Foraging on Telegraph Hill

Some photos from the food foraging session I led for Grow Wild, as part of the Telegraph Hill festival.

Despite bitterly cold weather, we had a huge turnout of 30+ local residents all keen to forage for wild greens. 

Touring around St Catherine's Church and the two parks, we gathered lots of three-cornered leek, nettles, and chickweed. We also identified plantain and hawthorne, and we took note of plums, cherries and sloes for harvesting later in the year.  

After foraging, we took our findings back to the Common Growth garden where Louise from Grow Wild cooked up some wild nettle soup (amongst other things!) to share with the group.

Nettle is really traditional at this time of year, it's a great tonic for the blood which helps to clear out all the toxins that build up during the winter months when we tend to eat more animal fats (meat, dairy) and exercise less. It's also packed with vitamins and minerals! 

The soup was delicious. It was a really rewarding day all round, and I'd love to do it again later in the year! 

Lunch at the Cowley Club

...I cooked at the Cowley Club for the first time today, which was fun. Thanks go to Ryan and Rob for their practical help, and Sammy for her moral support.

The cook went well, we had a fairly tasty(!) vegan korma with rice and salads. Turnout wasn't brilliant, but a few friends turned up on top of the usual Cowley lunchtime crowd.

I'm hoping to do it again in future, with help from some more Faerie friends - and probably on a Friday (which should draw out a few more punters!)

'Cookability'

For the past few weeks I've been attending the Cookability course, run by Brighton & Hove Food Partnership. It's designed to support food activists to deliver cooking courses of their own, out in the community.

It's been great fun, with some really interesting people. We've been working together week-after-week to build up our group-working skills, develop knowledge around healthy eating & nutrition, and practice our food-prep by cooking lunch together.

This week was 'fish week', and I took the chance to demonstrate a recipe in front of the group - Smoked Mackerel Pate. It's a great recipe: a really simple prep, it's cheap, it keeps well, and of course the mackerel is a good source of protein and omega fatty acids (as well as being a relatively sustainable fish).

The finished dish tastes like a posh, richer version of tuna mayo. Which can't be a bad thing! :)

Half a packet (150g) cream cheese - can use quark or other low-fat version
Packet (250g) of smoked mackerel
A generous spoonful of yogurt, sour cream or creme fraiche
Lemon, pepper, chopped herbs etc. for flavouring

Remove the mackerel flesh from the skin, and remove any major bones. Blend the cream cheese and yogurt (etc.) into the flesh, and season with the lemon, pepper etc.

That's it! Can be kept in the fridge for several days, and you can flavour batches with additions like sweetcorn, sweet chilli, wasabi, and so on.

A photo of the group cooking lunch together...

...and the finished article, including a Palestinian-style stuffed trout:

Delicious! :)

Sunday 10th March

I've been booked by Louise of Grow Wild to lead another foraging walk around Telegraph Hill.

Louise is the Food Activities Coordinator for Grow Wild - she runs the popular Souper Sunday events at Common Growth. So, I'm hoping she can help us set up a field kitchen, and our foraged Telegraph Hill produce can be used to prepare an exciting wild lunch.

Watch this space for more details!

Food-shopping in Amsterdam



...with my sister, Lindsay. We spent a lovely morning with friends, savouring home-made apple tart with lashings of whipped cream and strong Dutch coffee (thank you, Wolf!). Then we strolled around the famous Noordermarkt organic food market - every Saturday, come rain or shine (or heavy snow!!) farmers and producers come from all over the Nederlands to share their wares. I got a lovely chunk of my favourite Dutch cheese, an 'oud kumin' (matured cheese with cumin seeds). Delicious!

Boxing day mushroom forage

Boxing day, and I'm preparing a dish to take to a cocktail party.

So I decided to combine the traditional Boxing Day stroll, with a bit of food foraging.

December might not be the most fruitful time of the year, but as it's mild this time around it's an ideal chance to search for edible mushrooms.

Sure enough, I found oodles and oodles of these things:

Jew's Ear fungus. Not the prettiest name, but the fungus itself can be quite pretty, as the sunlight shines through the silky, salmon-coloured flesh.

I found these in a boggy part of my hometown (Castleford, West Yorkshire). They almost always grow on old, slightly rotten or damaged Elder trees. And of course, on a patch of boggy wasteland, such specimens aren't hard to find!

So I picked about half a kilo of Jew's Ear, and the plan is to fry them - whole - with just some light seasoning, and use the cooked shrooms as a stylish garnish for my mushrooms vol-au-vents.

I hope they're as good as they look!

Goodbye, Telegraph Hill...

Goodbye, Mr Fox.

 

 

 

I'll miss you, and everyone on TH!

 

xx

Final forage around Telegraph Hill?

I am preparing to possibly leave Telegraph Hill and move in with friends in Brighton.

Today I was invited by Louise and Ella at Grow Wild, to lead a farewell forage around Telegraph Hill. We went out under leaden skies, to find a whole host of wild weeds still growing. We identified nettles and dead-nettles, mallow, cleavers (goosegrass), dandelion, plantain, mint and chickweed. All these were growing just behind St Catherine's church, around the edges of the new community garden. I picked mostly nettles (both stinging and 'dead' varieties) which I made into a hearty soup for my lunch. I also showed them the sloe-berries in the Lower Park, which were picked to make sloe gin.

I made certain to share a link to the Transition Lewisham Foraging Map, an open resource for all foragers in the area. Here's a link: http://goo.gl/maps/ds38T

More info about local foraging might also appear on the Grow Wild website.

Concern Bake a Difference event...

Thanks to all who came and contributed... We had a fabulous day, baked innumerable cakes, and raised £73.57 for hungry and malnourished children. 

Okay, I'll enumerate the innumerable cakes:

1x weird sugar-free egg-free Yorkshire Brak

12x chocolate brownie buns

1x magical apple meringue pie

2x experimental orange & caraway syrup cakes

1x plate of delicious bread-buns

1x plate of gluten-free, blue cheese straws

1x heart-shaped coffee cake

and lots of love.

Faerie Bake and Share

Sunday 14th October, from 11am. Secret roof-terrace in Islington, London...

Join us for a morning of fun, coffee and cake, all for charity!

From 11am we will come together to bake our own selection of sweet treats. What would you like to make?? Help and advice will be on hand from White Rose and other expert bakers. 

When they're ready we'll enjoy our treats, hot from the oven! There'll be plenty of time to chat and relax over tea or coffee. 

There should even be plenty of cakes left over to take home or share with friends!

The event is on behalf of Concern's 'Bake a Difference' campaign. The aim is to raise £100 on behalf of malnourished children. Entry is NOTAFLOF for faeries, but please consider a donation of £10 if you can afford it.

Please RSVP on the facebook event page, or by emailing dazflint@hotmail.com - this will help us prepare enough ingredients for the day! Don't forget to mention any special dietary requirements... :)

Address details and more details will be sent to attendees before the event!

More details at  http://www.facebook.com/events/422860547770679/

xx

A New Look for Common Growth

The Common Growth community food garden now has a colourful new look! 

From this:

To this!

At the end of July a host of volunteers called at the garden for an afternoon of barbecue and handicraft. We painted a set of plywood letters (and colourful shapes) which are are now decorating the fence. Passers-by can no longer say they don't know where we are! :)

And then here's our latest harvest, which in the height of summer is starting to look almost as colourful as the fence!!

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!

Wild Food Cafe, Sunday 24th June

There aren't many pictures of me on this blog, so here's one from the foraging workshop on Sunday. We're busy gathering lavender flowers, which we used to make lavender sugar. The sugar adds a subtle aroma to your home baking!

We gathered our lavender from three useful sources: The children's playground outside the Laban centre; Deptford churchyard; and Margaret MacMillan Park. One participant commented how fascinating it is to compare the different varieties - they look, smell and taste very different!

Here our foragers are looking around Sue Godfrey nature reserve, where we collected a host of different greenery for making 'German Green Sauce.' I'll upload the recipe in a later post!

We ended the afternoon at Cafe 465, where we prepared a lovely midsummer's lunch...

Sundown Schoolhouse of Queer Home Economics

Yesterday I was invited down to the Hayward Gallery on the Southbank. I was there to represent the Faeries amongst a wider group of queer folk.

We spent the day in and around the 'Sundown Schoolhouse of Queer Home Economics', a fabulous geodesic dome tent on the roof of the Hayward Gallery. The dome was created by Fritz Haeg, an American artist and Faerie who has visited our Sanctuary at Folleterre last year. The day of events was arranged by Paul Green of Avant Gardening, London's foremost guerilla gardeners!

We made a fanzine, heard some presentations and watched some fun films. I cooked up a big vegan lunch, which we enjoyed in the open air, and later we learnt to integrate Buto (Japanese performance art) into our home cleaning regimes - very valuable Faerie skills! :)

One of the nicest outcomes is that we have been invited to use the dome tent for Faerie functions over the next three weeks, whilst it remains on the roof of the Hayward. More info should follow shortly!

 

 

 

Wild Food Cafe returns!

I can now reveal details of the next Wild Food Cafe - see the listing below:

 

 

Back by popular demand, the newly renovated Cafe 465 will soon be hosting another Wild Food Cafe.

On Sunday 24th June, local forager Darren Flint will guide us through Deptford's green spaces gathering edible foodstuffs on the way.

Then we will return to the cafe space to prepare lunch!

We will have egg salad with German Green Sauce, followed by elderflower fritters for desert.

Bring a clean, dry jam jar, and we will make lavender sugar for you to use in your home baking!

The workshop will run from 11am-2pm approximately (details TBC).

A suggested donation of £5 will cover the cost of ingredients and use of the cafe space (including refreshments throughout the day). If you will have trouble meeting the cost please mention this in your booking, as there are other ways you can offer support. No-one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Space is limited and your place must be booked in advance, on a first-come-first-served basis. Please email dazflint@hotmail.com to reserve your space.

Thank you!

Cafe 465 now open!

Worth noting that the community cafe on New Cross Road (previously known as Come the Revolution) has reopened as Cafe 465.

The cafe will offer healthy, home-cooked food at keen prices. We will also continue to offer a bookable space for the community, and a rolling programme of events; I have been involved with the cafe since it opened last year, under different management.

Only time will tell, but we hope that these recent changes will improve the fortunes of the cafe, so that we can continue to offer a valuable meeting-space in the heart of New Cross...

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