5 -a-Day

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              Photo by Jo Sinclair

I have been dining well recently - in a frugal, foraging kind of way, like a Medieval peasant after a mini ice-age. The landscape is rapidly greening up and I see the weeds at my feet as a glut of vitamins. A lovely spring day is good enough to eat. Sunshine on a plate. I had to bin a lacklustre bowl of wilting salad leaves from my local greengrocer, and a packet of watercress from Tesco turned into compost two days before its sell-by date, so this morning I collected new nettles from the riverbank. The sun was shining. Water babbled over the shallows, and a kingfisher flashed past. I found red nettles, hedge garlic, dandelions and hops. It was a lush contrast to traipsing the fluorescent supermarket aisles. For lunch I made a velvety, vibrant, potent soup.

Emerald Soup
2 rubber-gloved handfuls of nettle tops
250g potatoes
1 large onion
1 clove garlic
Olive oil
Black pepper
Vegetable stock cube
Single cream

Saute the onions and garlic in olive oil. Add diced potatoes and nettles with a trickle of water and put lid on for 5 minutes. Top up water, add seasoning, simmer for ten minutes. Liquidise. Stir in a little cream and return to required heat.

Hop shoots suddenly seem to be growing at a rate of an inch a day. I planted some last year to cover my shed but there were no signs of life until the temperature rose and I found them rudely probing their way towards the sun. I gathered some while walking and used them as a filling for a stack of pancakes.

Hop Shoot Pancakes
1 egg
4oz buckwheat flour
1/2 pint milk
1 generous handful hop shoots (each about four" long)
1 child's handful white nettles (also known as dead nettles)or any other nettle
Cheddar cheese

Mix egg into milk and gradually add to flour mix. Flip pancakes. Finely chop hop shoots and nettles, saute in butter. Use as filling for pancakes & add a little cheddar. Stack, and grill cheese on top.


I also resurrected some frozen jelly ear fungi I picked earlier in the year, by adding hot water to thaw them. The translucent lobes are unnervingly perfect (see photo). I imagine dropping them into a bowl of red soup - but I'm being unseasonal here; it's not Halloween. Instead I turned them into something green. Like my other two meals, this was an impromptu invention, but I may as well write it down:

Wild Fungi Spaghetti 
Jelly ear fungi
Garlic
Butter
Parlsey
Cream
Spaghetti
Salt and pepper

Wash, dry and finely chop the mushrooms. Fry in butter. Add garlic, cook for a minute at medium heat then turn down low and simmer with cream for ten minutes. Stir into pasta.

For guidance I have consulted the Richard Mabey classic Food For Free, and also Wild Food by Roger Phillips, published by Macmillan London in the early 80s. This is wonderfully illustrated, with rustic Laura Ashley-influenced vignettes and still-life arrangements photographed outdoors in natural habitats. A blackberry pie on a teacloth is styled on a straw bale with blazing stubble field in the background. A leg of lamb plated up with its wild mint sauce sits on a wooden jetty overlooking a lake. A bit of fancy Fanny Craddock footwork creeps in, with carragheen jelly-mould mousse placed on a rockpool. All lavishly demonstrating nature's bounty.

A good modern guide is 'Hedgerow' by John Wright, one from the charming and comprehensive  River Cottage handbook range. This has some important up-to-date advice on the safe eating of some species. With any fungi identification for example, it is recommended that you  cross-reference identification guides.

Jelly Ear (Auricularia auricula) by Jo Sinclair