Bramble Jam

Another fruit crop that has taken a bit of a hit this year due to the wet spring was the blackberry, or bramble.  The thorny bush that grows along Britain's roads and hedgerows gives gorgeous dark berries in the Autumn months and these are a sweet treat for any rambler or forager.

Brambles are a great freezer berry - popping them in freezer bags allows you you mix them in with your porridge all year round, gives you an easy pie filling and by in the bottom of a pudding bowl and plonking some sponge cake mix on top is a simple twenty minute pudding.

Another way to preserve these is to make jam - which, when I start up the Christmas Feast next year, I hope to use as a form of currency for bartering.  You need

Ingredients
1kg Blackberries (or raspberries)
1kg Sugar
1 sachet Pectin

What you do

Put the fruit, sugar and pectin into a large pot and heat, stirring occasionally.  Here is where you need a jam thermometer, and when the temperature hits 220F, allow the jam to boil for five minutes.  Then pour into sterilised jars and seal with a disc of waxed paper, before covering with either a lid or a piece of cellophane.  You can eat it once cool, but I'd leave it for a month - it tastes better.

Brambles, Sugar & Pectin

Boil at 220F for five minutes

Pour into sterilised jars

Damson Gin - 2012 vintage

So after my bumper Damson harvest last year, that resulted in numerous jars of jam and a bottle of Damson Gin, I was hoping that I could repeat 2011's success.  Sadly a terrible spring has resulted in a lousy crop of Damsons from the trees in which I forage.  Also, the derelict buildings that I forage from the gardens of are being renovated so this would be the last harvest from these wonderful old trees.

Instead of the two plastic bags full that I got last year, I got two handfuls of damsons from this years crop - not enough to make one jar of jam, so I decided to repeat last year's success of a bottle of Damson Gin.

It's pretty easy to make Damson Gin, you chuck a bundle of damsons into a two thirds full bottle of gin, then add a bit of sugar syrup (2 parts sugar to 3 parts boiling water and allowed to cool) and then all you need to do is wait.  Give it time to infuse.

If you are making some in the Autumn, it will be ready by Christmas, but the longer you leave it, the better.  My 2011 vintage is delicious when mixed with some tonic water.

Freshly Made

After a year

Admitting defeat

OK, time to give up - well, partially.  There isn't a chance that I'm going to manage to create a Christmas dinner in the time I have left.  The main reason was that I bought a house and that has meant that the past three months of my life has been spent decorating, and the house still isn't finished yet.  My weekends have been involving trips to B&Q and then covering walls in Dulux's finest rather than scampering through woodlands trying to find mushrooms.

So, for 2012, I'm going to have to give up and admit that my challenge has beaten me.  However, I am determined that this challenge is doable, so am going to try again in 2013.  In the meantime for the few people who have been reading the sporadic posts, I'm going to continue my foraging when time does allow and posting things on here and trying to live the 'River Cottage life' just a little bit.

Staring me in the face - Elderflower Cordial

After failing miserably in finding Elderflowers, and harvesting a load of Hawthorn flowers instead, I realised that there was a bush in the back garden of my work!  After harvesting a load of flowers, pulling a few oranges and lemons our of my fruit bowl, and cadging some citric acid from my boss, I set to work making Elderflower Cordial.


Needing a quick recipe, I went to the BBC food website and found a very simple to make cordial by Lotte Duncan.

Ingredients (to make 2 litres)
Around 30 Elderflower heads
1.7 litres boiling water
900g Caster Sugar (I used granulated)
50g citric acid
2 Oranges
3 Lemons

The Theory
Rinse the elderflowers, picking out any bugs, leaves or bits of twig

Put sugar and boiling water in a bowl, stir until the sugar is dissolved and then leave to cool.

Add the citric acid, citrus fruit and flowers

Stir and leave in a cool place for 24 hours, stirring occasionally

Strain and transfer to sterilised bottles

The Practice
It pretty much went as planned.  Knowing that I was going to have to freeze this to last until Christmas (kept in the fridge, it lasts about a month or so), I filled it into empty 500ml plastic Coke bottles.  Sure, it isn't going to look good, but I can always defrost it and put it into a nice jug.  I filtered it through a fine sieve, but the resultant cordial still had the odd flower in, but not to worry - it looks a bit more authentic!

I expected the cordial to be a bit thicker, like you get from commercial cordial, but it wasn't.  With a consistency akin to orange squash, it is very refreshing when diluted with a bit of water.  I've picked some more elderflowers from the abundant tree so will be playing around with the recipe to try and make a slightly thicker cordial - a bit more sugar (1kg) and a bit less water (1.4litres).

WARNING
The roots, seeds, leaves, twigs and branches of the elder contain a cyanide-inducing glycoside, which means that if you eat too much of these parts, it can cause a build up of cyanide in your body when digested.  Infusions of the flowers and the ripe berries are safe to eat.

An accidental harvest - Hawthorn Flowers

So all of a sudden flowers are blooming in the hedgerows and at the beginning of June it is cordial making time.  I had hoped to pick elderflowers but lacking any bushes in the immediate area, I decided to pick hawthorns.  Actually, that is a total lie.  I went out and started stripping a bush of its flowers and thought 'hold on a minute, these don't smell very elderflowery' - got out my iPhone and Googled 'elderflower'.  Hmmm, what the hell was I picking?  These flowers were not elderflowers.  Not wanting to tip two carrier bags full of flowers into a ditch, I took them home and hunted out what I had collected, and it turned out to be hawthorn flowers. 

So what could I do with these?  I noticed that when the flowers are a little bit yellow they can smell a bit fishy, which isn't that nice, so I've avoided using these as I didn't fancy anything that smelled like fish.  I looked online and found a Hawthorn tea recipe.  Simply put a load of flowers into a teapot and pour over boiling water.  Apparently good for high blood pressure, this tea has a slightly numbing floral scent to it and a bit like a hot summer day hedgerow.  It is pleasant enough when sweetened with a little honey or maple syrup, but I'm not a fan of herbal teas so won't be going down this path again soon.

I reckoned that the simple, summery floral aroma would also be able to be made into a cordial - slightly lighter than Elderflower, but hopefully just as nice.  I typed into Google 'Hawthorn Cordial' and came up with several recipes, but one stood out.  From www.vintagerecipes.net, I found a very simple cordial recipe involving the flowers and brandy. 

Now obviously brandy is expensive and I wouldn't be able to go out and buy some, but I did have half a bottle sitting in my kitchen and thought i might as well make use of this and add it to the menu.  At least I now have something alcoholic for the end of the meal!

Hawthorn Boozy Cordial

Ingredients

Hawthorn Flowers minus any leaves or stalks

Brandy (make it something half decent)

A tablespoon of sugar

Simply, I put a lot of flowers (minus any stalks or leaves) into a glass bottle and a tablespoons of sugar.  Then poured in the brandy over the top and there I will leave it for the next three months.  In September, I'll drain off the flowers and pour it back into another bottle (having a taste in the process) and see if I've wasted some perfectly good brandy or not.

Wild Garlic Pesto

If ingredients are the bricks of a house, then the cement holding them all together is usually two flavours - onions and garlic.  We love them, putting them into all sorts of dishes whether they are traditionally in there or not.

So realising that there may be a need for some garlic in December when I get round to making my Christmas dinner, I ventured into a couple patches of woodland to pick wild garlic - the first natural crop of the year.

Wild Garlic, or Ramsons to give them their proper name, is a plant that you will inevitably come across before even if you haven't noticed it.  They grow in moist soils in or at the edge of deciduous woodlands, often near bluebells, and are unmistakable due  to their garlic aroma wafting in the air.  

All of the plant is edible.  The leaves can be used in salads, or boiled as a vegetable, the flowers an attractive and powerfully flavoured addition to a plate.  The bulb (which is more like a spring onion than a garlic bulb) is edible raw or cooked, but it is illegal to dig them up without the landowners permission, and if on public land, you simply are not allowed to dig them up at all.  You can however collect the seeds from the pods in early summer (edible also), and can also buy bulbs from certified sources if you want to grow them yourself.  

WARNING Ramsons are very similar in appearance to poisonous, and possibly deadly, plants including Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), Colchicum autumnale and Arum aculatum but a there is a simple test that can be done to check what you are picking.  Ramsons are the only leaf that, when crushed between your fingers, smells of garlic.  There are also differences in the way the plants are presented, with differences to the flowers and stems.  Click here for further information.

I decided to make pesto with my first crop of the season, jarring some for immediate use and freezing some to use throughout the rest of the year and, of course, at Christmas.  When making this, it is important that you make sure that any remaining pesto in the jar is covered with olive oil to seal it from the air, and keep it in the fridge.  The fresh pesto will last about three weeks and comes from The River Cottage website.

The Theory

Ingredients

100g Wild Garlic Leaves

50g Mild Onions or leeks

50g Pine nuts, walnuts, brazil nuts - anything really

200ml Oil - Olive, sunflower or rapeseed

50g Finely grated hard cheese - Parmesan

Pinch of salt

Pinch of sugar

After you have thrown away any tough stalks, damaged leaves and washed the leaves, blitz the leaves, onions, nuts and 3/4 of the oil in a food processor until everything is finely chopped.  Fold in the cheese, salt and sugar and then put into sterilised jars.  Press down firmly with the back of a spoon to remove any pockets of air (words like botulism appear in warnings) and cover with a layer of oil.  If you want to freeze it, put it into small containers and freeze immediately.

The Practice

Even I can't mess this one up thought I!  I picked the garlic and tested every plant that I picked from just to make sure that I wasn't going to kill myself with toxic leaves.  Then once home, I started picking out all the leaves which were broken or covered in bird poop was the first task, which although time consuming was quite rewarding.  I had some walnuts in my cupboard, but any non-salted nuts will do, and instead of using the spring onions I used half an onion that I'd left over from making onion gravy.  Oil is fortunately one of the ingredients exempt from my budget, so I just used the olive oil I had, but what to do about the cheese?  Cheese is a big chunk of my budget, so what could I do?  Well, I found that I had some dried out parmesan in the fridge.  It meant putting a little more elbow grease into grating it, and the rind was equally useable in this dish, so that went in too.  Cheese for nothing - perfect!

The one thing I did notice was that when you have all the ingredients laid out before you, there is a reluctance to accept that this is supposed to fill five 200g jars.  Still, persevere I did and I rapidly found out that my blender is no good for making pesto.  A food processor is a nice simple gadget - a big blade in a big based jug.  A small blade in a tapered jug resulted in me picking the damn thing up and giving it a good shake to knock the remaining leaves down to the blade of the blender.  A few swear words later, I had something that resembled pesto, so I mixed in the cheese and filled the jars.  I was right, the measurements for this do not fill five 200g jars, it fills two and a small amount that I popped in a bag and put in the freezer for Christmas.  

Despite the farcical behaviour with my blender, and the fact that this recipe only makes half the amount it was supposed to, I'd say it was a success.  I have two small jars of wild garlic pesto to use over the next three weeks - perfect for some springtime pasta.

Further harvesting...
I decided to harvest some more ramsons a little later on and rather than make a pesto I simply blitzed the leaves with a little olive oil and then froze them into small ice cubes.  I'll be using these to add a gentle garlic flavour into cooking in the winter.

A month of reading and planning

 It has been a month since my last post, so you would be forgiven for thinking that I'd had an idea over Christmas and the reality of this challenge has been too much and I'd given up.  Far from it.  

After extensive reading of numerous books and websites, I've come up with my menu for the meal.  Obviously this will be flexible depending on what I manage to find and kill, but it is a good structure to create a plan of what I am going to do.  

I initially thought that basing a dinner around a Medieval Christmas feast would be easier due to the fact that all the ingredients would have been available in Britain.  All our current Christmas traditions stem from these ancient meals, with roast beasts, fruit and lots of fattier foods in abundance, so there would be a link to the current feasts we all know.  

The traditional Medieval Christmas dinner was rich and heavy as it had come after a period of fasting.  The Advent fast prohibited meat, chicken, milk, cheese and butter, so once the period of abstinence was over, everyone wanted to cram as much of these foods in as possible.  Sure, they had managed to eat some meat during the advent, as they reckoned that beavers, as they lived in water like fish, munching on their tails was a good source of protein.  Once they had had their fill of a month of fish flavoured to taste like meat and beaver tail, medieval folks fancied a bit of venison, pig, chicken or goose, with lots of fatty and sweet treats.  They also threw in lots of spices to their food, with gingerbread, spiced wines, mince pies and plum puddings, all things that are still commonplace today.  Although the medieval meal hasn't changed a lot, some of the ingredients have so I will be looking back in time to old recipes to try and find alternatives for a lot of our imported ingredients.

My amuse-bouche is inspired by the medieval love of land animals and fatty dishes and I will be making Wild Beast Terrine with chutney & toast.  I've deliberately kept things a bit vague here on the beast content, but it could include duck, pigeon rabbit, pheasant - anything really that I manage to get in the run up to Christmas.

The medieval feast was one of decadence and even though crabs and lobsters were once peasant food, they are now considered posh nosh so I will be making a Crab and/or Lobster consomme for a starter - hopefully that should embrace the decadence!

The main course is the highlight of the Christmas meal and again, being on the coast of Scotland with lots of migrating geese means that I'm aiming to have a couple of roast wild geese for dinner, and it is going very medieval as they too would have used this bird at Christmas.  You can't have a Christmas bird without stuffing, and taking inspiration from a River Cottage recipe for Bunny Burgers, I'm going to make Bunny Stuffing - packed with herbs and juniper (I've found a bush!).  I hope to be able to trade some shellfish for some venison that I will transform into Chipolata sausages (subtle hints have already been made for a Sausage maker for my birthday in June!) and instead of Cranberry Jelly, I'm going to have another go at making rosehip jelly to serve with the bird.  Root vegetables are going to come from homemade growbags, and my initial plan was to find some disused land and plant some potatoes in it.  Then I did some research.

Guerrilla Gardening is a growing past-time of the middle classes and, although illegal, has been going on for centuries.  Since the 17th century, when a group of people fought for the right to cultivate land for food, people have been planting in land that doesn't belong to them.  People are planting flowers on roundabouts and verges to stop the urban decay and brighten up our towns and cities with colour, others are putting down veggies in disused flower beds and all of this is often done in the middle of the night.  However, because I run a wine shop, I have to pass police checks to keep my license to sell alcohol.  Even though the chances of me being caught planting a few spuds up a farm track are slim to nil, I would have to write about it, and that would be me confessing to committing a crime, so I am going to have to borrow a bit of land somewhere for that.

Foraged Christmas Pudding is going to be made out of any fruit I can find and dry, as will the Christmas cake.  I should be able to get a supply of plums, so rather than make a raisin filled Christmas Pudding, I'll be making a Dickensian Plum pudding after harvesting and drying plums at home.  If I can find any other berries , I'll dry those out too for these desserts.

That isn't where the cooking stops I'm afraid, with as the Christmas feast continues with Mince Pies but that i've already got sussed.  My sister-in-law gave us a jar of homemade mincemeat for Christmas last year so I'm just going to continue feeding it with booze throughout 2012 and use that for some mince pies.  Another thing I'm cheating on is the damson gin that I made at the end of last year.  Infusing damsons with a bit of sugar in a bottle of gin is one of the easiest home made drinks you can make.  Of course it is unadvisable to make your own gin from scratch, but buying an inexpensive supermarket bottle of gin is a quick, cheap and easy way to make this winter treat.

Pickles and chutneys should be easy enough to make.  The vinegar is going to have to be bought out of the budget, but the vegetables that I need can be grown in containers and grow bags, but cheese is going to be hard to come by.  Any dairy I need is going to have to be bought, but when you start buying cheese, my £30 budget is going to be eliminated pretty quickly.

So those are my plans.  I've not been able to do anything towards this yet, but I've had a bit more luck and progress with the gifts side of things.  That will come in the next instalment.

First steps to making beer

Today I made my first steps to actually producing something!  Well, not really, but I did get some good news for future alcohol production.  I received an email from James Robertson of the Tullibardine Distillery, and they have very kindly offered me ten kilos of malted barley that should have been destined for Scotch Whisky production, to make into beer.  As beer is (and I apologise for the crudity of this statement) a combination of malt, water, yeast and hops, the only other thing I needed were hops... and there aren't any around here to forage.  So it got me thinking, what can I use instead?

The Williams Bros brewery has been making Heather Ale, commercially, for years now, and so using this very Scottish plant instead of hops was always an option.  However, I thought I'd delve a little deeper into other possibilities and started scouring the default source of all information, the internet.  I found that plants like Milk Thistle and Wormwood were used before hops became popular, but they are not exactly easy to come by nowadays and besides, I wouldn't know a Milk Thistle if it was right in front of me.

More easy to source plants include Dandelions and Nettles, but as I am exceptionally sensitive to nettle stings I don't fancy wading into patches of the things without the levels of protection that people wear in a nuclear plant.  Another option is rosemary, and I could grow this quite merrily in pots outside my house, but the beer that interests me most is made with Spruce.

I found a website called Gourmet Underground Detroit, that has a spruce beer recipe, but most importantly, it makes it clear that no hops are needed.  The resulting beer is apparently quite citrussy and tart, so I am hoping it will be a lighter, refreshing type of beer.  I have found out that spruce beer can also have a darker, Cola like flavour and am assuming that this is due to later harvesting when the tips of the spruce are more resinous and woody.

There are quite a few spruce trees around the area I live, so the hope is that I can harvest them in a few months and start making my Tullibardine Malt Spruce Beer in the spring... 

Pre-Christmas leftovers - Christmassy Bread & Butter Slice

I love spending time in the Cotswolds, and in the bakers there you often find a bread and butter slice – essentially a tray bake that uses up leftover bread that has a few raisins added into it.  It is deliciously moist and exceptionally tasty, but for some reason, frugal Scottish bakers haven’t cottoned onto the fact that you can use wasted stock to make this delicious sweet treat.

So embracing my idea yesterday of making things with pre-Christmas leftovers, I tried to make one of these bread & butter slices and put a Christmassy twist on it so it could be eaten as a snack or even for breakfast on Christmas day.

You need

1 Loaf of stale bread (white or brown, not seeded)

Some butter to spread on the bread

3 egg yolks

500mls milk

¼ cup caster sugar

Raisins or dried fruit

Ground Nutmeg

Ground Cinnamon

Here is what to do

Preheat the oven to 180c

Firstly, cut the bread into thick slices.  Leave the crusts on, as it gives it a more rustic slant.

Lightly butter both sides of the bread

Heat the milk in a pan until it is nearly at the boil

Meanwhile, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar and as much cinnamon and nutmeg as you desire until combined and put to one side.

When the milk is nearly boiling, pour onto the egg yolks and sugar and whisk to combine it all quickly.

Pour the mixture back into a pan and heat on a medium heat.

Stir constantly with a wooden spoon, cooking out the custard until the mixture coats the back of the spoon (I added a bit of cornflour because it was taking quite a while).

Pour the custard into a bowl and whisk to cool quickly and then transfer into a jug

Line a loaf tin with grease-proof paper and grease the inside.

Layer the bread in the bottom, add a small handful of raisins on top, and then pour some custard over the top.  Repeat until the bread & custard is all used up.

Place in the oven and cook for 35-45 minutes.

Remove from the oven and cool in the tin.

Turn out and slice and then eat.

Well – that is the theory.  Firstly, I forgot to grease the greaseproof paper, so when it came to taking the loaf out of the tin, the outer shell had welded itself to the paper and ripped off leaving the inner casing that looked as though I’d dropped it on the floor. Turning it upside down however made it look fine.

So presentation is terrible, but what does it taste like?  Well, essentially, Bread & Butter pudding, with a subtle nutmeg and cinnamon element coming through.  It was lovely and moist, with the custard flavour intensifying overnight.  Making a spiced custard works really well and I think if I’d soaked the raisins in rum and been a little more adventurous with the spices (infusing a clove in the custard would have been great), it would have made the whole thing taste much better and give a bit more of a Christmassy flavour.  I'll try this to make this again soon, and this time not muck it up.

Pre-Christmas Leftovers - Chicken stock

Using up leftovers at Christmas time is something everyone does.  The Turkey Curry/Chilli/Sandwich arrangement is something that everyone either enjoys or tolerates for the days following the big day.  After having a roast chicken on New Year’s Day, I realised that I could include things within the Christmas feast that would be utilising waste food from meals on the lead up to Christmas.  Instead of making things out of Christmas leftovers, making Christmas things from leftovers.

The most obvious starting place was stock – something I’ve never bothered making, and just bought good pre-made stuff.  Sure, a box of stock cubes don’t cost a lot, but with a £30 budget, it works out as a large percentage of my permitted money. I realised that if I have a roast chicken or beef joint in the couple of months before Christmas, I could make some stock out of the bones or carcass, and then freeze it to use at Christmas.  So, I decided to give it a shot with my roast chicken. 

I threw a the carcass, some leftover raw parsnips, some herbs (rosemary & thyme) a few cloves of garlic and a potato (I had it, and thought ‘why not’) and some peppercorns into a pan, three litres of water and turned on the heat.

I brought it to a boil, skimmed some scummy looking stuff off the top of the liquid and then turned down the heat.  Leaving it for four hours, skimming anymore scum that formed on the top when I saw it and then passed it all through a sieve. 

The stock tasted ok – it wasn’t fantastic, but I didn’t have a lot of ingredients to add flavour.  It was a bit watery and had a slightly oily element to it and I feel as though with more reduction, it certainly could be better.

So my first exploration into stock failed, but it gave me the notion that I’m going to have to explore using leftovers more.  I could confit meats that I don’t use, and if I shoot animals in the months prior to Christmas, I could preserve the meat I don't use from them.  Stuffing could be made out of leftover sausages that I’ve not eaten, and if I can master stock, it could be the basis for a soup for a starter. 

Bread is another thing that we all throw out, but I’ve discovered a fantastic way of producing a tray bake that uses old bread – sure, its not part of a Christmas feast, but with the right spices and it could be very Christmassy and be added to the festive table – maybe even as something for breakfast on Christmas morning!  I’m making it tonight and will let you know how it goes tomorrow!

A harsh reality, five pounds & poop

So, the beginning of January is here and there is nothing to forage, I haven't learnt to hunt yet and still need to figure out my menu, so I’ve been thinking about the ingredients that I may have a problem sourcing. 

My first thought went to alcohol, and what I can do to achieve my goal of having beer at my feast.  Beer is a simple theory.  You need water, a starter yeast, some malted barley and hops.  When I actually get round to making the beer, I'll deal with the hops, but my brain went into overdrive today regarding the barley.

I spoke to a work colleague who is an amateur brewer and been advised that for around 20 litres of beer, I will need 5kg of malted barley.  So, malted barley – where can I get that?  I’ve been told that buying from brewery shops, it would cost £5 for the amount that I need.  “That is very reasonable, a fiver for twenty litres of beer” thought I, and there was the temptation to reach into my wallet and haul out a crisp note.  Then the realisation of my challenge set in.  It isn’t that I can’t afford five pounds for the barley, I can, but my budget doesn’t allow me to.

A fiver is a sixth of my total budget for every consumable item on my Christmas dining table.  I figure I’m going to have to buy things like dairy products, sugar, maybe some spices and these ingredients aren't cheap.  So not to eat up all the budget, I realised I am going to have to change my mindset as I simply cannot afford to spend this money on barley to make beer.  If I want beer, I am going to have to make it for free, and I'm also going to have to find a lot of things for free.

I also need to figure out how I can bottle this beer.  I have easy access to empty beer bottles, but I can’t seal those with caps unless I spend money on them – again, something I can’t afford, so I need to find a source of swing top bottles, like the ones that are used by Grolsch.  Any ideas folks?

On a positive note, I’ve had some advice regarding veggies.  Tim Butler who runs The Seafood Restaurant in St Andrews has suggested upturned grow bags for growing all the root vegetables that I will need.  With a little lateral thinking, I realized that can make my own grow bags.  There are many farms around where I live, and they have horses.  In the next few days (once the farmer’s new year hangovers have subsided) I plan to approach a few farms with the hope that I can clear out their stables and collect the horse manure.  Sure, it means scooping a lot of poop, but it contains the nutrients that potatoes and parsnips need.  Combining this with some soil and then filling the mix into jute bags will be my first step, before leaving for a few months to compost down.  Then, come the springtime, I should have a DIY grow bag in which to plant my root veg for Christmas.  As I’m going to have to grow these at the front of my house, half way up a cliff with a public footpath running by, the jute sacks will also look much better than a plastic grow bag and stop the local preservation society moaning that I'm making my house look messy - I hope!