More summer cooking with foraged food

The German-style 'Green Sauce' makes a return to my dinner table, with this elegant creation:

Fried Polenta with Green Sauce and Crumbled Cheshire Cheese with Chives

The Green Sauce can be made using any foraged leaves (whether raw, or blanched if necessary - as in the case of nettles). Here I used a mixture of plantain, wild London rocket, chickweed, and frozen wild garlic leaves.

Basically you take a cup of green leaves, a generous slug of good oil, some garlic (though I used frozen garlic leaves), a tablespoon of cider vinegar, and a couple of tablespoons of sour cream (or creme fraiche I suppose). Just blitz everything in a blender - season and flavour with capers, lemon juice, even anchovies or chopped boiled egg.

Here I've plated up my fried polenta, dressed it with lashings of the Green Sauce, and crumbled over some delicious Cheshire Cheese with Chive from Boyer's of Camberwell. I've finished the plate with a trio of fantastic Sicilian olives from the farmer's market on Telegraph Hill.

Enjoy!

The Cafe on New Cross Road

It's 'back to the drawing board' for the cafe on New Cross Road - variously known as Come the Revolution and Cafe 465. Unfortunately the couple running the cafe still weren't making enough money, and have had no choice but to close down again.

However, the leaseholder is in this building for the foreseeable future, and is already formulating plans to reopen in a new guise. Not as a cafe though! New developments should become clear soon enough.

In the meantime, I am likely to continue using the space to host Wild Food Cafe workshops and similar events.

Grow Wild

Just submitted my application for the role of Food Activities Coordinator with Grow Wild, a new lottery-funded project being run by Edmund Waller school to promote healthy, food-related activities around our part of Lewisham. I'd love to take my 'food activism' to the next level, and work with this new outfit!

A weekend with the Faeries

Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th July were World Pride weekend, and the focus of two events in the Albion Faerie community.

On Saturday 7th we hosted a picnic in beautiful Phoenix Gardens, Soho. We had a wonderful, magical day -  and miraculously, a whole stretch of afternoon without rain, allowing us to lay out on my glamorous, pink satin blanket...

(I have re-posted this image as it is in the public domain)

On Sunday 8th it was back to the Sundown Schoolhouse, a temporary Queer meeting-space on the roof of the Hayward Gallery. We had 40+ people turn out for an afternoon of community-building and companionship - all facilitated by the usual tea, cakes and sympathy which I lovingly provide!

This is me in the guise of White Rose, my Faerie alter-ego and willing party hostess...

Delicious Lavender Biscuits...

Following the Wild Food Cafe, I just got an email asking me for a recipe for some lavender biscuits I served. Since I've written up the recipe, I thought I'd post it here, too.

The biscuits take their flavour from a lavendar sugar, which is really easy to make, Just steep a handful of lavendar flower heads in a jar of caster sugar for around 1 week. You should shake it every so often, otherwise the sugar tends to clump together!

You can use the sugar in all kinds of home baking, but here's my recipe for Lavender biscuits. They were absolutely delicious served with vanilla icecream and a drizzle of elderflower syrup!

Lavender Biscuits:

1 cup lavendar sugar
1 cup of fine, plain flour
1/2 cup of softened butter, at room temperature
1 egg, beaten (with a few drops of lemon oil essence, optional)

cups should be about a small teacup size.

Cream the lavendar sugar and butter together; mix in the egg; incorporate the flour.

I pressed the mixture into yorkshire pudding tins to create little medalion biscuits. You could also press it into a large tray to make a single slab. Grease your trays liberally!

Bake in a medium oven for 10mins, then take them out and allow to rest for at least 10mins. Return them to the oven for another 5 or 10mins, and finally take them out again to cool right down. (This is a genuine 'biscuit', meaning 'twice cooked'!)


If you time it right, you should get a lovely crisp edge and a soft chewy centre.







Enjoy!