Bumbling Bee

22/02/2024

Kept myself busy today, these are home made gingerbread men, and walnut, hazelnut and sultana biscuits, all baked in the oven at the same time to save on energy costs.

One packet of 5 oat and raisin biscuits from ASDA costs £1.25. They may be big, but they're only 5 portions and so easy to eat in just one or 2 sittings if you're greedy like me.

In comparison, I made 30 of these biscuits (half the size of the ASDA ones) but more than enough to last for ages, especially as I keep them in the freezer to stop the family from bingeing them as easily. I can't cost them up because I'm rubbish at maths, but they cost pennies as I'm lucky enough to be able to buy flour in bulk - although I'm aware that not everyone can afford to do the same. No artificial flavourings or additives in home made stuff too, which is a bonus. Freezing baked goods preserves them anyway. Just blast for a few minutes in a microwave to reheat if you like them warm, or leave on the side to defrost when needed.

The walnuts were given to me at Xmas and the hazelnuts were foraged from Hazel trees last Autumn, so they didn't cost me anything. I could not find a nutcracker anywhere! Who'd have thought a hammer could be essential kitchen kit. 😆

Gingerbread men at Greggs are £1.25 I made 10 of them for far, far less than that, although I'll admit that they are wonky and don't include fancy chocolate buttons and the like. Equal rights for disabled gingerbread men I say! One missing arm isn't the end of the world.

I feel bad for the squirrels, but there were plenty left for them and I'm still reaping the benefits from my foraging last year - it was worth the time and effort I spent poking up at trees with a litter picker like a weirdo last year after all. 😁

You’ll learn the parts of Hazel used as food and medicine, harvest time, nutrition and other ways humans use this amazing plant - Read more!

10/02/2024

More kitchen foraging today! This does include wild ingredients but they were scrabbled out of the deep, dark depths of my freezer. I hope you can forgive me for my lack of authenticity. Honestly, they were hand picked, just last Autumn. I'm not 'really' cheating.

Wild Garlic has started to crop up again in green foresty glades, but it's way too soon to nab these gorgeous pops of garlic seeds. You'll have to wait until they've flowered and seeded to find these. Just be patient though, they are worth the wait. Their flavour is much more intense than the leaves and they are absolutely fabulous pickled, but that particular recipe will have to wait for another day.

Here we have 2 ingredients Wild Garlic Naan Breads, 4 ingredients if you include the Wild Garlic Seeds and half a TSP of salt. Simply add 3/4 of a cup of thick gloopy greek yoghurt to 1 heaped cup of self raising flour with a handful of garlic seeds, 1/2 TSP salt and mix to a dough with your hands. That's it. You could do this in your sleep it's that easy.

Separate into 8 balls of dough, flatten into naan shapes and dry fry, dousing with butter or margarine as you go if you like a bit of golden crisp crust. 3 minutes on one side, flip and 2 minutes on the other.

They're so fluffy! Proper pillowy loveliness. I adore the things. Eat with curries, dips, sandwich filling, whatever you like.



https://www.first-nature.com/flowers/allium-ursinum.php

09/02/2024

This is definitely not a foraging in the great outdoors recipe, I make no apologies for that. Don't judge me! It is, however, foraging in a kitchen, which is where most of us forage for our food on a daily basis. So, if you read this and you're sat in an urban area, in a house, with no garden, no access to the great outdoors, you can still have a go. No excuses!

Food waste drives me mad, so I always try to use every scrap of ingredients that I have, including bread. In a cost of living crisis, it seems irresponsible not to, in my humble opinion. Today we venture into the land of stale bread. Not quite Alice in Wonderland, but an awful lot more practical and with less weird potions in small bottles.

Today I made croutons. I'm going to freeze them and just take out a handful now and then to chuck into salads for a bit of crunch, to throw into soups, pasta dishes etc.

First of all I dried the stale (not mouldy) bread as shown in one of my previous posts - then I broke them up into fairly regularly sized pieces ready to be thrown into a scalding hot wok with some home made, melted garlic butter, olive oil, herbs, salt and pepper. Once the bread has soaked up the oil and toasted a little, they're ready for use, it's as simple as that. It's basically like making bite size pieces of crunchy, tasty, fried bread.

The butter was made from churned out of date double cream and the bread was just left too long so it wasn't suitable for sandwiches. I'm sure other people have their own ways of doing this, but I thought sharing my method might help someone who hasn't tried this yet?

I added the following ingredients to the wok, but you can add whatever you like really, all that matters is that there's enough olive oil (or fat or butter) to soak into the bread, so it fries nicely. Try a piece now and then as you go and stop frying when it tastes crunchy or seasoned enough.

Recipe - I added olive oil, a generous lump of garlic butter, 2 tsp dried oregano, 1 tsp garlic powder, 3/4 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp black pepper.

It's a very approximate recipe, so just adapt according to how you like them. The important bit is the toastiness and the crunch. I love eating these as snacks too, with a bit of dip, they're an incredibly cheap packet of crisps substitute....although they're probably not helping with my waistline. 😆

25/01/2024

Right, I love foraging, but apples just push my limits! I STILL have so many tupperware boxes full of the blasted things in my freezer. Yesterday I decided to actually try to use some of them up

This is an Apple Crumble made with apples I foraged last year and crumble made from dried, finely ground, leftover crusts of bread instead of flour, with just a little bit of proper flour in the crumble to get it to 'crumble' properly.

I know it's seen as being a simple recipe, but if you're new to cooking or baking, a recipe really helps. Not everyone knows the basics, I know I didn't when I started learning.

Measure 100g of finely ground breadcrumbs out and mix in 50g of butter (could use marg), using your fingers, combine it till it looks like larger breadcrumbs. If it's still got large lumps of butter, add a dash of flour and mix that in too.
Add approx 75 g sugar, mix it in.
Set aside.
Then get 450g of any fruit, squish it or heat it till it's gloopy (tinned is quicker). Add sugar to taste.
Put the fruit in an ovenproof bowl, cover the fruit in the crumble mixture so it looks like a pie topping.

Bake at approx 200C until the top goes crusty, it's heated through and looks a bit brown.

This tastes almost identical to normal crumble, the crust is a bit softer, but it's still nice enough. Flour is cheap, but if all you have is breadcrumbs from an excess of free Olio bread or something, this is a very good substitute. Don't chuck bread away, it's so useful!

This is a very inexpensive recipe because the apples were foraged. The breadcrumbs were made from stale bread that would otherwise have gone in the bin, and really, I only paid for the sugar and the fat in this. It made about 6 portions and it's well worth trying.

Call me sad if you like, but I enjoy making things up as I go along, even if it includes messing around with something as basic as breadcrumbs and apples. Sometimes it even works out and tastes nice. 😋

(The ice cream in the pic was extra of course)

11/10/2023

I love Autumn and in particular, Apples!

Maybe we're lucky, but there's a ton of them growing in our area. The apples shown in the included photograph are my favourite though. They're tiny bright red crab apples that grow in the community garden a few feet from our back door.

With permission, I harvested a small bag of them the other day and made, sweet, cloudy apple juice. If I'd bought the equivalent from a shop, with all the labelling and air miles, it would have cost an arm and a leg. Lucky old me, got it for free, if you discount the minimal cost of sugar and a blast of gas on the hob of course.

It's so easy, it's barely a recipe. The apples were looking a bit past their best, so I washed them and cut away and disposed of any black, bruised or soft sections, next I nicked off the woody stalks. Each apple was chopped into 4 pieces and then put into a pan with just enough water to stew them in at a low temperature - add a dash of lemon juice too if you like? Apple cores, skin, everything went in the pan - no fussing. Add sugar to taste. No need to boil, this isn't a jam recipe.

After they'd softened enough to be squished into something that looked like apple'ish mashed potato, I simply tipped all the contents of the pan into a large piece of muslin which I tied together at the top. This bag of squished apples dripped into a bowl, with a bit of a help from me. Imagine milking a cow and just think of this as milking a squishy bag of apples. Straining apples through muslin removes all the pips, skin, bits you don't want in your drink and it saves you having to peel, core, waste a load of valuable time and effort. It just makes the process easier.

Then, you've finished! You have your very own apple juice, no additives or preservatives and faff free too. It tasted lovely and check out the amazing, completely natural colour! It's so pretty.

07/10/2023

Long time no write anything! So sorry!

Been really quite poorly and ended up in hospital with complications related to my auto immune disease, Ulcerative Colitis flare up this time.

Anyway, I'm a determined little Bumbly Bee and am recovering nicely now, so I'm still buzzing around going odds and ends of foraging. I may fall down, but I get up again. 😊

Today I'm writing up a little project from a while ago. 'Wild Plum and Pineapple W**d Fruit Leather'.

A while ago I found a wild plum tree, a ton of Pineapple W**d and thought the flavours might mesh really well. I've never seen this done elsewhere and I knew it was a bit of a risk. I hate to waste ingredients if things go wrong, but experimentation is all part of the fun and the gamble.

It worked! All the stones were removed from the plums and then I stewed them until soft and jammy; adding a bit of sugar to taste, not that it needed much to be honest. Next stage was to trim all the dried up bits of leaves from the Pineapple W**d, leaving only the clean, fresh, green leaves and flowerheads. The chopped up Pineapple W**d went into the jammy plum mix, was stirred throughout and then the fruit leather process began.

To make fruit leather you can use an oven at a very low temperature for hours or you can use a dehydrator, which is what I do. I poured the mixture into shallow lipped trays, onto greaseproof paper and simply left it to dry at a low temperature until the liquid transformed into a solid, slightly sticky, leathery layer.

The next bit is easy, all you have to do is trim the excess greaseproof paper from around the edges of the fruit leather, cut the leather into long strips with the greaseproof paper still stuck to the reverse side and then roll them up into little fruit leather swiss roll style things. Tie them neatly with string and you're done!

These fruit leather roll ups can be kept for ages and ages in a freezer if you want to preserve them that way, or you can simply bob them into a tightly sealed, sterilized jam jar to dip in and out of if you fancy a wild food sweet treat. I put food safe silica pouches in with my fruit leathers to keep them dry, damp and mould free.

This flavour combination is gorgeous you know! Plums and pineapple are a lovely mix. I'm so pleased with how well everything worked out and it really is worth trying. Plus it looks incredibly pretty held up to a light. I have a vague plan to cut out star shapes of fruit leather and hang them on string as edible Xmas tree decorations. Thankfully I won't have to think about that for a while though. One thing at a time eh? 😊

https://totallywilduk.co.uk/2023/01/05/wild-plum-prunus-domestica-identification-guide/
https://www.wildfooduk.com/edible-wild-plants/pineapple-weed/

13/09/2023

Kill me now.

I carefully stripped a cooked chicken and put it into 3 bowls, one for Boz (my dustbin dawg), one for stock, one for reheating and using. Then I put the stock mix in the slow cooker with onions, bay leaf etc.

Next I made a white sauce from scratch, added chopped onions, my home made butter from the freezer and the nice big lumps of chicken, plus some of the stock. Leftover tortilla wraps would do for chickeny pancaky things, right? I dolloped the mixture into the tortillas, folded them, brushed with milk and put them in the oven to cook and reheat.

I had leftover mixture so I mixed the lukewarm/hot/ish white sauce up with the cold stripped chicken. Left it for about 1/2 hour whilst filling dishwasher. Spooned it over pasta and served up with a lukewarm chicken sauce to me and Tom. Tasted awful....then after a few mouthfuls I remembered I'd not reheated the chicken in the sauce....so potential lukewarm chicken dodgy belly tea - had a few bites, but all of it got tipped in the bin when I realised what I'd done. Accompanied with a vast array of swear words, naturally. Clever eh?
The icing on the disgusting, very time consuming, possibly poisonous meal I just served up was that I also burnt the tortilla chicken pancake things and they taste crap too.

Total and utter waste of time, energy and noisy swearing. Took me about 2 hours in total because I'm a bit poorly and I move slowly or something.

There's a cold, pre-made, pre-packaged meat pie in the fridge. Thank the gods for that. Took me precisely 10 seconds to get it out of the fridge, to unwrap it, cut it in half and shove it in my gob. 🙄

Sometimes you just have to accept that the learning process is really annoying and unpleasant and persist regardless.....just on another day....when you feel more patient. We're all, frustratingly, only human I guess. I like big meat pies, I cannot lie. Maybe it's not such a bad result after all. 😆

23/08/2023

I churned my own home made butter from a 600ml tub of out of date, reduced to 53p, double cream last night. Each ball of butter had its own individual flavour. Marojam from the garden, garlic flakes, chilli and minced up Nasturtium seeds.

These will all go into the freezer. The Nasturtium butter is hot, like grassy flavoured chillies, lovely mixed through pasta. The chilli one will be melted onto meats. The Marojam herby butter will be nice with fish. Garlic butter is for making garlic bread. Simples!

The Marojam and Nasturtiums were foraged so they were free. The garlic flakes were dried and from an absolutely massive bag from an Asian supermarket so were nearly free and the chilli flavour came from the dregs of a hot sauce bottle I had in the fridge.

Just check out how expensive posh flavoured butter is online, it's a fortune! You can make your own for literal pennies.



https://www.wildwalks-southwest.co.uk/make-capers-from-nasturtium-seeds/ #:~:text=All%20parts%20of%20nasturtiums%20(pronounced,all%20have%20that%20spicy%20flavour.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/marjoram

15/08/2023

Just a quick post today and I'm very sorry but the plum fruit leather update will have to wait for another day or so. I have to spend a bit of time rolling the stuff so I have pretty photos to show you.

Today's post is simply about how I use handfuls of 'weeds' to add green nutrition to everyday meals. This is a homemade chicken pie with a difference. It is 'Chicken Pie Al la Carte...full of Stuff You'd Usually Put in Your Compost'. A bit of a mouthful, but that's the point of it, right?

It was made much the same as every other chicken pie you've ever eaten, but with the addition of a massive handful of leaves and a (few flowers) from Willowherb, Nettles, Plantain, Dandylion and Hairy Bittercress. The largest proportion of this bunch were nettles, the rest were added for a bit of nutritional variety. Nettles are very spinach like and I wanted that to be the strongest flavour in the sauce.

The stems were all removed and I made sure I only used nettle leaves from plants that hadn't gone to seed. They were all thoroughly rinsed, finely chopped and were then thrown and mixed into my white sauce. It looked like parsley sauce, but tasted greener, which I swear is a real actual flavour - not grassy, not earthy, not manky...just greener. You'll have to try it to see what I mean. I like it anyway.

The rest of the process was exactly as normal. My family wolfed it down with no complaints which is good, although they did say it wasn't as nice as grandma's chicken pie; but that's not a recipe I can ever hope to compete with, nor will I try to. I know my limits!

So, that's another easy way to add wild food into your diet - nothing fussy or complicated, nothing too weird. Just add edible plants that grow as weeds in your garden into your sauces. It's no big deal and if you do your ID checks carefully, which I can't stress enough, you really will end up with healthy, lovely food you can share with your family.

*Did I mention, 'Do your ID checks carefully'? I forget....because you really, really can't miss that bit out.

P.S Always use reliable sources so you know exactly what you're picking, preferably 3 of them. Use books, the internet, forums, your common sense. Don't ever, ever, EVER guess the identity of wild food ingredients you plan to eat - if you're not sure what something is, don't put it in your mouth, please.

I have included a couple of pages, so you can start learning about these useful edible plants.

https://www.wildfoodie.co.uk/post/hairy-bittercress-pesky-weed
https://www.first-nature.com/flowers/~onagraceae.php
https://www.first-nature.com/flowers/taraxacum-officinale.php
https://www.growforagecookferment.com/plantain-natures-band-aid/
https://www.first-nature.com/flowers/urtica-dioica.php