Eat Weeds

I love mugwort, dried or fresh it does not matter. The aroma sends me into heady reverie, and I love making drinks with it, and adding it to fruit salads etc. 

This evening I wanted something a little different, more a scented fruit drink, and so I went to work. Out popped this divine smoothie, giving mugwort centre stage.

Ingredients

• 1 banana
• 8 strawberries
• 2 tsps mugwort flower buds (dried or fresh)
• ½ tsp turmeric
• 1 tsp ginger (freshly grated)
• 2 tbsp kefir or natural yoghurt
• 1 tbsp rice syrup
• salt & pepper

Put all ingredients into a blender. Start blending slowly, then increase speed incrementally. Drink and enjoy!

Serves: 2

The dandelions are all bright and beautiful at the moment. Perfect, I thought for making a dandelion flower vinegar. 

Ingredients

• Dandelion flower heads
• Cider vinegar
• Jam jar with rubber sealed lid

And so jar in hand, I walked out down the lane from my house and gathered as many dandelion flower heads as I could fit comfortably into the jar.

I took them back to my house, and then poured 10 year old cider vinegar over them until they were submerged, then capped them and placed them in a shady place.

Really you should leave them for about 6 weeks, but I was already tucking into the vinegar within about 5 days. I like to taste the changes as the vinegar matures.

Makes: 1 jam jar

The young hogweed leaf stalks and nettle tips are at their peak at the moment with regards the freshest, youngest greens. Hogweed is a plant that I have a lot of respect for, it is one of the true gourmet wild edibles, and it is well worth spending the time learning how to identify hogweed.

WARNING: Hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) is part of the Carrot family and as such you must be 500% certain that you have identified this plant correctly. You must also gather it with gloves on as the sap can burn you. This is completely destroyed by cooking. ! DO NOT EAT THIS PLANT RAW ! Definitely not a plant for novice foragers to start playing around with. Giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), is highly poisonous, and even brushing against it can give some people very serious burns.

In this recipe the delicate flavours of hogweed leaf stalks combine well with young nettle tips providing a wonderful tapas style side dish. In this recipe I am not going to give you quantities. I teach foraging using your senses, and as such the next shift is to start cooking with your senses, rather than relying on linear-mind quantities. If you look at old fashioned recipe books, ingredients were listed but rarely the quantities.

So go on, try this recipe and let me know how the recipe turned out for you.

Ingredients

• young hogweed leaf stalks (remove the leaves and use them for another dish)
• young nettle tips
• wild garlic
• coconut oil
• red chilli
• slices of parma ham
• cracked black pepper
• sea salt

Suggested Instructions

1. Boil the hogweed stems and nettle tips for 5 minutes. Drain.
2. Put a small amount of coconut butter in a frying pan along with the red chilli and sauté the hogweed and nettles with the wild garlic.
3. Towards the end of cooking, tear up the Parma ham into pieces add to the wild greens, then quickly cook until done.
4. Serve with bread as a snack or as a vegetable side dish

With the trees just about to break from bud into a kaleidoscope of lime green visual delight, and a slightly cold wind coming in, I decided to make this warming cleavers bake. Cleavers is also known as goosegrass. You must only pick the top tips of the cleavers as they might be too stringy if you use older growth.

Ingredients

• 650g sliced (rounds) aubergine
• 150g cleavers tips
• 2 onions (sliced)
• 2 garlic cloves (chopped)
• 2 tbsp mixed herbs
• 1 tin of tomatoes
• 500ml cheese sauce
• 2 tsps tomato puree
• salt
• water

Suggested Instructions

1. Slice aubergine, then lightly oil the slices, now grill them for 2 minutes on high until wilted, turning occasionally.
2. Steam fry the cleavers straight from being washed, do not bother to shake dry, then set aside.
3. Sauté the onions and garlic until translucent, then add the tin tomatoes, mixed herbs, a pinch of salt and the tomato puree. Stir and simmer for 15 minutes.
4. In the meantime make up your cheese sauce. When both the sauces are ready, layer a dish with tomato sauce, aubergine, cleavers and cheese sauce, then repeat until all used up finishing with a layer of cheese sauce on top.
5. Pop in the oven at 180 degrees and bake until piping hot and bubbling, about 30 minutes.

Serves: 2

This wild garlic recipe is a great way to preserve the annual wild garlic gluts. I always make it my mission to make a few jars of this puree so I can use it through the year.

Preserving this gourmet plant has become something of an annual celebration for me, as it means the beginning of Spring, and the return of the Sun.

BOTULISM ALERT: DO NOT USE THIS RECIPE (It is for information purposes only): Please read Zoe Hawes’ pertinent comments below about botulism contamination. Also checkout the PDF by the UK Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food, Clostridium botulinum & Vegetables in Oil. Here is what the Oregon State University have to say on the matter: “Raw or cooked garlic and/or herbs in oil – These mixtures MUST be refrigerated. Do not store them longer than 3 weeks in the refrigerator. Note: Raw garlic MAY be safely stored in vinegar at room temperature.

CASES OF BOTULISM IN THE UK: According to the NHS, “Botulism is relatively rare in the UK. There have only been 33 recorded cases of food-borne botulism in England and Wales since 1989. Twenty-seven of these were linked to a single outbreak that was caused by contaminated hazelnut yoghurt. Since 1978, there have been eight cases of infant botulism. None of these cases resulted in death.”

Ingredients

• 500g of pre-flowering wild garlic leaves
• 500ml of light olive oil
• 1 tsp sea salt

Suggested Instructions

1. Gather your wild garlic leaves on a dry day.
2. Roughly chop them, then put in a food processor along with olive oil and the sea salt. Blitz until pureed.
3. Pour into clean sterilised jars, making sure that there is a small amount of olive oil covering the contents.

Beef passes my lips about 5 times a year (if that), so I was a bit surprised when my body nudged me to go and buy a steak. Local that is, like 2 miles away.

All I had flashing through my mind was the scent and taste of ground ivy. So why ground ivy and beef? Well one of the old names for ground ivy was ale-hoof, it was used to clarify and add bitterness to ales during the brewing process.

Does beef & ale pie ring a bell? See where I’m going with this? Traditionally beef steak is served with horseradish sauce. Ale was brewed with ground ivy. Put the two together and you get my mayo recipe… kind of. Check it out.

I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the bottom of the jug with my fingers. Finger feeding is so much classier than knives and forks, especially if you’re a ‘smear yourself all over with food’ kind of forager.

Ingredients

• 15g fresh ground ivy leaves and stems
• 1 egg (can we take free-range as a given please)
• 200 ml rapeseed oil
• 3 tsp grated horseradish root
• 2 tbsp lemon juice (or the vinegar from preserved horseradish root)

Suggested Instructions

1. Add egg to a hand blender jug, along with 150ml of oil and lemon juice. Blitz until thick, if too thin add more oil.
2. Add chopped ground ivy and horseradish root, then blitz until blended into the mayo.
3. Serve with beef, or as a coleslaw type of dressing.

Combine ramsons/wild garlic (Allium ursinum), or any other wild herb with this home made goat’s cheese recipe and you can almost imagine you are back in bygone days with village hamlets and horse drawn ploughs.

This wild garlic recipe came as a result of me developing a bit of ‘a thing’ for making my own goat’s cheese at home. And the recipe below is a very low tech, super quick way to make a basic version of it.

Ingredients

• 1 pint of raw goat’s milk
• ½ lemon (juiced) or 2 caps of cider vinegar
• 25g ramsons/wild garlic (finely chopped)
• sea salt

Suggested Instructions

1. Pour goat’s milk into a pan and slowly bring to the boil. Remove from heat immediately.
2. Now add the lemon juice a little at a time until the curds separate from the whey. The lemon juice curdles the milk. You’ll know you have got it right when it looks like you have left a pint of milk out of the refrigerator for too many weeks.
3. Pour the pan of curds and whey through a fine muslin cloth, making sure that you collect the whey. Leave to drip for a few hours. You can refrigerate the whey for a couple of weeks, and use it in your sauerkraut recipes, in soups, stocks or as a refreshing drink. Whey is super full of minerals, and an excellent digestive.
4. Next tip cheese into a bowl and add the finely chopped ramsons and few pinches of sea salt, then stir until the ramsons and salt are thoroughly worked into the cheese. Use fingers and mouth to taste saltiness and adjust according to your personal taste. Now put the cheese back into the muslin and twist into a ball. Put on a slanted board with a big weight on top (always a bit of a balancing act), and leave for a couple of hours. The salt draws more moisture out of the cheese making it firmer.
5. This cheese can be eaten right away, I have yet to try aging one, always gets eaten too soon!

I have always loved dahl. Its deeply warming and satisfying, and comes in so many variations. This Wild Dahl recipe uses hedgerow seeds to make a truly heavenly dish. Even though I am blowing my own trumpet, I have to say this simple dahl recipe surpassed even my expectations.

We have some truly divine wild spices in our hedgerows!

Over the Autumn I collected rock samphire, wild fennel and alexanders seeds, combined them with some dried pine needle shoots (think rosemary) and a little turmeric and you have a dahl recipe mix that will have your tongue slapping about wanting more.

Ingredients Part 1: Dahl Mix

• 2 medium onions (finely chopped)
• 3 garlic cloves (roughly chopped)
• 1 red pepper (chopped)
• 1 fresh red chili (chopped, seeds & all)
• 1 cup of dried red lentils
• 2½ cups of water

Ingredients Part 2: Wild Spice Mix

• ½ tsp rock samphire seeds (ground)
• ¼ tsp wild fennel seeds (ground)
• ½ tsp alexanders seeds (ground)
• ½ tsp dried pine shoots (finely chopped)
• 1 tsp turmeric
• salt & pepper

Grind and mix together all the spices into a course powder. Use as instructed below.

Suggested Instructions

1. Fry onions until translucent, then add the Wild Spice mix along with the garlic, red pepper, red chili and continue frying until the onion starts to brown.
2. Add the lentils, stir quickly to coat them in the mixture, then add 2 cups of water.
3. Bring to the boil, then turn down and simmer until the lentils have dissolved into a thick sauce. You may need more water, so keep an eye on the dahl.
4. Serve on its own or with rice or chapati or bread.