that no significant yeast fermentation occured its presence became irrelevant. No doubt I could have made a sour dough mixture that would have fermented under its own steam so to speak. In any case, the yeast fermentation is not a problem as I have succeeded here many times before - for instance using mahonia and bullace plum skins started off in wild apple juice solution or using birch sap yeasts.

The first clue and sign of hope that a lightish wild bread can be made came last year. Whist house-sitting for friends I noticed that they had an organic rye flour loaf. In fact, it was the most delicious rye bread I've ever eaten. It was so light and airy that I assumed it must be half rye and half wheat. To my amazement it was 100% rye. I had always assumed that rye didn't contain sufficient gluten to create a light crumb structure, instead producing very dense breads. However, according to Katz in his wonderful book Wild Fermentation, "in rye bread, gluten is not the primary component that traps carbon dioxide produced by fermentation. Rye contains polysaccharide compounds called 'pentosans' which are extremely viscous and enable dough to hold gas." Unfortunately no grasses of the Secale genus grow wild in this country (rye is Secale cereale) but perhaps plants with similar acting pentosans do? Unfortunately Rye Grass is a non-starter. That's in a different genus (Lolium) and is used as a sedative and vasodilator and, reports Elpel in his fantastic 'Botany in a Day', could be poisonous in excess. The search goes on....

Yesterday I attempted to make brick number 2 or, being a little more charitable, I could call it breeze block 1. Yes, after refining the ingredients and method I managed to get the thing to rise by a whole centimetre. Now that's progress! This time it contained the following ingredients: 50g roasted alexanders root flour, 70g acorn flour, 60g reedmace rhizome flour, 40g reedmace seed-head flour, 30g evening primrose seedpod flour, 2 tbspns shredded dried dulse, 1 tsp carrageen powder, sea salt and spring water. Unfortunately it collapsed prior to baking. Nevertheless, although almost equally dense it does taste better than the first one.
This is going to be a hard one to crack and any helpful advice or suggestions would be most gratefully received! Right, I'm off to bed. Maybe I'll dream about wonderful fat loaves falling like manna from heaven. Actually, last week I had the most delightful morel picking dream. Four days later it came true with unsurpassed generosity but that's another story.

So speaking of manna from heaven it's time for my bedtime prayers.....

Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy Name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread....
..................................

2008-04-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

Speeding up to slow down
24/04/2008

Speeding up to slow down; speeding up to mow down; the first reflects one of the terrible ironies of the modern world; the second, one of its tragedies: Roadkill.

The concepts of both tragedy and irony are rich seams for creative inspiration to chip and forage away at in the search for nuggets of truth. As a forager who, since the beginning of April, has been attempting to live the entire year on wild food, I have been forced to explore this dreadful irony. In fact, this particularly exhausting irony is more finely nuanced than you might suppose, as its juxtaposition of opposites has some particularly annoying friends: got to hit rock bottom before climbing back up; you can only completely appreciate a full belly of food when yours has been entirely empty, and other such variations on the theme of apparent contradiction. In fact, I'm coming to realize (not that it isn't completely obvious) that living in the modern world with a regular job, and all the other clutter of modernity, postmodernity - or whatever you wish to call it, is virtually impossible if one wishes to forage for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That, in itself, is a full-time Mesolithic job. And so, in my hectic rush to slow down these past three weeks, only one thing has allowed me to do so. The moment came last week after meeting Adam, the creative explorer of roadkill tragedies (and so much more) at his show, Roadkill: The Last Supper. All his pieces are brimming with painful nuggets of truth - the truth of tragedy and, yet, also the truth of opportunity; the opportunity to change. Look deeply at his works and you may be struck so intensely that you breakdown, burst into tears, as I did, or even laugh hysterically in opposition to your deeper feelings. But, playing positively with the dynamics of contradiction, and looking deeper still, the horrors that cause such passion breakdown into more basic parts: love and compassion, friendship and laughter.

So what led me to react the way I did, to have such a strong emotional reaction? Well, the answer lies in the resurfacing of a painful childhood memory, an event that so traumatized me at the time that its influence touches on many of my beliefs and activities today. It is, for example, why, in part (always in part), I am concerned about roadkill; why I refuse to sell wild food; why I have never smoked and why, indeed, I have issues with any form of external authority or power - be that rules of grammar, teachers, governments or global capitalism.

It was a gloriously warm and windless sunny day in early May 1979. With reckless abandon, nature had decided to cast aside the cold shackling chains of winter, showing off instead her fully verdant spring virility for all she was worth. I was 8 years old and bursting with enthusiasm for all things wild that crawled, hopped, flew or simply hid away from my prying eye. It was the prying eye of identification. Seek, find, name, understand, befriend. That was the childish logic of my daily pursuits and it applied especially to beetles, spiders, butterflies, moths, frogs, toads and newts.

A typical day, then, would see me striding out net in hand to capture things that flew - butterflies and moths, or things that swam - sticklebacks, toads and newts. Having built a small garden pond I was very keen to bring it to life with wildlife riches from what I considered to be the mother pond down the road, so off I skipped to the local park.

Everything was just so perfect - that perfection informed by both relativity and welcoming relief. It had been cold and grey for the previous few weeks and now the relative change in weather fortunes had families out playing games on the grass whilst other groups of people lay sprawled out in homage to the spring sunshine. Around the pond tadpoles were teeming and newts were abundant amongst the weeds. I was feeling particularly chuffed after managing to net both a male and female newt. I retired to the grass to watch them swim about in my jar, imagining my little pond some time in the not too distant future filled with generations of newts now that I had, so cleverly, hooked these two up together. After all, it was obvious from the way they swam that they were now partners for life with a one track mind: make baby newts!

As I lay there two older boys ambled over, admired my newts and asked if I would get them a few. Seeing my reluctance they offered me 10p for every newt I could get. Wow, my pocket money was only £1, and I had to wait a week for that. Now, I calculated, I could earn that with my net in about half an hour. No doubt these boys also had ponds in need of a few newts. Catching 10 newts was a sinch. I returned to the boys, now sitting in a ring that had grown in number to about 6, and triumphantly presented them with a jar of newts. The exchange was done; two fifty pence pieces jangled in my pocket; the sun shone; the day had reached an entirely unanticipated perfection beyond perfect. I walked away and glanced back over my shoulder. The boys (actually 4 boys and 2 girls) had placed the jar at the centre of their circle. As I continued to gaze one of the boys waved me away with a dismissive flick of the hand. Feeling uneasy for the first time I continued to linger, watching as they tipped the water out. I was acutely aware that on a very hot day newts liked to remain cool so this puzzled me. With some boldness, and in spite of again being waved away, I turned back. Perhaps they simply didn't realise that the newts wouldn't like to be out of water in the midday sun? If so, that was surprising because, I thought, older boys and girls, being so much more knowledgeable than me, would have known this. The jar had now been completely emptied of water. One of the boys held his hand over the jar. A cigarette dropped from his mouth - up until this point I had not noticed that everyone there was smoking. On his hands and knees, the only free hand he had that was not supporting his weight was the one covering the newt jar. He removed this to retrieve his cigarette. As he did so two determined newts made a successful bid for freedom. There was much laughter as he fell over trying to retrieve them. This struck me as a perfect moment to pipe up. So I did, suggesting that if there was water in the jar the newts would be quite happy and not try to escape. "You've got your money, now FUCK OFF!", said the boy who had handed over the 50 pence pieces. Suddenly the day of joy and light was taking on a darker hue. More laughter at the shocked look on my face. I explained that the reason I had got the newts, apart from the money, was my understanding that they wanted them for their pond. This statement sent them into convulsions of laughter. "Fuck off", they shouted, "we don't need you any more; we'll do what the fuck we want with them."

I won't give any graphic description, suffice to say, what they wanted included burning them with cigarette butts and mashing and grinding all life from the newts with pounding sticks and and hammering stones. As they laughed merrily with bits of newt splatter on their faces I stood, watched, and cried. Dark is the night without light or reason.

And so with these dark memories locked away I strolled around the gallery, until....

Road Kill ( Light on Reason )

The piece had the following explanation or, rather, observation:

One world famous Squirrel, oil taw, willow lantern-work and three bar stool, coin of the realm and chromium plated steel bolts, oiled rope. When I began working on the squirrel I discovered the skull had all but completely disintegrated. I presume on impact. Further investigation showed broken limbs, ( both fore paws and left hind leg ) massive internal injury, stomach having burst through the abdominal muscles and finally its spine had been snapped in half. Trauma throughout the muscular systems of the animal was evident. I'm reminded of a recent experience with students showing me a podcast of a squirrel being launched into the air via a clay pigeon launcher and the resultant giggles.

I could hear the demented laughter once again, its long-remembering arms dragging me back through time to be surrounded by grotesque newt splattered and contorted faces.

Dark is the night without light or reason. And yet 8 years after that incident, about the time when I must have been the same age as those boys and girls, I was ready to understand through an exploration of my own inner darkness. On a windy night of madness as clouds rushed across the moon I fully explored the complexity of their motivation - its ugly and wicked depravity as well as its deep fear and genuine curiosity so that, in part, I now understand.

Respect is one of the keys; respect not purely represented in action but as intention, as a state of mind. Over the course of the coming year I intend to continue with my wild animal skins project; I intend to continue with a diet that may at times include roadkill. I may even post up a few recipies. There will be stock, wild roots, mushrooms and salt. And yet neither these nor the main roadkill food item will be the main ingredient; the most important ingredient. That ingredient will be respect because respect is the key.

Any roadkill clothes I make and food I cook will all be made with respect in mind. Here I am supported in friendship and agreement with Adam. As he has said and I would say:

"All my pieces contain naturally processed forms which without exception bare in mind the simple premise of working with respect. The processes I use are indigenous in origin and therefore proven to be environmentally benign. However it is not entered into lightly and my understanding comes from the knowledge of what it costs to produce.

My premise is that all synthetic and processed materials have a relative cost and we as adults make a conscious decision regarding the materials we use. Often these decisions are made without a true understanding and therefore due to this fundamental flaw without our true consent.

I entered into making these pieces to highlight the plight of many of the animals under our care and stewardship and believe we have a duty care to protect and sustain the natural spaces still remaining, before we ruin them by exhausting them completely.

The real truth; 'It is easy to turn a blind eye'"

If you read my last blog you will know that I had intended to write about the generosity of saints and, in particular Bristol's St Werburg and England's St George. One supplied me with wild garlic, japanese knotweed, and a roadkill buzzard amongst other things, the other with his eponymous mushrooms. Well, it's a long story and there's no time for it now. At least that protector and defender of animals has put in an appearance: St Francis!

Next time, my trials with wild bread - so far disaster but hopefully, by this time next week, success!!!?

Fergus and Adam looking up to 'The Womble': Road Kill (Queen Mother, Instant Fail, The Progression of Evolution)

2008-04-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

The Caffeine Kick Gets A Kicking
18/04/2008

Four years in a row I've fasted for one or two weeks twice a year - just drinking water. This is a wonderful thing to do - provided you're not anorexic and your health is good. Anyway, the first four days, sometimes even the full fourteen, were always a major arse pain.
I'm partial to a cup or two or three......of strong, stronger, strongest coffee. The first days of such fasts, then, were always dominated by severe coffee withdrawal headaches - excruciating. Then, last year I found out about feverfew and it's reputation as a migraine cure. Well, the herb is WONDERFUL!!!!!!!!!!! I drank three cups on 31st March, three every day until 4 days ago, then one a day and, finally, none. No headaches, and believe me I HAD been caining the caffeine! The only hint of a germinal headache came as I was on the way up to London to see Paul Kingsnorth at his book launch, a few weeks ago now. Unfortunately after 4 station stops I had to text him the following:

"Hi Paul. Was on the train 2 London - even took wild soup and wine, thought about all those stressed and hurried people rushing about at Victoria station, felt nauseous, got off train! Going back home. Really hope it goes well 2night + look 4ward 2 reading the bk! Fergus x"

As soon as I arrived back in Herne Bay I nosed about the local park, found some fever few and ate it. My germinal headache was eradicated at source! I also found some Japanese Knotweed so, arriving home, I stewed it up, this time with windfall dwarf quince and wild apple juice.

Japanese knotweed, in fact, is a fabulous plant and has been serving me very well these past two weeks. However, it is true that in many ways it can drive you mad - wild even. The day before my abortive trip to London I had come across a wonderful quote about the plant that I had forwarded to Paul after using it to conclude an article I had just written on the plant's culinary value. It just seemed so incredibly apt given the subject matter of his new book Real England. Karen Leach, writing for Birmingham friends of the Earth has come up with this delightful analogy:

"a similar monoculture has been creeping into our high streets all over the country, and is similarly tenacious, pernicious and rage-inspiring.

Just as Knotweed is all cloned from one single plant, so the big chains are all cloned from global corporations. Just as Knotweed makes it impossible for the local plant life at its roots, and thus kills off the local insects and the local birds, so the big chain shops kill off the local independent shops around them and thus destroys the local economy. Just as Knotweed will come back again several growing seasons in a row until those of us out there with mallets and rollers are exhausted, so a big supermarket, refused planning permission, will apply again and again until the Council and local people are worn down and give in."

Next time I want to tell you about the amazing generosity of saints: St George and St Werburgh. In the meantime, I won't be going hungry.

On today's dinner menu: Slow roasted charlock and cleavers stuffed pheasant cooked with chestnuts, wild mushrooms and apple juice, and served with braised burdock roots and sea beet.

And, besides, I've quite sensibly laid down a not insignificant quantity of supplies:

Inventory of wild food supplies April 2008

250g sea salt (Herne Bay)
1.4kg dried apple rings
363g mixed dried wild mushrooms: tawny funnel caps, hedgehog fungus, parasols, trooping funnel caps
156g dried field blewit mushrooms
286g dried yellow leg mushrooms
300g dried mixed boletus mushrooms: ceps, orange birch bolete, bay bolete
7.437 kg dried chestnuts
1.775 kg alexanders root flour
2.170 kg roasted alexanders root flour
1.6 kg roasted acorn halves for coffee
1.8kg coarse grade acorn flour
3.6 kg fine acorn flour
2.3 kg dried rose hip seeds
940g roasted rose hip seeds for coffee
350g hazel nuts in shells
590g Carrageen seaweed powder
2.135 kg dried kelp powder
915g dried dulse powder
580g dried unlabeled and unknown seaweed powder - probably kelp and serrated wrack
590g chickweed powder (from 2002)
95g hairy bittercress powder
268g dried wintercress powder
100g wild garlic leaf powder (after extracting protein content for leaf curd)
528g slightly burnt rosehip and apple juice cheese roll
1.525 kg wild cherry cheese roll
150g curly dock seed flour
100g dried wild cherries
140g powdered alexanders seeds
140g unknown flour
180g unknown but probably evening primrose seed pod flour
20g reedmace seed head flour
100g tree mallow seed flour
454g wild garlic leaf curd
225g alexanders leaf curd
8 x 50 ml bottles 4x concentrated apple juice
6 x 250 ml jars 5x concentrated apple juice
29 portions of seaweed, pheasant and fox soup
29 portions of nettle, wild garlic, burdock root, alexanders root, evening primrose root etc etc soup
40 litres spring water
9x 500 ml bottles rosehip (and apple) syrup
57 x 750ml bottles sea buckthorn juice
4 x 750ml bottles clear extracted sea buckthorn juice for vinegar
30 x 750 ml bottles apple juice
7 pints bullace plum wine
6 pints rosehip wine
7 pints apple wine
3 frozen pheasants
350g processed badger protein
1 frozen rabbit
950g pure processed badger fat
3 badger intestines for sausage making

Technorati Tags:
Foraging
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Fasting

2008-04-29T04:12:00.000-07:00

How to skin a Badger
11/04/2008

My name is Fergus Drennan or Fergus the Forager as I like to be called - not the roadkill chef (I blame that particular moniker on Paul Kingsnorth) and..well, I'm just an average bloke really.

Nevertheless, I am perhaps a little more sensitive to certain cultural and environmental pressures than some and feel compelled to respond creatively. Of course, most Ecologist readers do this in any case, using all the particular skills they possess. My skills lie in cooking (some would disagree), nature appreciation, insatiable curiosity and looking beyond the limitations of certain cultural taboos. My aim is to let those skills inform my eating habits as much as possible as I seek to battle the culture of waste and cult of speed, not forgetting to mention, of course, the environmental degradation that follows in swift pursuit. It may be that I'm doomed to failure, that I've failed before having even begun, that gross hypocrisy and contradiction will mar my every step. But step into a past-peak-oil future we must. To that end I did a thought experiment. What if cheap food runs out; what if all conventional food runs out; what would I do? I would have to switch to the transition food of a transition diet: foraged and wild food. Could I live that way for a year? Maybe. Would it help inform others - small sustainable eco-communities, as to the wealth of wild foods they could use to supplement their diets and the processing problems and other pitfalls they would need to overcome? Probably. Would it be fun, stupid, playful, absurd? No doubt. Should I stop the thought experiment and do it for real? YES, WHY NOT!

Today is the the 11th day of my year-long 100% wild/foraged food eating experiment. So far so good - actually that's not quite true as I'll explain in a bit, nevertheless, assuming I eat three meals a day, I can already cross thirty-three off the list which means there are now only another one thousand and sixty two to go. So, no problem there then!

Apart from my comments above, there are many reasons for carrying out this experiment. There are the obvious environmental ones of course. We've all seen the astonishingly disgraceful figures detailing the tonnes of perfectly good food we throw away every year; we all know about the polluting effects of excessive food miles and the resulting packaging that is destroying our landscape, be that as ubiquitous plastic bag remnants in trees, oceans full of the albatross-suffocating-and-starving stuff, and landfill stinking with the out-of-sight-out-of-mind debris of our rampant consumerism. Eating wild food seems to bypass many of these problems whilst, inevitable, giving rise to inherent problems of its own. And, in that respect, I'm definitely not suggesting that if the current millions populating the British Isles returned to subsistence living and we all foraged for our supper we would achieve a return to some lost Eden of plenty, a place where we all lie basking in the sun with sheep and lions (as The Jehovah's Witness Watchtower magazine would have it), with humanity and nature in perfect harmony, at one, as manna gently falls on a heavenly summer breeze: Far from it, far far from it! The dire results would make foliage stripping locusts of us all. Nevertheless, through incorporating a certain amount of wild food into the diet there is much to be learned.....

Waste has always bothered me in all it's various guises: wasted words - mindless babel when silence would be more appropriate and powerful, wasted time, wasted skills, wasted talent, wasted opportunities, wasted food and wasted clothes amongst other things. Why buy new clothes when charity shops are brimming full with good things? Why go to some crappy sweat-shop-sourcing cheap clothes chain when you could make your own?! It is to that end that an unexpected project has inspired my interest, perhaps even more than my wild food diet. Right now, thanks to being pointed in the right direction by archaeologist Karen Hardy at the university of York, I'm reading through a PhD thesis entitled Skin Processing Technology In Eurasian Reindeer Cultures by Torunn Klokkerness. This is with a view to creating a whole Davey Crockett set of roadkill skin clothes: boots, trousers, jacket and hat (maybe with a feather in it!). To that end I already have a badger, fox and rabbit skin soaking in a bucket of my own urine as part of the initial tanning process. If all fails at least it'll make a good soup! Interestingly, the procedure has made me appreciate urine as a valuable resource, something definitely not to be wasted. I've found my self trying to hold it in so as to be able to reach home and my piss awaiting bucket!!

This is how you skin a Badger.

1)fresh road slaughtered badger

2) Cut down the underside with a very sharp knife or razor blade. Just to cut the skin, not the flesh

3) Start to peel the skin back

4) Continue cafefully peeling back away from the flesh

5) Pull out arms and legs

6) Skin side - still needs scraping

7) fur side

Now, just on the off chance that any vegans are reading this and are feeling outraged (as I, in fact, am) at the thought of roadkill or, more to the point, are outraged by my behaviour, let me tell you something. The last time I visited Karen Hardy at the University of York it was to discuss the possibility of me not brushing my teeth for the year's duration of my wild food diet. One of her specializations is the analysis and identification of starch grains in Mesolithic dental plaque from recovered teeth. Apart from giving us a greater understanding as to our ancestor's diet, dental plaque research has other interesting applications. It seems that analysis of various foods sold as vegan has revealed that, actually, animal products are present. Because throughout July I have decided to eat an exclusively vegan diet, analysis of my dental plaque may help to refine research. This means more scamming bastards who put meat products in vegan food are likely to be exposed! Actually, I think to a large extent it is unintentional - due to cost cutting, perhaps, or inadequate sourcing of materials.

Now, let's get back to the wild food.

April Fool's Day

DAY ONE

BREAKFAST

A glass of sea buckthorn and apple juice

Chestnut and apple porridge served with (disgusting) Alexander root milk - big mistake!

A mug of feverfew tea

LUNCH

Wild Spring Salad

(alexanders leaf and flower buds, fennel leaf, Hoary Cress, Smooth Sow Thistle

Hairy Bittercress, Dandelion Leaves, Garlic Mustard, Honesty Leaf and Flowers

Common Mallow, Red Valerian, White deadnettle Flowers)

And

Seabeet Quiche

(30g acorn flour, 10g wild garlic leaf powder after making leaf curd, i.e with protein removed,

6g dried yellow le mushrooms, very large handful of seabeet, very small handful of cleavers

a pinch of Herne Bay's finest sea salt)

DINNER

Wild garlic, nettles, burdock root, alexanders root, evening primrose root, cleavers, charlock

hawthorn leaf, blackberry leaf, garlic mustard etc etc etc spring and seawater soup

DESSERT

Japanese Knotweed stewed in wild apple juice

SNACKS

A piece of wild cherry cheese

TEA

Feverfew tea throughout the day

Lunch!

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2008-04-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

For and from the GMTV website minus all the stupid adverts

Read Fergus Drennan's diary about his passion for foraging for food, get his recipes and find out what happened when GMTV descended...

Today, is my 11th day of eating nothing but wild and foraged food - there is a distinction - and those eager beavers at GMTV, the chief culprit being Matt Arnold, woke me up at 5am to start preparing breakfast. Wild foods are definitely on the menu, although I hadn't factored in such wildly early hours. Normally it would be fine.

Just grab a coffee and embrace the caffeine culture of speed. No such luxury. But is it really such a luxury? Isn't it just so much more fun and rewarding to drink wild coffee made with roasted acorns and wild water, to remember the warm autumn days gathering acorns in the sun, the jays fluttering in the branches above and squirrels twitching their tails in anticipation of their next nut for the winter store? I certainly think so!

Sourcing and eating wild food really opens your eyes, your mind and heart, in fact, your whole being, to a deep appreciation of and connection to the natural world around you! The more you eat, the better the feeling. Now you don't get that with cakes and chocolate which, admittedly, are great at first but later...

Today's breakfast menu is most interesting, in my opinion, because of the salad and, in particular, the salad dressing. Having eaten wild salads (amongst other things of course!) virtually every day for the last two weeks I've been getting, not bored exactly, but just desirous of a little dressing luxury. This morning I cracked it! So here's the breakfast menu starting with that all important sexy salad sauce!

Salad Dressing

INGREDIENTS

1 litre spring water
2 tablespoons carrageen seaweed powder
1 tbspn wild apple juice
1 tbspn seabuckthorn juice
10 staghorn sumac berry clusters
a few wild chives
10 dittander leaves
sea salt

METHOD:

Pull the berries off the stughorn sumac berry clusters and squash with a potato masher in the spring water. Strain and add the seaweed powder. Add the 2 different juices and salt, then bring to the boil. Continue to boil for five minutes. Strain out the seaweed and pour liquid in a suitable bottle. Add finely chopped dittander and chives and shake well. Leave to cool. This will also allow the mustard pungency of the dittander leaves to infuse. Wow!

Salad (on the side)

INGREDIENTS (varying proportions of each)

Grated alexanders roots
Young hawthorn leaves
Wild garlic leaves
Hairy bittercress
Garlic mustard leaves
Dandelion leaves
White deadnettle flowers
Gorse flowers
Lady's smock flowers

METHOD

Roughly chop or tear the the leaves and mix together with the grated roots and flowers. Easy!

Pheasant with wild mushrooms and other goodies

INGREDIENTS

4 Pheasant breasts
Some wild mushrooms fresh or dried (Fresh St Georges Mushrooms if you can find them)
Big bunch wild garlic leaves
1-2 Alexanders roots

METHOD

Scrub and chop the roots into small batons and boil for 10 mins in seasalted spring water. Meanwhile finely chop the fresh or rehydrated wild mushrooms, mixing with some chopped wild garlic leaves. Bash your pheasant breast out flat and stuff with the chopped leaves and fungi. Form a parcel with the meat, skewered and shallow fry. Whilst frying toss in some different mushrooms for good measure and boil the rest of the wild garlic in a pan of spring water. Bring it all together and serve hot.

Something sweet instead......

Chestnut and apple porridge

INGREDIENTS

A handful of dried chestnuts
3 dried apple rings
Spring water

METHOD

Grind the chestnuts and apple, add water and blend some more. Place in a pan with a little more water and heat until required thickness is reached.

And to drink...

Hot:

Acorn and rosehip seed coffee

Simply shell, roast and grind the acorns with the roasted seeds (hairs removed) and infuse in boiling water

Cold:

Seabuckthorn and apple juice

Want to know more? I run wild food courses. Can't bear the thought of it? Stay away from my website at www.wildmanwildfood.co.uk

ROADKILL

2006-07-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

Lately, quite a few people have been asking me about roadkill. So I’m going to say a few words about it. Not that I eat it that much. At most it constitutes 1-5% of my diet throughout the year. Also, I would rarely if ever actively go out searching for it. Nevertheless, what I do want to say about roadkill is in large measure addressed by this wonderful video that I found on the web recently. Have a look first before we get down to some waffle and something more useful: the practicalities and pitfalls of roadkill eating.

Why eat roadkill? Why indeed?! Does eating roadkill simply represent a somewhat quirky or peculiar dimension to the forage/freegan/self-sufficient lifestyle? Maybe. For me it’s a simple equation: I love animals therefore I don’t eat them (roadkill excepted). I don’t want them killed for me to eat, nor do I wish to kill them. Of course, no doubt a strong intellectual argument could be used to support this position on moral grounds, or we could talk about it from a spiritual point of view, relating it to such concepts as karma and ahimsa– maybe some other time. The truth is I am sentimental; it’s an emotional thing. Huge Fearnley-Whittingstall has written about roadkill (see his A Cook on the Wild Side p.47) and about meat in general. See, for instance.

His position is one that I can understand and respect. His emphasis is on good animal husbandry, welfare and respect and, although you may think that, ultimately, killing an animal for food is not in the least bit respectful of that animal it can, in a sense, be so - at least relatively speaking. For me the least hypocritical position, and the position that gives you the greatest connection to, and understanding of the animal you wish to consume, is to only eat animals that you yourself have hunted and killed. Emotionally, though, I cannot do it! Perhaps, though, the future is heading not towards a reconnection with the food, including meat, that we eat, but a radical and horrific disconnection. Is this what we really want?

Anyway, occasionally I do like to eat meat. Also….., the fact is, I am very fond of our native wildlife and am extremely distressed at the number of animals and insects needlessly killed every day – needlessly killed due to human greed, recklessness, laziness, lack of awareness or concern and general environmental exploitation and mismanagement. At the same time, I find myself similarly distressed and concerned by our consumer society’s insatiable thirst and craving for cheap but, again, relatively speaking, nutritionally valueless, food. And so, two ideas collide and generate a surprising idea: eat roadkill. It’s not factory farmed or pumped full of antibiotics. It is fresh, local, seasonal and nutritionally rich. The most common finds are pheasant, squirrel, rabbit, fox, hedgehog, badger, moorhen, hare etc. This is certainly the case where I live, in Kent. And, really, it’s not so unusual to be eating such things – historically anyway. In his book British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, Colin Spencer records, amongst other things, the regular consumption of badgers, door mice, rats, hedgehogs, song thrush, blackbird, wheatear and sparrow throughout the Middle Ages (p.15). These days it is only fairly arbitrary, though powerful, dietary taboos that prevent us from eating such creatures. I recently delved in to a book by Frederick Simoons called Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present. It discusses a number of such common taboos and is well worth reading.

What’s good to eat and what’s not:

The best places to find roadkill are on stretches of road that you travel along daily. If it wasn’t there the previous day then it’s probably good to eat today. But, for goodness sake, don’t put your foot down to deliberately try and kill something. In fact if you are walking or cycling roadkill is easier to find. This is because many animals when hit are injured rather than killed outright. Consequently, they manage to reach the cover of grass and shrub by the roadside. Some animals, even if killed on impact, though dead, manage to kick their way into the grass verge by the sheer force of their spasmodic death throes. The slower pace of walking or cycling allows such animals to be noticed. Specimens need to be intact and, at the height of summer, not more than a day old; that time extending to three to four days in the colder winter months. If there is fresh blood on the road, this is a sign of recent death and, hence, freshness. Similarly, with respect to birds, if there are feathers blowing around the road this is the sign of a recent hit. In my experience – although I stand to be corrected – rigor mortis tends to set in 6-12 hours after an animal is killed. So, if you pick an animal up and it is as stiff as a board but still plump and fresh looking, this is a good sign. Also, if on a cold day the animal feels warm then, clearly, this is a strong indicator of recent death. Bad signs include: dull looking eyes, rotten smell, visible maggots or fly eggs around the eyes mouth/beak, rupture of the intestines, signs of sickness, or, suspicious death. If you see 5 badgers on the road within 200 metres, chances are a farmer is illegally killing them and putting them on the road to look like roadkill. Of course, some animals may have been legally poisoned, so it is worth asking local farmers if they are using poisons. As for bird flu…….I need to look into this.

Finally or perhaps it should be, firstly, before even considering inspecting a dead road-side animal for eating it is sensible to familiarise yourself with certain relevant laws, especially the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

Of course, the Act also covers such birds as swans. As native wild birds, swans enjoy statutory protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and it is an offence to intentionally injure, take or kill a wild swan. The Act similarly protects the eggs and nests of swans. It is an offence to take or possess the egg of a wild mute swan, or to damage or destroy the nest of a mute swan whilst in use or being built. Unfortunately, swans and their nests are sometimes a target for vandals.

Anyone seeing an offence against swans or other wildlife is encouraged to contact their police Wildlife Liaison Officer through their local police station.

Source: Swans wildlife information leaflet (2002)

Under the Countryside Act and Rights of Way Act 2000, people who kill swans face a maximum £5,000 fine and/or six months in prison.