Foraging?

Have you ever been out picking "free food"? Any favourite recipes?

Yes, we go most years. The children love it

Im not very inventive with the recipies though.

We pick apples and make the usual pies and cakes etc.
Blackberrys, hazelnuts which I actually made a lovely liquere with. Sometimes we also get horseradish if I can remember where they were when they still had their leaves and rosehips to make rosehip jelly. Ive also picked plums, greengage and cherrys and cherry-plums too. Sweet chestnuts are a favourite and last for ages if stored correctly. I used them in the stuffing for christmas dinner last year.

I did find an old quince tree but most of the fruit was rotten by the time I had got to it and its never really produced good quality fruit since. Perhaps its diseased ?

Watermint is something I know the location of but have never picked it to use for anything. It smells lovely though.

I never pick fungi unless ive grown it myself and know what it is.

I do love the idea of foraging but I wouldn't have any idea where to start. Very impressed with all your forgaging Lottienhuw

Wow Lottienhuw, that's quite some results - never mind "inventive" recipes - like you, I enjoy just finding those "free resources" and then making preserves and liqueurs for use later - I also love elderberry (flowers for making syrup, and berries to make liqueur), or blackberries and crab apple (good for cakes, jam, juice and liqueur). I do stay well clear of fungi, too, although I know it is quite a "science" over in my native Germany, where lots of people make it a proper pastime

Nettles are nice steamed or in soup .Just about stopped my dad from digging up my lovely big patch .We have fruit and nut trees and there are herbs growing around the garden and I'm not sure that I'd recognise anything else .

LOL Ladynett, I've just stopped a friend of mine pulling up my nettles - I usually make tea from them (she did manage to pull up my chickweed, which is good against cuts, before I could say anything, sigh!)

I was raised in the country and what is now the fashionable food craze of the moment was a way of life for me growing up.

I know much about what to gather, when and how, and also many ways of preparing the foraged food.

I can, if I chose, forage for mushrooms, wild hedgerow fruits like brambles, hips, haws, damsons, bullace and so on, samphire, sea beet, seaweeds, sea buckthorn, wild herbs like sage and thyme (although they do not have much flavour as we demand of our herbs) pignuts, sweet chestnuts,watercress, elderflower, elderberry, wild strawberries, sloes, and much more. If you class this as foraging, I can catch and prepare fish, shellfish like razorclams, winkles, mussels etc, and I even know how to catch and skin a rabbit, and how to gather gull eggs making sure the ones you harvest are fresh. I have nettles and dandelions growing in my garden a plenty!

These days, I mostly make jams and jellies, and country wines and sloe gin as I don't have time to forage, but if needed, I could survive on foraged food, but that would be all it would be, survival, for there is not anything like enough food 'in the wild' to support the population and to get enough to survive is hard work.

You've just given me some great new ideas there ysbryd - I did notice all those lovely wild plants growing along our beaches the other day when we went for a walk...