Articles

The fungi season starts in March with the emergence of morels on waste ground – surely one of our most delicious species?
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Fieldfares arrive in large flocks in early autumn and stay to spring, long after the last mushrooms have gone.
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I love rice pudding as it is such a comforting dish and can be eaten hot or cold. I know you can buy rice pudding out of a tin but it is no where near as good as one your have made yourself – so be told! (more…)

Although not the greatest wild vegetable, bittercress is available at a point in the year when few fungi are available…
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Fungi fanatics hate the phrase ‘toadstool’ because it is both laden with prejudice and deeply-misleading – when did you last see a toad on a mushroom?
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It’s extremely cold here in the UK at the moment (coldest winter for over 30 years apparently), so what better way to warm yourself up than to have a lovely bowl of homemade soup! I often cook up chicken soup however I fancied a change and to make something a bit more filling, so I adapted a sweetcorn soup recipe and made a dozen portions of this to cool and freeze for lunches over the next couple of weeks

The soup is great for a base and for freezing. Then when you want to eat it you can just add in some fresh vegetables and/or a bit of extra meat such as cooked chicken, bacon or prawns.

Ingredients

1 teaspoon of butter
2 large potatoes sliced
1 medium onion chopped finely
1 leek, chopped
3 rashers of streaky bacon, chopped
1 pint / 268ml of chicken stock
150g of frozen sweetcorn
700ml of milk
1 tablespoon of corn flour

Method

Fry the onions and bacon in the butter in a large/tall sauce pan until the onions are soft. Add the potatoes, leek and stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 15-20 minutes until the potatoes are soft (you can add in a chopped celery too at this point if you want to). Blend the corn flour with the milk and add that plus the sweetcorn to the pan and stir well. Bring to the boil and simmer for a further 5 minutes. Blend the soup with a hand blender. Mix in some seasoning to suit your own taste.

For freezing: put the soup into freezable containers and allow to cool before freezing.

For eating: put the soup into a saucepan and add some sweetcorn plus either some prawns, chopped bacon or chicken (all already cooked, but can be cold). Add some extra veg such as peas or leek if you wish.

It’s pretty simple but it’s quite filling and it’s great on a cold winters day

This article is reproduced by kind permission of Sarah Anderson Food and Drink Meanderings

Pennywort is a delicious Welsh wild food ingredient which ranks with most wild mushrooms…
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Many edible mushrooms have symbiotic relationships with birch, but the tree itself can provide a delicious product.
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The Great Spotted Woodpecker is a colourful and exciting bird that probes mushrooms for its insect diet…
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As we tuck into hearty mushroom casseroles, Daniel Butler argues the mistle thrush, not the robin, should be the real Christmas bird…
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Partridge is available throughout the autumn and makes the perfect vehicle for a wild mushroom sauce…
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Hedgehogs begin to hibernate just as the main mushroom crop begins to dwindle…
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A fleeting glimpse of a garish jay is a common sight on a autumn mushroom foray…
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Sloes are a frequent ‘by-catch’ on forays and the next season the resulting drink makes the perfect end to a chilly expedition…
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Is there some strange link between spiders and fungi? Both emerge in force in early Autumn…
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Badgers are well loved creatures, but unfortunately they have a taste to the beetle grubs which invade porcini and can devastate a potential bumper crop.
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Smaller and firmer than their cultivated counterparts, wild strawberries grow in the same woodland glades which will later be adorned with delicious fungi…
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Like fungi, insects in general suffer from poor PR – butterflies are a notable exception…
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Chanterelles – or girolles to give them their French culinary name – begin to flush in July and continue to flush regularly well into October…
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The top ten reasons to ‘go organic’
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The stinging qualities of the nettle needs no introduction, but its gastronomic qualities are as overlooked as those of our greatest wild mushrooms…
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In early summer woods which will later be full of fungi are home to one of our most mysterious and least-seen breeding birds…
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‘Food miles’ is the popular term for the distance your food travels from farm to fork. It has become an issue for debate because it is reckoned that the global scale of the food industry today means that our food now travels fifty per cent further than it did twenty years ago, often literally travelling half way across the planet to reach us.
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Research from Yeo Valley Organic (www.yeovalley.co.uk) has revealed a nutritional divide for the nation’s tots. Some babies are being brought up on organic foods while others are being weaned on fast food, pizzas and Chinese takeaways. Nearly a quarter of the new mums interviewed for the report said that they would allow their babies to start eating fast food such as burgers, chips and fried chicken from a year old. A third of mothers in England and Wales said they would wait until their children were two. Only 3.5% of mums in the UK said that they would ban fast food altogether at any age.
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From birth to potty, a baby can use up to five thousand disposable nappies. This is the automatic option for most parents as they are seen to be cheap and convenient. Other parents are becoming more concerned about the environmental costs of disposable nappies and are looking for real alternatives.
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All gardeners spend the warm, wet Welsh summer doing battle with slugs, but organic gardeners shouldn’t resort to slug pellets to save their plants as they can pose a risk to other wildlife. This article gives some ideas for natural alternative solutions to try instead. There are thirty different types of slug in Britain. The most common, and those whish do the most damage, are the grey field slug, the garden slug, the keel slug and the black slug. The grey field slug, Deroceras reticulatum, was once prescribed as a cure for consumption and either swallowed live or boiled in milk.
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Biodynamic agriculture is a sustainable approach to farming and gardening which also involves a spiritual understanding of nature. It builds on the pioneering work of the philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). He also inspired new approaches in medicine, education, economics and the arts.
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