Fat Hen

Japanese knotweed - the largest female clone in the world

I was just sent a link from the BBC online news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8162775.stm

Just a few words of warning to prospective pickers and eaters of the superweed.

It is a scheduled weed listed under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and it is an offence to cause it to spread in the wild.

It can regenerate from a piece of rhizome the size of your thumbnail.  It is extremely invasive and even small pieces inadvertently picked up by your boots can spread it.

It is illegal to dump it or enable its spread in any way.

Therefore, if picking it to eat you must take extreme caution that you do not allow it to be spread in any way.

Always take any pieces with you in a sealed container.  Never drop any on the way home.  Never put any in your compost or throw any in the garden or on the side of the road.

Never, cut knotweed and leave it, especially alongisde water courses.

Always brush your boots off with a stiff brush to make sure you aren't treading any away from the knotweed site.  Check your car or vehicle doesn't have any knotweed on its tyres.

Furthermore, always check if the site has been sprayed with herbicide or not.

If you've done all that then you can go home and cook it and enjoy it.

Any bits you don't eat boil up in a pan and kill it before you dispose of it. 

This weed is the clone of one single female plant and reproduces vegetatively - it is a really strong weed - called 'itadori' in Japanese which means 'strong one'.

It has medicinal as well as culinary properties.

Substitute any rhubarb recipes for knotweed.  Knotweed should be harvested in Spring (March-May) when the new spears (looking like reddish-green asparagus) come up. 

Enjoy  x

Where and why I came to love wild food

Having never been given processed food as a child, by a mother who grew up in rural Wales during the war, I have always been interested in food.

I spent a colourful childhood in Hongkong and Botswana and had a real understanding of where food came from.  As a 6 year old I saw decapitated chickens running around the food markets in Hongkong, and at 8 I was helping my neighbours in Botswana bash the meelie meal (maize) in a giant pestle and mortar to make the staple porridge they ate.  I was used to seeing spit roasted pigs and the large extruding ox-tongue that adorned the top of my grandmother's fridge each time we went to visit was commonplace.  Food was real and meat very definitely from the animal. 

My mother took me nutting and blackberry picking as a child and I had my first exotic wild food experience as a 7 year old in Kashmir.  Mr Marvellous, the flower seller, took us out onto Lake Dahl to eat lotus seeds in the early morning mist.  It was magical and rather mystical.  I grew up with a deep desire to follow my interest in the natural world.  After spending several years in Botswana, as soon as I was aware that we, as a species, were putting so much pressure on the natural world that habitats were being lost and other species becoming extinct I could not ignore it and form and early age had a desire to work in wildlife conservation.

My idyllic and safe childhood was shattered by the death of my father when I was 13 to bowel cancer.  This sent me on a journey of internal desolation, sadness, depression and stubborn rebellion.  I began a soul searching enquiry into the state of our environment, the contamination of our food resources and a desire to find meaning in life.  I never towed the conventional line and found great solace and healing in nature. 

I moved to Cornwall in 1998 and worked as an ecologist for Cornwall Environmental Consultants for 10 years where I honed my plant identification skills and developed a deeper understanding of the conflict between economic growth and development and the health of our natural wildlife systems.

My love of food and my professional skills as a plant ecologist combined with the excitement and empowerment of gathering wild food for free led to the desire to share these discoveries with others and in the subsequent creation of Fat Hen.

Meeting Matt and Claire (Fat Hen's chefs) elevated the gastronomic level of my wild food cooking to something I could never have imagined and this meeting has been a catalyst in setting up Fat Hen.  I realised we could offer something different to the regular 'bushcraft' wilderness cooking courses where survival is an integral part of the course.

We at Fat Hen aren't interested in eating just to survive - we eat to enjoy.  It's about bringing the outdoors indoors and creating fantastic food good enough to grace the tables of the best restaurants in the country.

Elderflower Cordial Recipe

This is simply the best elderflower cordial recipe ever!  There's nothing more evocative of dreamy sunny summer days than elderflower cordial.   Lounging around in the garden, eating al fresco and having to cool off under the hose pipe....We really have just had a whole week of sun, a glimpse into the world of the Meditterranean, where life is slow, lunchbreaks last 2 hours, dinners take all night and wine flows freely.

Alas, the spell was suddenly broken this weekend with howling wind and horizontal rain.  It feels more like a sloe gin and crackling fire day today.  Its June 8th and I'm sitting with my fleecy blanket wrapped around my legs.

Back to the Med.  Last week really was divine.  Evenings spent on the beach with the children after school when the sun never went down.  That sunshine did wonders for all our garden and wild plants.  Elderflowers totally bloomed last week and came into their prime.  I picked hundreds of elderflowers for my cordial and champagne and to supply to the Gurnards Head pub for their pudding of elderflower fritters and lemon mousse.

Elderflowers need to be picked in the first half of the day and in sunshine.  You can immediately tell which flowers you need to pick - the big fully opened cream flowers with the sweetest scent are the best and these are the ones you'll get the best result from.  Don't pick the old flowers - you want to have them young and fresh.

By the end of the day the flowers either lose their scent or smell a bit cat's pissy....best to leave it till the next day for picking.

When I pick lots of elderflowers and have to carry them around in the van all day I keep them in cool boxes with wet tea towels covering them.  By keeping them In the dark and moist I believe you can preserve the scent until you get home to start to turn them into the delectable drink of the goddesses - sparkling elderflower or elderflower champagne.

Here's my recipe:

Elderflower cordial

 

To make approx 3.5 litres

50 elderflower heads

2.5 kg organic un-refined caster sugar

2 litres filtered water

3 organic unwaxed lemons

1 organic orange

110g citric acid

Shake the elderflowers of insects and place in a large bucket.

Put the sugar into a pan with the filtered water and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar has completely dissolved.

While the sugar syrup is heating pare the zest of lemons and oranges off in wide strips and toss into the bowl with the elderflowers.

Slice the oranges and lemons, discard the ends and add to the bowl.

Pour over the boiling syrup and then stir in the citric acid.

Cover with a cloth and leave at room temperature for 24hours.

The next day strain through muslin or a jelly bag into sterlised glass or clean plastic bottles.

Dilute with still or sparkling water to taste.

Or turn it into a delicate sorbet by diluting with water and putting into an ice cream maker or putting in the freezer and taking out to whisk periodically to break up the ice crystals.

I store the cordial in sterlised glass bottles which I subsequently pasteurise after filling up the bottles,  in a large stock pan with water up to the necks of the bottles.  I keep the water at 80oC for 20 mins to complete the pasteurisation process.  You must place something in the bottom of the pan such as cardboard or a tray to stop the glass bottles touching the bottom of the pan.

I also store some in plastic bottles in the freezer - this seems to really keep the cordial so fresh and then, depending how much freezer space you have, you can have cordial all year round.

What to do when your nettle beer explodes?!

Gorgeous refreshing nettle and ginger beer stacked up in the workshop ready to drink but far too fizzy... oh damn the bottles are starting to explode.  This is as dangerous as a bomb going off if you happen to be in the vicinity of the bottles.  I recall a story by my in-laws whose ginger beer exploded and a piece of glass was wedged in 2 inches into the ceiling....

I'm desperate to save my nettle beer and have had Frank in full protective clothing trying to release some pressure.... Wearing his chain saw trousers on his arms and his strimming visor whilst defending himself behind a large piece of plywood he's been trying to gently push the grolsch type tops without opening them just to release a bit of gas.....

Did it work??  Well, not really as we opened two bottles and the geyser erupted to leave about an inch in the bottom of the bottle.  Its absolutely delicious so I don't want to waste it but I also don't want to injure myself.  Brewing is a dangerous business.

The moral of the story is ...... patience is a virtue...... if I hadn't been so keen to bottle the nettle beer it wouldn't be so fizzy now... Should have left it for another couple of days - I only left it in the bucket to ferment for two days.

Oh well.  I'm wondering if I can empty all bottles into a huge vat and start again.... Probably not possible.  Entering the workshop now is becoming quite a worrying event....

Let's hope the elderflower isn't quite so excitable.....

What a weekend!

Wow!  we were totally blessed with perfect weather for Fat Hen's gourmet wild food weekend last weekend 23/24th May.  blazing hot sunshine all weekend....We also had a great gang of people on our weekend including two lovely writers and three hilarious lads from Surrey.  We foraged for rock samphire, laver seaweed, sea beet, mallow flowers, hedge bedstraw, wood sorrel, pink purslane, wild fennel, three cornered leek, black mustard leaves and flower buds, elderflowers, sweet violet leaves, mallow leaves, wild cabbage (almost on its way out), oxeye daisy flowers and leaves, sorrel, wall pennywort, carragheen seaweed, dulse seaweed, pignuts, jelly ear fungus etc. etc....  we were also lucky enough to get a delivery of a huge box of fish and spider crabs on Friday night literally an hour out of the water.  Some of the fish were still moving - you can't get fresher than that.  Huge thanks to Roger for the fish.  It was so fresh that we ate the mackerel raw with lemon juice, miso and wrapped in black mustard leaf... delicious...and we had a lovely fish soup with the John Dory, plaice, lemon sole and gurnard....

We just caught the end of the venison season and had seared venison with black pepper and mugwort, potato gratin with mugwort and wild fennel and wild cabbage and sea beet.

Elderflowers are just coming out down here and we managed to get enough to fritter and serve alongside our classic vanilla and lemon carragheen pudding.  Yum....

The evening folk music was played outside around the fire and much wine was swilled......

Tuesday saw a film shoot with The One Show on BBC1 on a headland above Perranporth beach.  I had to cook up some seaweed dishes for the show's 'family' who are on holiday in Cornwall trying out local wildlife activities.  The crispy seaweed went down the pan (quite literally) as the saucepan of hot oil slid off the stove on the windy and uneven headland but all was not lost as the black pudding with laver seaweed went down a treat, as did the carragheen seaweed pudding... it will be shown at 7pm sometime during the week 13th-20th July.

I'm getting twitchy about elderflowers and keeping a keen eye on progress every day, trying to judge the best time to go gathering.  I always reckon the morning is best before the sun comes out as the elderflowers are at their sweetest and most fragrant.  I'm lining up my bottles for elderflower champagne and have bagged the empty champagne bottles from our friend's wedding on Saturday night... Elderflower frenzy....cordial, cupcakes, dried flowers, infused into caster sugar, with gooseberries, as a sorbet.

There are few wild things that bring me such joy!!  you really can't beat elderflowers with their fresh and light fragrance- a true sign of the start of summer.

And off I go to sleep dreaming of elderflowers.   Alas, it is dangerous to fall asleep under an elder tree in full flower for risk of being taken away by fairies to another realm...(true folklore no less).  Respect to the elder tree.

Goodnight...x