Foragers Diary; December 2018

Foraging isn't always about bringing edible things home, in the Spirit of Christmas as well as this pheasant I brought home a big bundle of mistletoe to decorate the house; 

As well as collecting mistletoe, the pheasant breasts will go into the multi bird roast that we are preparing for Christmas and other preparations have included preparing some rolled, stuffed venison joints;

There will be plenty of venison to share with friends and family and we've been preparing some goose crowns to share as well for family members who are tired of turkey every year;

Not all the game is being given away or saved for Christmas though;

There are still plenty of mushrooms to forage as well, although stroganoff is one of our favourite dishes to prepare with mushrooms a pheasant and mushroom carbonara was a delicious alternative; 

The Christmas season is just as good a time as any other to enjoy wild food.

Foragers Diary; November 2018

At this time of year we are very lucky as foragers and wild food enthusiasts to have plenty of game and fungi available; 

Cellophane wrapped, battery farmed chicken can't compete with these roast pheasants for Sunday dinner. 

And I've rarely had steak anywhere that can compete with these venison steaks;

Crusted with crushed chillies and herbs

The plate is waiting for it's steak

Delicious


Sometimes game and fungi can be married together in a single delicious dish;

Wood blewits and field mushrooms that my son found on his way to school, we added them to a venison chilli and it was fantastic;

Finely diced venison ready for making chilli, the knife in the picture is an Extrema Ratio Scout and you can read a full review of it HERE that we posted earlier this month. 

Ready to add the mushrooms to the chilli. 

At other times the mushrooms can stand on their own feet; 

A great haul of shaggy parasols and oyster mushrooms with a couple of blewits and common ink caps.

My children love helping chop up our foraged mushrooms. 

A delicious stroganoff is one of our favourite things to make with foraged fungi. 

As well as game meat and fungi there are a few late fruits to harvest including black nightshade. They are an edible member of the nightshade family and taste like very sweet tomatoes but are small and black. They can be easily distinguished from the deadly nightshade, which also has a black berry, as black nightshade berries grow in small clusters rather than a single berry like the deadly nightshade.

Foragers Diary; Sweden October 2018

My recent trip to Sweden with my oldest son Michael should have yielded a bit more wild food than it actually did, our plan was to do some fishing, now we dedicated a whole day to fishing but didn't actually catch any fish, we did though find some delicious fungi to incorporate into our meals.

Michael has grown very adept at spotting penny buns or as the Swedes call the karljohann svamp, the year one of the most sought after culinary mushrooms in Europe and absolutely delicious, it was too late in the season to find many but we found enough to supplement our first meal at our camp site near Ullsjön. 

Frying the penny buns in the lid of our billy can before adding them to our meal of meatballs and rice. 

We found plenty of crow berries and blue berries but they were all far past their best and not worth picking. 

 

We found a really good haul of hedgehog fungi, something I don't see a lot of in the UK although it isn't rare here, and made several meals of them. They are known as blek taggsvamp in Swedish but don't be confused by google translate, if you type 'hedgehog mushroom in Swedish' into google you may find it leads you astray. hedgehog in Swedish is igelkott and the Swedish word for lions mane fungi is igelkottstaggsvamp (literally hedgehog spine mushroom) but that isn't the same as this. 

A billy can lid full of delicious fungi, we made skewers with some of them and picked more for a stew later in our trip. 

It wasn't only in the wilderness that we found mushrooms, I've said before that the UK is behind the rest of Europe as far as wild food, particularly mushrooms, are concerned and this just highlights that. This is Hötorget in central Stockholm and the market stalls are loaded with Chanterrelles and other fresh produce, I haven't seen anything like this in the UK.  

Even the manikins in the outdoor shops are out picking mushrooms. 

Check back in tomorrow for more about our adventures in Sweden. 

Foragers Diary; February 2018

February is another lean month in the Foragers Diary. The 'Hungry Gap' is in full force and the wildlife are struggling for food, this is the time of year that you will see deer and rabbits eating tree bark when their preferred food is scarce. 

The pheasant and partridge seasons are over, although wildfowl can still be shot below the high water mark until the 20th so there is still scope for some duck and goose in the diet. The last of this seasons pheasants and partridges have been eaten or frozen for later in the year. 

Pheasant and Partridge being jointed to go in the freezer or strait into a game curry after the last days partridge and pheasant shooting on the 1st . 

Jelly ear fungi are still available in great quantities in February and are a good addition to stir fries. 

 

I love getting the children involved in preparing wild food, here my youngest has helped prepare some pheasant and jelly ear fungi for a stir fry

Just a few shop bought veg and the meal was ready. 

Next month you will start to see wild greens start to reappear in the foragers diary, there are a few things that can be had at this time of year but not much. Next month though wild greens will be back, in fact I've already seen bluebells, dogs mercury and other plants starting to make an appearance and the crocuses and snowdrops are already flowering, the wild edibles will follow soon.

Foragers Diary; January 2018

I originally set up the foragers diary as a regular series here on the Bushcraft Education blog before it became a stand alone 'micro blog' which you can access through the link at the top of the page or HERE. The micro blog allowed me to post small regular updates on the foraging I was doing and the wild food I was eating directly from my phone. 

Since setting it up I haven't really done much about wild food on the Bushcraft Education blog but from now on there will be a monthly update here on the wild food that is available at that time of year, these posts will be longer and more detailed than the micro blog posts and will contain tips for finding, identifying and cooking wild food as well. 

I hope you enjoy January's post and maybe you'll even be inspired to do a bit of foraging yourself or expand your current wild food repertoire. 

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January is part of the 'Hungry Gap' the time of the year when little is available for animals or humans to eat, the seeds, fruits and nuts are all gone, the season for most fungi is over and hardly any edible greens are available at all. This is the time of year that demonstrates the importance of meat in the diet of hunter gatherers. Although vegans are entitled to make their decision not to eat meat I guarantee not many of them would stand by their conviction at this time of year if all they had to eat was what they could forage. 

Luckily for meat eaters there is plenty of variety over winter and this 'hungry gap' coincides conveniently with most of the UK's game bird shooting seasons and some of the deer seasons too. In January Chinese water deer, roe does, muntjac, red, sika and fallow deer are all in season as are pheasants, partridge ducks and geese. Even before seasons for game were implemented and non native game species were introduced to the British Isles the lack of fruit, veg and other food during during this hungry gap would have necessitated a reliance on meat and preserved foods. 

Without preserved food from last year though what wild food can you eat in January;

Scarlet elf caps and jelly ear fungi are some of the few edible fungi available in January and are one of those unmistakable wild foods which unlike some other fungi are more or less impossible to mistake for something inedible or poisonous.
 

Scarlet elf caps grown on the floor of damp woodlands, on decaying wood and amongst moss, the bright scarlet colour inside the caps gives them away and their lack of any gills or pores makes them really easy to identify. Jelly ear fungi can be found growing on dead and live wood alike and seem to have a particular preference to elder. I have found the best way to make use of jelly ears is to slice them fairly thinly and add them to stir fries, some specimens can seem to have quite a rubbery texture but they do go well in stir fries. 

Scarlet elf caps are also quite good in stir fries but are delicious on their own as well, I would describe their taste as something between a field mushroom and a very mild radish. Although I have been eating them for quite some time I'm still undecided as to whether the radish taste is real or whether I'm imagining it because they just happen to be a similar colour. 

I quite enjoy filling scarlet elf cups with beetroot chutney and winter cress leaves, cress plants which are part of the brassica family produce basal leaves all year around so if you know what  to look for you can forage some greens in winter.

Cress comes in many shapes and sizes but what you won't see in January are any flowers, hairy bitter cress has small clusters of white flowers to help in it's identification in spring and summer but in January you will be looking for leaves and nothing else. 

Collecting scarlet elf caps and cress leaves. 

You will also occasionally be able to find oyster mushrooms in January and my favourite way to eat those is to use them in a stroganoff. Their firm meaty texture makes them a perfect substitute to the beef that would normally make up the bulk of a stroganoff. 

Oyster mushroom stroganoff. A delicious dish of  oyster mushrooms, peppers, creme freche and flavoured with paprika and mustard. 

While the jelly ear fungi and scarlet elf cups are easy to identify oyster mushrooms as will any gilled fungi require a little more care in their identification. They grow exclusively on decaying wood and in my experience seem to have a preference for dead horse chestnut, willow and poplar although I have seen them on other species. 

To identify them look first for the oyster shaped caps which will generally be of white to quite dark grey, their gills are decurent which means that they are not only present under the cap but that they continue down the length of the stem, if there is a stem present. The stem on oyster fungi is not typical and they will often be twisted, short and curved as a fungi will grow on the side of logs as often as on top, where stems might grow in a normal upright shape. As well as decurent gills where a stem is present there will be no ring around the stem like you might find on a shaggy parasol or horse mushroom and no sack around the base. Additionally although the cap may be quite dark grey the flesh should always be white. 

The fungi that can be found in January are a treat for the wild food enthusiast as is the food that can be hunted but pheasants are much easier to identify than fungi. 

Pheasant, pigeon and vegetables ready for roasting 

A delicious meal and while the pheasant and pigeon can be foraged from the wild other parts of this meal obviously weren't  

Follow the posts on the foragers diary blog for regular updates on the wild food I have been foraging and eating and you can expect another more detailed wild food post here for the month of February.

Bushscience; Coprinopsis atramentaria

As promised the Bushscience series is back on the Bushcraft Education blog and this weeks topic is the mysterious Common Ink Cap (Coprinopsis atramentaria).

They pop up in large clumps and are smooth, grey and dome shaped, generally smaller than their shaggy (Coprinus comatus) cousins they do however share that same trait, as do all the ink caps, of decaying into an inky mess after a day or two. In fact it is from this trait that the species derives it's name atramentaria from the Latin 'atramentum' for 'ink'. Originally classified as belonging to the genus Agaricus, as was the shaggy ink cap, they were later re-classified as belonging to the genus Coprinopsis. Ink cap is as much a description as a name as the unique trait of these species is that to spread their spored their gills secrete a fluid filled with spores (this spore print can be seen in the picture on the right) and eventually the entire fruiting body turns to an inky slime and disintegrates.  For this reason although common and shaggy ink caps are both edible and delicious they must be eaten very fresh as within a few hours of picking this decay will begin. 

Shaggy ink caps showing all stages of growth and decay with young specimens to the front and right, you can notice the start of the decay in the tallest mushroom in the centre and watch the gradual disintegration of the entire cap and collapse of the stem in those on the left. 

Decaying shaggy ink caps. 

There are many ink cap species, over 120 in fact and while the topic of this post will relate specifically to the common ink cap and it's edibility there is an ink cap species, native to the UK although not particularly common, that is poisonous, the magpie ink cap  (Coprinus picacea). 

Magpie ink cap, you don't see them very often and they do look superficially like the shaggy ink cap but you will notice that while shaggy ink caps start of a uniform creamy white before they start to turn but this magpie ink cap is definitely black and white from the beginning, like a magpie. 

On to the main event though; the common ink cap and it's fickle edibility, sometimes it's edible, sometimes it isn't but why? To explain why it is sometimes inedible we need to refer to one of it's colloquial names; tipplers bane. This name refers to the fact that this particular mushroom is poisonous when combined with alcohol. 

What it actually creates is an extreme sensitivity to alcohol with similar consequences to drugs specifically used to combat alcohol addiction such as disulfiram which inhibits the function of the enzyme acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. The compound present in common ink caps which causes this is something called coprine.

Coprine

Coprine doesn't stop the production of  acetaldehyde dehydrogenase but rather blocks it's action and it's this enzyme that is responsible for many of the effects of a hangover. What you get if you have eaten common ink caps and consume enough alcohol to raise your blood alcohol concentration to about 5mg/dL you will feel the effects of this poisoning in the form of a reddening face, nausea, vomiting, tingling in the limbs and eventually in extreme cases, the effects of the poison grow worse the more alcohol you consume, cardiac arrhythmia.   

So there you have it, that's what make the common ink cap a 'tipplers bane'. 

As you will have read plenty of scientific names for fungi in this post I've decided to do another Bushscience post next week on the topic of 'binomial nomenclature' or scientific names to explain how they work, where they come from and what they are for, look forward to it next Tuesday. 

Geoff   

My Day in Fungi

The late Summer months leading into Autumn provide some of the best fungi foraging opportunities of the whole year, in todays post I will show you all the fungi I encounter on an average day.

These Field Mushrooms came from the field where I keep my pheasants but I also see plenty in the field behind my house. 

I mentioned fairy ring champignon mushrooms in my magic or not-so-magic mushroom post recently and here they are in the flesh, in their typical 'fairy ring' formation. 

The fairy ring champignon up close

Giant puff balls ready for picking, but should I take them all? I'll be posting something on Hunter Gatherer Ethics soon to discuss the 'how much is too much?' question of hunting and gathering 

One of the most sought after edible fungi in Europe, although this slightly slug eaten specimen has seen better days, probably second only to the chanterelle, this is the cap of a penny bun, also called the cep or porcini.  

The distinctive wrinkly 'cobwebby' stem of the penny bun 

The expanded cap of a mature, and fairly large, although not record breaking penny bun. 

Although this fungi is similar to the penny bun in the sense that it has tubes instead of gills it's general colour and another interesting feature give it away;

It is a Devils Bolete and it stains this blue/black colour as soon as it's flesh is exposed to the air.

The earthball or pigskin poison puff ball, you can tell by it's name you shouldn't eat it right? and if you ever got so far as to cut it open it's innards should put you off...

It's always this colour on the inside it doesn't start white and colour like the devil's bolete earlier it's always like this, no very appetising is it, compare it to the pure white of a giant puff ball below... 

The pure white innards of a delicious giant puff ball. 

So that's a few of the fungi I see regularly at the moment, obviously this is seasonal and perhaps a little later in the year I will see more of the ink caps, parasols and wood blewets. Look forward to those species being featured on the blog a little later in the year.   

Geoff 

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