We like to forage

We like to forage here are some ideas for some of the treats you can find in the hedgerows hit the button to get to the post to read more  

Damson batter buns	Nettle soap, beer and tea	Rosehip syrup	Cider time
Pickled pears	Elderberry wine	Sweet chestnuts	Rose petal syrup
Rosehip tea	Lavender and honey ice cream	Sloe wine	Plum jam and plum sauce
Apple crisps	Elderflower and lemon cordial	Nettle tea	Nettle beer

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Lemon and Elderflower sorbet

This is a lovely snowball in a glass, fresh and light and a perfect dessert or treat for a nice sunny day and can also be eaten as an amuse bouche.  Not only is this unbelievable easy to make your have to stop yourself going back for seconds

Ingredients 
150g caster sugar
1 pint water
juice of 3 lemons
4 tbsp of elderflower cordial
1 egg white

place the sugar in a pan with 1pint of water to dissolve over a low heat and once dissolved simmer for 5 mins until your have made a light syrup. if you have a sugar thermometer it should have a temperature of 106c.

Allow the syrup to cool completely and stir in the lemon juice and cordial and freeze.

When frozen remove from the freeze and break up into chucks and add to a food processor with the egg white and process till smooth and then return to the freezer until frozen

If your making this at the right time of year and fancy making your own Elderflower cordial check out my post on how to make this  elderflower and lemon cordial this lasts all year long so its a great make for your store cupboard.

Soaps

Busy, busy the last few days getting ready for all the spring and summer fairs with more soaps to create for my new collection, with all the hot weather there is more of a preference for people to what to smell more fresh and fruity than warm and snuggled with the caramels scented soaps that are popular in winter. Above is a lemon grass and lime soap bar.

Nettle Soap

This Sunday was spent foraging out in the woodlands for the first of the young and tender spring nettles.  nettles contain some amazing healing properties and i consider to be a super plant.

Astridge forest Sweet chestnuts

Today we went for a walk in Astridge forest to see the leaves change and see what we could find, however Sophie's agender was different we had just bought her some Wellington boots and she was obsessed with finding a puddle to jump into the test out said new wellies.

Pickled pears

I have wondered about pickled pears for a couple of years but either didn't have the time or wasn't sure about the taste.  I did have an hour spare and we did have a bumper crop of pears in the garden even though i am not convinced on the all that vinegar with the pears and how it will change the flavour of the suculate juicy fruit, if you don't try you wont know so i gave them a go.

Damson batter buns

With all the lovely damsons we foraged for most went into making damson wine but i saved some to make some damson batter buns for Sophie as her favourite word is CAKE ! and its a good way to sneak fruit into her.

Rosehip Syrup

 As said in my rosehip-tea post rose hips are really good for you packed with loads of vitamins, little ones may not enjoy drinking tea but this sweet treat is always appreciated by Sophie.  Great on pancakes, ice cream and my favourite snack yoghurt with rose hip syrup.

Rosehip tea

Rosehips are one of my favourite things to forage for they are packed with goodness with Vitamin A, B, C, E and K  and is excellent at fighting colds, as soon as i feel a little low or have a tickle in my throat i good cup of refreshing tea is a good fast fix to feeling better, especially as rose hips contain more vitamin C that citrous fruit. You can sweeten the tea with a little honey but i like the tart fruity flavour especially with a ginger biscuit. 

Sloe wine

Out and about foraging again and this weekend we planned to gather Sloes, we have loads and loads where we live so are never in short supply after picking quite a few we gave them a good wash and stuck them in our big pan and added water and brought to just boiling heat and turned the heat off and left over night.

Elderberry wine

Today we are making Elderberry wine, we had loads of success earlier in the year with elderflower and lemon cordial so we were watching and waiting for the elderberries to be ready, when they were we picked like mad as we have quite a few things brewing and popping away and a few more planed through the month so needed to get the elderberries picked and processed to to maximise our time and fermenting buckets.

We managed to gather 6kg of berries and had the very long task of picking them all off the stalks, so we stuck a good long movie on cracked open a bottle of wine we had made from the previous year and settled into picking. it took a few hours and we were so relieved when we had finished.

 

 Next we gave them a good mash with the potatoe masher and added 4 liters of boiling water and let it steep for 24 hour.  the next day Ali added 1.5kg of sugar used his hydrometer to see how boozy it would be and added 1tsp of yeast for every gallon of liquid and gave it a good stir the put it all in the fermenting bucket to pop away for a week.

Later we are planning to strained to get rid of any little bits and decanted into demijohns and leave for a few weeks to finish before bottling up.  I cant wait for this brew to finish as it smells really fruity and full.

Apple crisps

With the bumper crop of apples this year we have turn most into Cider but there are still loads left and not wanted to fill my freezer with apple pies and puree as freezer space is a premium, i decided to make apple crips, the idea was inspired from Ali's M&D who last year made thicker apple rings they dried out over their Aga.  Not having an Aga myself needed a thinner option so made apple crisps, which are fabulous and intensely appley.   

Cider time

We are lucky to have an apple tree in our garden, however when we moved into our house the previous occupants had knocked copper nails into the trunk and grown a huge amount of ivy all over the tree making it look a bit spooky, but worse was chocking the tree, also it created lots of mould and made the apples very small and very scabbing. We cleared the ivy which took ages and pulled the nails out and waited a few years, watching and waiting hoping the tree would revive and it did slowly each year the apples getting better. Last year we got enough good looking apples to make some cider it was a little sour but still nice considering the apples were still in recovery. This year we had a bumper crop of lovely looking apples that were crisp juicy and sweet.

Plum jam and Plum Sauce and some Ale

I was lucky to go with my friend Emma to a ladies house who had 8 plum trees and after picking 3 kg of juicy ripe plums got cracking to turn them into something that would preserve them so i could enjoy them in the months to come.

Lavender and Honey ice cream and other ideas

I like this unusual ice cream and use it as  amuse bouche and love to watch the faces of my friends and family as they try and guess the flavour.

Ingredients
600 ml full milk
10 lavender heads
4 egg yolks
284ml double cream
180g honey

• heat the milk untill it starts to bubble around the edges. add the lavender sprigs , and remove from the heat to infuse for 30 mins  or longer.
• Whisk the egg yolks and honey into a bowl until thick. Strain the milk into a bowl and mix well 
• Pour the mix back into the pan and over a gentle heat stir to make a smooth custard which coats the back of the wooden spoon. strain in a bowl and cool 
• Whip the cream and fold it into the cool custard.  Put into the freezer and ever 30 mins give the bowl and whisk to break the ice crystals do this for 4 times till the ice cream freezes to an almost ice cream state and then place your mix into a box and leave to freeze overnight 

If you have lots of lavender you could always make a cushion and then pick a good big handful of lavender and dry this in the oven and stuff it inside the cushion to aid restful sleeping

Or maybe some make some cold press lavender soap the possibility's are endless

Rose petal syrup

We are lucky to have an abundance of roses in our garden some of them at the top of our garden that cant be seen, so i had to  have a think about how else to put them to good use and thought i would try some Rose petal syrup as all rose petals can be eaten.

Elderflower and Lemon cordial

Every year we go out foraging for elderflower's and we usually pick enough to make champagne to last us all summer, however this year has just been awful with the weather with nothing but rain and it has put a real dampener on the foraging, especially as you need to pick the elderflower's when they have had a good mornings sun on the flower to make them taste so scrummy.


Ingredients
20 heads of elderflower's
3 unwaxed lemons
1 kilo of sugar
1 liter of boiling water
75g citric acid

Lucky for us we  have 1 elderflower tree in our garden that we use to help us tell us when is the right time to pick.  we also had 1 day of sun so i took advantage of this and picked 20 big heads of flowers to make some cordial.  Make sure you give the heads a little knock upside down to get rid of bugs but don't what ever you do wash them as your loose flavour.

First off i put 1 litre of boiling water in a pan and add 1 kilo of sugar and melt, i then zest 3 lemons and slice the lemons adding all into the boiled water.  i tend to leave this for about 1 hour just to cool a little and let the lemons seep a bit, after this i add 75g of citric acid and stir this in adding the elderflower's afterwards and give it a gentle stir then cover and leave for 24 hours.  I leave a wooden spoon out by the side and instruct everyone if they walk past give it a mash and a stir to help release the flavours.

After 24 hours of the elderflower and lemons doing their thing get ready by sterilising your jars that you want to put your cordial into, when sterilising you can either sterilise them in sterilisation tablets which we always have about as we make a lot of wine, or wash in hot water then place upside down in an oven and turn it onto 150c mines a fan assisted and when it comes up to temperature turn off the oven, where they will stay warm ready for you to use them, i wash my lids with boiled water from the kettle, or if i need just 1 or 2 i use the steam form a boiling kettle so careful not to scold yourself.  Also sterilise some muslin a jug and a sieve by pouring boiling water over them from the kettle.

With jars i'm a bit thrifty i re-use food jars and i don't see why not either, the jars are jolly useful and you have paid for them when you bought the food stuff that was inside them, and to me they are a valuable for all sorts of storage solutions. I even have a special cupboard in the garage where i store and save them up through out the year for projects like this.

Once your ready discard all the lemons and elderflower's which is pretty good to go on your compost heap.  Put your muslin inside your sieve and your sieve over your jug and pour the delicious elderflower and lemon cordial through this to capture any zest or stray flowers.  The use your jug to fill the jars make sure you fill each jar all the way to the top so there is no air. Pop the lids on and store in a cool dark place ready for when you need to use it.  We think it taste nice with sparkling water or Ali likes it with lemonade, its pretty nice in gin vodka and cheap white wine that you can turn into flavoured spritzers, you can even use it to make salad dressings and marinades for chicken.  It tastes so nice like a glass of summer and really refreshing.

Nettle Beer

I look forward to this yearly treat nettle beer is just delicious and has its own wonderful scent and flavour flowery nectar and very easy to drink.  If you read my Nettle tea post then this will not taste like the tea, far from it.

Nettle Tea

When young nettles start poking their leaves out of the ground, best picked when they are about 6 leaves to the plant and after a nice spring shower the day before, so they are good and juicy.  Wear some garden gloves as although these look small and un-imposing they can still give you a good sting, however if you are stung rest assured this can help aid rheumatic pains.  Find a good clump not near a dirty road or a place where dogs may be regularly walked and nip the top cluster of leaves of the plant and leave the rest to carry on growing as nettles provide a very important habitat for beneficial bugs.     

The health benefits of nettles are widely known and have been used for centuries, containing lots of iron, vitamin A,B2 C E and K, acetophenone, heptennone, polysaccarides, Folic acids, Calcium, potassium, magnesium, glucidic stubstances, flavanoids which are an antioxidant, beta- carotene and many amino acids, formic and acetic acids, amines sterols, panthotenic acid, chlorophyl 0.3-0.8, protoporphyrine and coproporphynine, cetones as methyl heptenone, sitosterols, Ca, Mg, Fe and Si salts, phosphates, zinc as well as being high in protein. So as you can see it really is a super food. 
(above list source live and feel, bright hub and tea benifits)

• Nettle tea fights coughs, tuberculosis and asthma;
• Nettle tea counters arthritis, rheumatism, tendonitis and other disorders of the muscles and joints;
• Nettle tea combats a variety of intestinal disorders;
• Nettle tea fights skin problems ;
• Nettle tea fights allergies like eczema, and hay fever;
• Nettle tea is used to treat urinary tract infections.

(above list source tea benifits)

The plant also has anti-anemic, haemostatic and diuretic properties and a great help to those suffering from diabetes as it can decrease blood sugar and glycemic levels.  It is also useful in eliminating viruses and bacterial infections.

(above list source live and feel)

Woman's Tonic
Nettle tea is considered an excellent tonic for women. Native American women would drink it during their pregnancy and use it as a remedy to stop excessive bleeding after delivery.
After childbirth, nettle tea helps restore a woman's energy and stimulates milk production.
Nettle tea can also reduce water retention, soothe premenstrual syndrome (PMS) symptoms, stop excessive menstrual bleeding, and treat anemia.


Hay Fever
Nettle tea has natural antihistamine and anti-inflammatory substances that can open nasal and bronchial passages, making it a great herbal remedy for treating hay fever. Drinking nettle tea three times a day can help prevent springtime allergies
(above list source bright hub)

Making nettle tea is simple adding 1 oz of young nettle leaves to 1 pint of boiling water and leave to steep for 10 mins to get rid of the sting. By adding a slice of lemon the tea will change from a green to pink colour but I prefer mine with a bit of sugar as the flavour for a first time drinker can be a bit odd as it is very fresh and green tasting and takes a few cups to get your head around drinking.