Foraging (Research)

Finders eaters! How to feed your family for free by foraging in Britain's hedgerows

By LUCY CAVENDISH

When I was in my early teens, my sister went on a week long cooking course. She'd come home every night and try out what she had made that day on myself and my siblings. We had chicken pie, quiche lorraine, chocolate mousse.

Then, one night, she set off out of the house and down the country lane armed with a bowl and some scissors. 

When we asked her what she was doing, she said, 'I'm making hedgerow salad.' She claimed that on her course that day they had learned what they could take from the countryside and turn into food. 

Lunch time: Lucy Cavendish cooks up her harvest with her children, who are suitably impressed with their mother's foraging skills

Unfortunately, I think she got something wrong. The resulting salad was bitter and inedible and 'hedgerow salad' became legendary in my family, a term for something that no one wants to eat. But it's two decades on now and 'food for free' as it's known is having a major resurgence. 

Every chef worth their salt employs their own professional forager - men or women who scour the countryside for tasty titbits that chefs can turn in to something delicious. 

Free food is, basically, anything you can find around and about that is edible. For some people, it's having your own chickens and eating their eggs. For others, it's growing their own vegetables. In its extreme form, it's eating roadkill. Foraging, however, is different. It takes ingenuity and knowledge. It is about looking for specific things yet also realising that many things that grow naturally are edible.

Yun Hider is one of these foragers. He lives down a tiny narrow lane in the middle of Wales with his partner, Catherine, and has devoted his life to learning what it takes to make a delicious hedgerow salad, rather than a disgusting one.

This is why I am in the rain, standing staring at a hedgerow in Pembrokeshire with Yun. I have come to visit him with the head chef of The Grill at The Dorchester, Brian Hughson, who uses Yun as a professional 'hunter gatherer' for the food in his restaurant.

'Yun is the best,' Brian tells me as we watch Yun scour the hedgerow like a dog looking for a stick. 'Everything he delivers is fresh. He sends me whatever he finds and my job is to turn it into something delicious.' 

Committed: Yun Hider, a forager who has devoted his life to learning what it talkes to make a delicious hedgerow salad, with head chef at The Dorchester hotel Grill, Brian Hughson 

Yun is going to teach me what to forage for and Brian will tell me how to cook it. I am then going to take my new-found knowledge back home and cook for my family as cheaply as possible. It makes sense to me, during these times when people are so hard hit for money, to find food that costs you nothing. 

I live in the countryside in Oxfordshire and am surrounded by woods, hedges, fields, streams and rivers. I am convinced there is more I could be taking from there - at no cost to the environment - to reduce my family's grocery bill.

'Anyone can forage for food,' says Yun. 'All you need is a hedgerow or some woods. Even in towns, there is free food available. Go to the end of the Tube line and just start searching,' he says. 'Take a book with you so that you can check what you are picking.'

Foraging is big business at the moment. Yun doesn't just work for The Dorchester but also many other restaurants countrywide. He has been on radio and TV and provided food for BBC2's Great British Menu series. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's chief forager, John Wright, has just written a book on how to forage called The River Cottage Hedgerow Handbook. 

Credit crunch: It makes sense, during times when people are hard hit for money, to find food that costs nothing

According to Yun, we Brits are also turning away from traditional strawberries and raspberries in favour of more home-grown native hedgerow berries this summer such as blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries. His first piece of advice is to get excited about the whole idea of foraging.

'Try reading Richard Mabey's Food For Free and Roger Phillips' Wild Food, they really inspired me. You must embrace it,' he says as he leaps over a ditch to pick something from the very back of the hedgerow. 'Know your plant,' he says, leaning over to hand me a green leaf.

'Taste this.' I put the small fresh leaf in my mouth. It is quite tangy, not bitter. 'Do you like it?' he asks me. I nod. 'That's hawthorn,' he says. 'You can eat the red berries and the white and pink flowers, but don't confuse it with blackthorn. You shouldn't eat blackthorn flowers as they can make you very ill.' Blackthorn blossom flowers are also small and white, but the centres are green, not pink. 

This is why Yun says that all potential foragers need to research what they want to pick thoroughly. 'You need to know what's good for you and what isn't,' he says. 'You don't want to be eating ivy or nightshade or something that'll do you harm.'

Game: Lucy makes pigeon breasts, given to her by the local gamekeeper for free

Next he delves in to the hedge and comes up with a handful of sticky weed, also known as Cleavers or goose grass (Galium aparine) - I remember it from childhood when the swirling green leaves and sticky stems and burrs would cling to my clothes and socks on walks. 'You can eat the leaves of this,' he says. They are also rather delicious and piquant.

'It's important to get leaves in the right season,' Yun says, reaching down. 'Fresh young leaves are good.' He hands me some small blackberry leaves. 'These taste of blackberries,' he says, and they do.

In the local wood we find wood sorrel ( Oxalis acetosella) growing on a mossy log. We pick handfuls of the acid-green trefoil leaves that look a lot like clover, and small white flowers, as both can be eaten. I also find a lot of yellowy-orange mushrooms. 'They're girolles,' says Yun. 'You have to be very careful with mushrooms. Some look very similar to girolles but they are not great to eat, Real girolles curl up at the edges and smell slightly of apricots.' 

We discard all but two of the mushrooms to be on the safe side. For lunch we cook them with a wild rabbit Yun shot the day before. 

Brian makes a hedgerow salad of hawthorn leaves, blackberry leaves, dandelion leaves, gorse flowers, hedge sorrel, hedge mustard and chops up the wood sorrel, which Yun tells me you can identify by its three heart-shaped leaves, and mixes it with goats' cheese. It is all delicious.

In the afternoon we collect bright yellow gorse flowers that grow on spiny evergreen bushes to make gorse gin with, wavy green oak leaves for oak leaf sherry, bilberries - which look a lot like blueberries, but you can tell the difference because they grow in pairs or singularly, while blueberries grow in clusters - to use with some sea bass Yun caught earlier on in the day and sea purslane, a salty leafy salad plant that resembles young spinach, from the local estuary. 

Before we leave, Yun tells me that I must be prepared to embrace the unexpected when it comes to foraging. 'You won't necessarily find exactly what I did,' he says. 'Be prepared to experiment but don't use guesswork. You need to embrace interacting with nature.'

That night, Brian shows me how to use the leaves of the sticky weed to add piquancy to dishes such as rabbit terrine and lobster ballotine. He also teaches me to make a meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria) panna cotta using the flowers of the perennial flowering herb that grows in damp meadows, which he serves with nettle cream (nettle leaves blended with cream) and rosehip granita, made by simmering rosehips with water and sugar to make a syrup, then straining and freezing to get the frozen grainy texture. It is absolutely wonderful.

I come back totally inspired to translate what I have learned. I am committed to trying to forage to feed my family. I have tried in the past to grow my own food - everything from courgettes to spinach to lettuce - with limited success. The joy of foraging for me is that the food is already growing. The only effort is in identifying it and picking it. 

and chill for 2 hours. 

When I tell my children what I am going to do, they all look a bit dubious. 'Food from a hedge?' they say. I then tell them that, if we are lucky, maybe I'll find us a rabbit or a deer on the road to eat. They all make gagging sounds. 

Maybe I will go to the local stream and see if I can find some crayfish. I've seen the chef Valentine Warner do this on the television and decide that I might be able to trap some too.

My children are not quite sure what to make of it all. Luckily, just as I am about to set off in my waders, my friend, the local gamekeeper, comes round with five pigeons he has shot that day. He gives them to me for free. 

Now all we need are the salad leaves to go with it. I start at the hedgerow outside my house. I immediately spot hawthorn, new young blackberry leaves, blackberry flowers and some just-ripe blackberries. Inspired by my success the children join me to search for some sticky weed. I offer them some leaves to taste and they excitedly put the tiny leaves in their mouths.

'I like that,' my three year-old daughter Ottoline says. I pick more and put it in my foraging basket. I pick extra hawthorn - as Brian gave me a recipe for hawthorn jelly that I want to try out - along with a rosebay willowherb ( officially known as Epilobium angustifolium, it has beautiful pink spires of flowers that are a common sight on grass verges and roadsides) version that uses agar, a setting agent derived from sea algae, rather than gelatine. 

I find more sticky weed and then some red clover flowers. Yun has told me the petals are edible and I decide they will look very pretty on my plate. I add some honeysuckle flowers as well. 

I remember sucking the nectar out of them when I was a child. We then walk for about half-a-mile, picking rosebay willowherb on our way, before we get to a stream, I always go to a certain patch for watercress. I also find a patch of wild garlic which grows in clumps in damp woodland and hedgerows and has round, white frothy flower heads atop long sword-shaped pungent green leaves - you can smell it before you see it, and both the leaves and flowers are edible. I decide I will make a soup with the leaves and maybe mix some dandelion leaves in.

That afternoon, I take the children for a walk to a wood I know often has mushrooms growing in it. We pick them every year but usually fail to eat them as I always feel slightly nervous about identifying them. This time we look only for girolles. We find just three but it's enough for the children to try. We also find a verdant patch of wood sorrel - a startlingly astringent and lemony tasting leaf that you can use in cooking like spinach. I pick some and get the children to try a leaf each.

'Lemony,' says Jerry, aged six. I show them how to recognise it. 'Wood sorrel has three heart-shaped leaves,' I tell them. 'Hedge, or common, sorrel (Rumex acetosa) has leaves shaped like arrow heads, but it tastes the same.' My children all look suitably impressed. I think they are getting the hang of it.

That evening, I decide it is best to cook it all over an open fire in a nearby beauty spot. I have enlisted the help of Sunny Bull, a bushcraft expert. He says he will show me the best way to cook outdoors to make the most of my free supper.

'It's not difficult,' he says as he positions three sticks together to make a pyramid or wigwam shape. He tells me that the key to the success of an outdoor fire is to make sure you build your fire on mud or sand. 'Otherwise you can set fire to the surrounding countryside,' he says. 

You then position sticks, starting with small dry ones and then building on the base with bigger ones, so that your fire will light quickly and get burning. 'It's about know-how and confidence,' he says as the fire starts getting hot.

I heat the soup up in a billy can that Sunny has hung over the fire, then I fry up the pigeon breasts in some walnut oil. It takes seconds to cook. The children help; they love the fire and find Sunny a source of interesting information.

I serve the pigeon with the blackberry sauce with blackberry garnish. I fry up the girolles quickly on the fire and then add on their plates my hedgerow salad and wood sorrel mixed with goats' cheese. The children all look at their plates with suspicion but agree to give it a go.

Ten minutes later, the plates are clean. 'That was delicious,' says Leonard, aged seven. The other two agree whole-heartedly. I sit there and beam with delight. I can see that feeding my family is going to change from now on. 

Yun Hider's website: www.mountainfood.org

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1304172/Finders-eaters-How-feed-family-free-foraging-Britains-hedgerows.html#ixzz1qDzPZCh5


Summary

The following article explains the benefits of foraging and the interaction it will bring with children, it is a personal article of a person explains how they started and how they have enjoyed the experience. They describe how they have been foraging from right outside their house to the country side and they also find it beneficial due to the current economical climate and food prices.