After picking a basketful of nettle tips, cleavers and hedge mustard leaves, I decided to create a wild greens soup with them. I would also have added wild garlic and chickweed had I found some in that spot too!

The other soup base ingredients are just what I had to hand, you can vary it to what you have in your larder, eg a carrot, or even potato or rice to thicken if you prefer. I also think that adding a little fresh mint might lift it to a different dish again, plus the addition of frozen peas would be delicious I think.

It’s a versatile recipe. Make it as you will from what you can pick on the day and what you’ve got knocking about in the kitchen!

Nettle and wild greens soup

Serves: 4-6 as a starter, 2-4 as a main (with bread etc) depending how hungry you are!

A note on nettles:
Select and pick only the tips and first few leaves of the nettles, and make sure they are bright and young. Don’t pick leaves after flowering, toxins build up in nettles with age. So they are best picked in the spring or where there is new fresh growth to pick. Gloves and scissors are a simple way of picking nettles (also avoid areas when dogs might pee!)

You will need:
A basketful of nettle tips (handle with gloves until cooked)
A handful of other wild greens (eg cleavers, dandelion, hedge mustard, chickweed, wild garlic)
2 black kale leaves (or use curly, green kale or savoy cabbage)
15 sliced dried wild mushrooms (I used mixed ceps and birch boletes I’ve picked and dried myself)
1 medium or large brown onion
3 slender sticks celery (or 2 thicker ones)
2 cloves garlic (I shall substitute a bunch of wild garlic leaves next time!)
1.5 litres water for blanching
1 stock cube or jelly pot (choose type depending on your tastes or dietary requirements eg chicken, veggie, vegan, gluten-free)
1 tbsp oil
1 tbsp double cream per bowl to serve (optional, omit for vegan or dairy-free)
Salt and pepper to taste

Prep your greens/remove any grass/debris (and evict any insect tenants!) and rinse in a colander. Chop the black kale leaves up to where the stalk starts thickening. Keep the thicker parts aside the stock.

Bring the water to the boil in a pan with a few grinds of salt in it. Add the greens and blanch for a minute or two until tender and softened. Strain, retaining the cooking water, and run the greens under cold water to cool and stop them cooking. This preserves the vitamins and colour. Squeeze the greens and add excess water to the blanching water. Chop to greens and keep to one side.

In the blanching pan, with the (now-green) cooking water you saved, add the dried mushroom slices and the stock cube and bring to the boil.

In a different pan, add the oil, chopped onions, kale stalks, celery and garlic and fry gently with the lid on to soften. Add a little of the stock water if starting to stick to the bottom. When the onions are translucent and the celery softened, add the hot stock from the other pan.

Take off the heat and use a stick blender to blitz the vegetables (you could also use a jug blender, this is just easier!). Now add the chopped blanched greens and blitz again. You now have your nettle soup! Taste and adjust seasoning if needed. I added a grind of black pepper to mine, but remember the stock usually has plenty of salt in plus we salted the cooking water at the start.

To serve:
You can eat it just as it is, or to serve you can swirl a spoon of cream on the top – it adds a touch of luxury to the eating, plus it looks amazing!

Other ideas for toppings are sautéed sorrel flower stems, a spring or sprinkle of wild garlic flowers, primroses, red quince petals or violet flowers, fried crispy croutons. or perhaps sautéed sliced scarlet elf cups, amethyst deceivers (in summer/autumn!) or sliced pignuts… yummmm!

The colour should stay fairly vibrant on reheating (say if you froze portions and reheated) but be careful of reheating as too much or too long and the colour will dull and go murky if you’re not careful. So best prepared fresh to keep that vibrancy and for it to look its best for your diners!

Enjoy! And do tell me how you get on if you try this out for yourself! x

Who cares that it’s only 1ºC? Not us crazy forager-types! Undeterred by the wintery weather, we went out for a day of seashore exploration and cook-up on the North Yorkshire coast…

The sea keeps coastal temperatures much more stable during winter, so even if there isn’t much around to forage inland, you might be lucky on the seashore. On the cliff-top, the alexanders were already in leaf – I’ll pick some of the more slender stems to candy in the spring. We also found hogweed already flowering. Along the paths and into the dunes we came across sea beet, buck’s-horn plantain, wild carrot, common scurvy-grass, sea radish, sea mayweed, coltsfoot, mallow… and even a couple of ‘slender blewits’ as I call them, Clitocybe/Lepista sordida to add some purple to our basket!

We sautéed up some scallops, samphire (cultivated at this time of year) and scarlet elf cups from another foray with pine nuts, alexanders tips and sea beet, whilst snacking snacked on nettle crackers (nettle leaves and seed, oats, sourdough starter, and seaweed powder) with buffalo mozzarella & punchy wild garlic pesto (frozen from last spring, full of ramsons leaves & buds, toasted foraged hazelnuts & walnuts, foraged dulse seaweed flakes, Yorkshire goat’s cheese, wild common & wood sorrels & Yorkshire rapeseed oil). With dusk descending, and a cheeky shot of sloe vodka to warm you up, all-in-all a lovely foraging foodie day out by the sea.

We’ll be jointly hosting an intensive foraging experience in the New Forest at the end of September 2015 which will hopefully include a coastal foray on day 2… watch this space!

Don’t you just *love* a spontaneous trip?

My foraging friend Matt and I were lamenting the distinct lack of mushrooms around in December oop north now that winter has most definitely arrived. So we decided to jump in the car and head down to one of my favourite places on earth, the New Forest, where it is still late autumn and the fungi are still fruiting and it’s still warm!

Our mission: to find Matt some winter chanterelles!

I grew up in this area so I know the forest pretty well and have foraged here for years. We scouted a couple of new places I’d spotted from the road but never tried, but there wasn’t much to find. We then moved on to a wood I knew to be bursting with edible fungi during autumn and full of prime habitat for winter chanterelles, with areas of both beech and pine. I’d just never visited this late in the year before! Exciting.

We met up with another experienced local foraging guide Peter who kindly showed us around a wonderful patch for winter chanterelles (Cantharellus tubaeformis), and even more exciting (for me!) a very similar species but one I’d not met for myself before: the golden chanterelle (Cantharellus lutescens). The golden chanterelle looks very similar to the winter chanterelle, however it has distinctly yellow ‘gills’ rather than brownish. Cool beans!

Peter headed off, and we returned to the woods after decanting our treasure-so-far into spare baskets in the car. We then explored a denser area with long grass and mixed tree types including holly, pine and beech. The ground was uneven and boggy in places. And here, we found some of the largest winter chanterelles I’ve ever seen. Hundreds of them. Woop woop!!

We also found hedgehog mushrooms (Hydnum repandum) and their redder cousin, the terracotta hedgehog (Hydnum rufescens) and to my sheer delight, a new patch of black trumpets (Craterellus cornucopioides)! I’d found some huge cauliflower fungi (Sparissa crispa) and hundreds of hedgehog mushrooms in this wood back in the autumn, as well as ceps (Boletus edulis), hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa), saffron milk caps (Lactaruis deliciosus), chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) and even a few early winter chanterelles… it’s an amazing place.

As the light faded we called it a day, with basketfuls of bounty to keep us in wild mushrooms over the winter and to give away to friends. We stopped off at a large Tesco for extra dinner ingredients and I spotted a huge stand of beech so went to check underneath them. Sure enough, we found wood blewits! Brilliant.

As a thank you for the free B&B at ‘Casa Cutcliffe’ we cooked my folks linguine in creamy garlic white wine sauce with sauteed hedgehog mushrooms and winter chanterelles accompanied by crusty walnut bread… YUM!

The next day, we pottered around some of Winchester, where I grew up, and took a hike up St Catherine’s Hill. Despite being December, there were still many more types of wild plants and herbs around than up north, and some different species we don’t see up our way very much, if at all. We found wild marjoram/oregano, wild basil, salad burnet, wild carrot, common hogweed, to name but a few… all sorts of things, some only identifiable by dried up seed heads and a few scant leaves.

We also found some more wood blewits and some jelly ears…

A wonderful way to end 2014 with so much foraging gold in our baskets! Here’s to the hope of many more fungi-filled forays in 2015!

Happy Christmas everyone.

 

[A big thank you to: Matt @edenwildfood for doing all the driving and for taking most of the pictures! I never quite got my camera out…! And also to Peter @absolutelywild for allowing us to tag along on a pre-Christmas amble with you and for introducing us to an edible mushroom I haven’t found before! It was a pleasure to meet you. And finally to Mum & Dad Cutcliffe for having guests to stay at such short notice! x]

The trumpet of death, or horn of plenty (Craterellus cornucopioides), is one of my most favourite wild mushrooms, and one of the hardest to find! Superbly camouflaged with the leaf litter, this funereally-coloured, unassuming and misleadingly-named gourmet ‘shroom is an exciting find for any forager in the UK. It is listed as ‘uncommon’ (which indeed it is) as well as being notoriously difficult to spot, even when it is pointed out to you…

After years of fruitless searching, I finally stumbled across my first-ever patch of black trumpets while taking my dad out on his maiden fungi foray near where my parents live (and where I grew up) down in Hampshire. I squealed with joy and danced around, so excited to have finally found this elusive quarry for myself! My dad looked around puzzled as to what I was celebrating about and was surprised that my inexplicable elation was due to the unremarkable grey-and-black thing sitting in my hand that he would never have noticed in a million years, nor would he ever have thought was a prized edible mushroom.

It was the last weekend in August, 2010 and so they were only half-grown (as I now know), each about 2-3 inches long and not yet frilly-edged and convoluted. That said, we picked 90% of them and filled my deep basket to brim, as well as also finding my very first ceps (Boletus edulis), millers (Clitopilus prunulus) and chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) in the same spot – three other edible species that had so far eluded my in my searching up in Yorkshire.

That day taught me an incredible amount about the habitat that black horns, ceps and chanterelles like – and also how very much easier it is to find amazing edibles in southern ancient woodland! I’d been trying really hard to find good edibles up north with not much success until that point. No wonder all these TV forager were finding this stuff so readily in their shows – they were all in the south… I go into an old forest down there and suddenly I’m tripping over choice edibles!

I have since used this similar habitat knowledge to target similar-feeling spots in Yorkshire and all over the UK and this was the breakthrough I needed. I now have many, many locations for ceps, a few great places for yellow chanterelles, and was also shown one other epic local place for black trumpets – (a super-secret spot I shall never reveal because it’s so incredible!) I taught myself to forage from books, which is why it took so long I think. If I’d gone out on forays with experts earlier I expect I’d have learned and been successful much more quickly. But hey, that’s all part of the journey!

Every autumn I check that trumpet spot I discovered in 2010, and every year since I have been pipped to the post by other foragers. By checking the area whenever I was down south, I noticed that the fruitbodies started appearing in teeny-tiny form around the tree roots in early August, and they’d all be picked (probably while still quite small – boooo) in September, but occasionally I’d get lucky and find a few spectacular specimens hiding under holly bushes as late as the end of October that had been missed in the big foraging sweep and had been allowed to grow huge. Through regular monitoring, I’d never seen black trumpets flush again in the same spot within the same year so I had concluded that they must be relatively slow-growing species that only fruits once a year.

I was down with my folks this weekend for an early Christmas family gathering. I managed to sneak off to the woods on the Monday before travelling back up north, and I had the most amazing day… it was the first week of December and I was hunting for winter chanterelles (Cantharellus tubaeformis), as they are very much in season now. I thought I might also find some grey oysters, and perhaps a couple of hardcore hedgehog mushrooms just hanging on ahead of the frosts. I did *not* expect to find black trumpets!!

And yet, find some I did! Knowing that winter chanterelles like similar habitats to black trumpets, I went to look in my favourite wood, where I found those first horns in 2010. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I noticed black amongst the leaves and realised the mild extended autumn had resulted in a second flush! It was a stunningly sunny day, no breeze, it was just magical. I did also find winter chanterelles as predicted, double-whammy. I wandered on to other spots nearby and discovered loads more winter chanterelles and even some creamy young hedgehog mushrooms and yellow chanterelles clinging on. An unexpectedly fabulous day!

I think I might go back down very soon, if the mild weather continues…! Winter chanterelles dry very well and will keep me going until the foraging joys of spring start emerging.

Happy foraging!

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