Forraging - Elderflower Cordial

I just love this time of year, I like going out for a nice walk and seeing what bounties I can forrage!

What people don't know when they smile as they pass is that often I have a carrier bag and a pair of scissors in my pocket! Why I hear you ask, well for elderflowers. I love love love em and the best bit is they are free. I use them for cordial, champage and for fritters. DELISH!!!

For now I have made elderflower cordial and thought I would share the images from the process with you. What sparked it off was this darling little lady bug - so cute I grabbed my camera and from there I thought why not lets shoot the whole thing. Don't worry, the little bug was not harmed in the procees, she was put out to graze in my garden.

So piccies first and the I will share the recipe with you and then some tips on foraging!

Elderflower Cordial Recipe

To make approximately 3 litres

40 heads of elderflower
3.5 Kg sugar
2.5 litres water
4 lemons
150g citric acid
Bottles - Glass looks pretty but you can also use plastic.

1. Shake the elderflower heads to remove any bugs and beasties and also to shake off dead flowers and pollen
2. Trim as much of the green stalks off as possible as these can make it taste more bitter
3. Put the flowers into a large bowl (or two medium sized). Slice up the lemon and add this to the bowl with the flowers. If you would like the cordial to be less torte, use fewer lemons!
4. Pour the water into a large (or two medium sized) saucepan, add the sugar and slowly heat.
5. Once the sugar has dissolved, pour this into the bowl over the lemons and the flowers and savour that wonderful smell!
6. Stir in the citric acid, cover with a cloth.
7. Leave to infuse for 24-48 hours stirring occasionally.
8. Pour into clean sterilised bottles using a sieve or muslin cloth and a funnel.

Can be stored for up to one month or it can be frozen in batches and defrosted to use when required. This is what I do. I use smaller plastic bottles, the type that you buy for a one off drink about 500ml, I fill the bottle 3/4 full and then freeze it. That way I can get a bottle out when I like and not much goes off. It keeps for months and months frozen.

My tips and how to identify the plant

Elderflowers can be harvested approximately May – June.

I had bought cordial in the shops and paid an absolute fortune for it (particularly in the pretty fancy unusual bottles – I am a sucker for that – it must be posh and good if it is in a posh looking bottle, surely? All I knew was that Elderflowers taste yummy, the grow wild and are free. Making things with cordials must be easy and I no longer had to spend a fortune on my luxury cordial, or posh squash as Jon likes to call it!
I want to make elderflower cordial, I had that established but where on earth do I start? Where do they grow? What do they look like? My main worry with picking elderflowers is that I wasn’t entirely sure what they look like. This was our first foraging for free food experience and I was terrified that I was going to poison us!

Once you know what elderflower looks like, you always know. That may sound silly but now every where I go I am like, ooooh there’s one, ooooh fancy it growing there. It becomes an addiction.

The main plant that you could confuse elder with is the Guelder Rose. The guelder rose however is a much smaller shrub. The branches of Elder are very brittle and the bark is slightly corky looking. You can also tell the elderflower apart from the guelder rose by the leaves. Elder  leaves have finely serrated edges on a stem with two or three pairs and then a single leaf at the end. The Elder flowers are individually very small - the whole flower head being of a larger spread than the Guelder Rose. The latter has much larger individual white flowers open around the outside of the flower head, and smaller flowers very similar to the Elders in the centre of the flower head. Leaves are totally different to the Elder, being broader - a bit like a Field Maple shape.
Elderflowers smell of what can only be described as being “Tom cat ish” if they smell too much like tom cat then they have gone over and shouldn’t be used. Anything you make with gone over elderflowers will smell equally noxious!

The other plant that you could perhaps mistake them for is the white cowslip.

I would recommend that you harvest from as high as possible to avoid the concern that a doggy may have already paid a visit and to ensure that you are not harvesting cowslip. Also as ever avoid harvesting from a bush that is potentially polluted, from by the side of a road for example.

ENJOY!!!!

Book Review: Food For Free

I think if nothing else the title should really grab your attention, I mean afterall who wouldn't want to eat for free huh!

It's a Collins Gem book and I tell ya, it really is a little Gem! It is small in size but certainly not in content. I think I paid something like £3 for it and it was well worth it. In fact we keep it in the car so that it is handy for trips out etc but I am thinking of getting another couple and leaving them in bags etc as there are often times when I wish I had this little book with me.

It has details of pretty much everything you can imagine that you would want to forrage and then eat. It has both photographs and drawings /paintings so that you can easily identify what it is. The write up about each food stuff is pretty good and it is certainly a good start if you are thinking of forraging it or not, the only thing I would say is that I have refferred to other books or the internet later on for ideas of how to eat / cook / preserve the items. At the end of the day I don't mind that though as if it had all that information in the book would be huuuuuuuuge and I really want it more as an identifier whilst I am out and about.

Here I am in the tent after a walk along the saltmarshes forraging. I just wanted to show you how small the book is. So what are you waiting for? Go buy the book and go forraging. It is certainly a liberating experience and truly a way to get back to nature.

Forraging - Saltmarsh style

For the bank holiday we decided to have an impromptu break and go to the coast for a couple of days. Camping of course. You knew the weather by the seaside really was very pleasant and we were certainly warm and cosy in the tent. I love Norfolk. We stayed in Stiffkey and went along the stretch of coast from Wells to just after Blakeney. I do love the area and whilst it has become a lot snoottier over the years it has meant that a lot of small independent shops have opened up in the area. Far far more than we have here which is lovely. I do agree with Nicola though, when she wrote on her blog about local Farm Shops...

It’s the kind of place where all of the customers seem to drive immaculate 4×4’s, wear pristine hunter wellies and gilets and be incredibly well-groomed and manicured, as if they want to present the image of country living without actually coming into contact with real country life.  http://thegoodlifechallenge.wordpress.com/

Why is it that farm shops are more like posh chutney shops than actual grown produce? Anyway back to Norfolk...

So we were staying in Stiffkey which if you know the area you will know that the campsite is right next to the saltmarshes..

Our love of self sufficiency and our love for nice walks has lead us to forraging for our tea.

Armed with a bucket, pen knife, waterproofs and a sense of humour, we had a lovely walk along the salt marshes. It is a verritable buffet of lovliness it really is. On this trip we settled for Samphire and Mussels, a lovely combo! Some books and even some critics would probably say that it is too early in the year for such forraging. Well by the book yes it is, but remember before all the rain we have had of recent days it was unseasonably warm and everything was growing like crazy!

Below you will see the greyish area on the sand - these are all mussels and lots of them, oh and a windswept looking me!

My advice to budding forragers is to read good books. We reccommend the following:

River Cottage Handbook - Edible Seashore
Seaweed and Eat it: A family foraging and cooking adventure
The Camper Van Cookbook: Life on 4 Wheels, Cooking on 2 Rings

They tell you what to look out for, identifying your finds, safety, the law, and how to cook your finds.

And then of course have fun!

The books will tell you everything you need to do but make sure that the mussels are all still alive (OK that bit chokes me up!) and that they have been soaking in fresh water that has been changed several times. You need to make sure that they are nice and clean so give them a good scrub. Any floaters are dead so they need to go. Pop all your ingredients in a pan and they are ready to eat when they have opened up!

BUT PLEASE READ MORE ABOUT THIS.... I don't want you to get food poisoning!

We cooked our mussels in cream and garlic and served them over sauted samphire. It really was a scrumscious meal and almost FREE!