Seaweed

Orkney, Oysters and Oysterplant

Margaret Lear Dishes/Comestibles, Fauna, Flora, Pasture, Seashore, Seaweed, Summer, Vegetables, Wild Food & Wild Things Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

We had a ridiculously wonderful week’s holiday in Orkney.  Expecting windswept, wet and cold marginal land where nothing grows, but instead found fertile, weather-rich  (every kind in a day) and unique countryside, wrapped in glittering sea and sky, nice cheese, good beer, bere-barley bannocks, and Andrew, bless him, even found an apple tree with apples on within minutes of getting off the ferry (reported, doubtless with pictures, on his website www.appletreeman.co.uk) . There were plenty of seaweeds to choose from – bladder wrack, serrated wrack, sea lettuce, kelp (Laminaria digitata), sugarweed (Laminaria saccharina) and gutweed (Enteromorpha intestinalis) for starters! Most seaweeds are cookable when camping, even with our primitive trangia, because all they need is a wash and a rapid stir-fry. I do find the filmy ones easier, though, because you don’t need to cut them up. Wish we were nearer the coast at home, then I could experiment with different cooking methods.

Orkney is famed for its fish and seafood, and although we had to buy them, it was a wonderful near-neolithic experience picknicking on a beach by a prehistoric village on dived native oysters (Ostrea edulis) with Orkney oatcakes. Thanks to the oyster man for lending us his oyster knife!

We spent much time (between visiting prehistoric sites), botanising. Went in search of Scotland’s endemic primrose (Primula scotica) and found it, in abundance, on the spectacular cliffs at Yesnaby. We were in between flowering periods, so it was mostly seed heads, but an endemic in its native habitat is a wonderful find for a plant twitcher. However, we had the scary experience there of being dived on by bonxies, or great skuas, beastly great birds almost as aggressively territorial as Homo sapiens… Artcic skuas were about, too, and on the island of Eday (LOVELY place! LOVELY cake too, thanks Chris and Peter!) we watched red-throated divers on Mill Loch. Everywhere, the wild flowers were so abundant it was heavenly, the road verges providing the sort of floral display Perth Council pays good money to get; I can’t remember all we saw now, but three edible plants stand out:

Rose-root (Sedum roseum), clinging to the steep, deep edges of a GLOUP (basically a huge pit in the cliff due to the lower strata caving in). I have rose-root in the garden and sell it, but have never seen it in the wild before.

The same is true of Scots Lovage,, which I was thrilled to find sprouting freely on the shingle beach below the campsite. It was delicious – stronger in flavour than my garden specimen. Annoying how it obviously seeds itself merrily on a stony beach, but can I get the seeds from mine to germinate?

And on the same beach, one I’d only ever seen in books, the Oysterplant (Mertensia). With blue-grey, succulent leaves, and azure blue flowers, this member of the borage family is rare in the wild, and you wouldn’t dream of picking very much of it even though it was plentiful on this beach. It is absolutely beautiful. It is so named because the leaves are said to taste of oysters. I love oysters, as you’ve heard, and if you’ve never had one, imagine a taste that is the smell and lazy feel of dipping in rock pools on a clean coast on a warm, summer’s day. A plant that tastes like that?

Be assured, the Oysterplant really does!

The wildest thing I saw in Orkney was coming back from Eday to Kirkwall on the ferry. It was a hot, sunny evening, the sea calm and sparkling. I stood on deck and shut my eyes, just enjoying the sunshine and the peace and sea-smells. When I opened them, a minke whale surfaced and went down, up a few more times, then gone. I’d never seen a whale before. What can you say. It was magic.

And more wild garlic…

Margaret Lear Broadleaved Woods, Dishes/Comestibles, Flora, Fungi, Hedgerow, Nuts, Salad, Sauce, Seashore, Seaweed, Spring, Uncategorized, Vegetables, Wine Leave a comment

Ramsons (Allium ursinum) is commonly called Wild Garlic, even though several other wild plants also have this name. It’s the broad-leaved, glossy plant that carpets old woods in April and May, and bears heads of starry white flowers. Both the leaves and the flowers are edible. Last night I made Ramsons pesto with a bucket of leaves.

I just liquidised the washed leaves with the water that clung from washing, together with a packet of pine nuts, a small bag of other undistinguished wild nuts that needed using up, and olive oil. I don’t know how much olive oil went in because I just slurped it in till the consistency was right, but couldn’t have been more than a couple of eggcupsful, maybe less. Then I tasted it, and decided it needed a wee bit of Maldon Sea Salt (this isn’t advertising, just supporting a local industry from way back home, being an Essex Girl). Andrew said it was too bitter and to add some honey, but I didn’t – these days I can’t stand anything to be too sweet and I thought it was perfect. He added some honey on his oatcake but still didn’t like it, so it’s all for me. Excellent! Strange how the garlic flavour comes through really strongly – individual leaves in salad are very mild, but this is good and strong. The colour is absolutely beautiful too.

What else? Lime leaves are nice now, before they start to lose that spring-green flavour. Wood sorrel remains magnificent, and ground elder has reached the point where it’s better steamed/cooked rather than raw. Flowers appear in salads – cornflowers, violets, broom buds, chives and of course ramsons. We were down at the coast in Fife last weekend and failed to collect because we forgot to go back for it lots of the seaweed Enteromorpha intestinalis, which is rather nice. However my stomach rebelled against a rich diet badly enough on Monday, so maybe it was just as well.

More St. George’s Mushrooms made their way to Saturday’s breakfast, and burdock stems onto dinner. I have only so far eaten the fleshy leaf stems of the Great Burdock (Arctium lappa), although I am assured other parts are edible too. It’s delicious. What you have to do is carefully peel away the slightly hairy outer skin on each stem – it doesn’t matter if you don’t get all of it. It’s a bit like peeling rhubarb. You’ll notice the interesting, musty but rather pleasant smell. Cut into sections and steam or lightly boil. You can serve it as a vegetable; I used to add butter but don’t feel the need to these days. My tastes really have changed!

Noticing the buds on elder bushes; the rowans are out and may (hawthorn) about to blur the distinction between late pear and early apple blossom. Eyeing up this year’s wine and cider sources. I racked off last years elderberry and sloe and blackcurrant wines this weekend – the last before bottling. As usual the elderberry tastes the more promising!

Ullapool – and Beyond

Margaret Lear Salad, Seaweed Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Just back from student field trip to Ullapool. Hotel very accommodating about microwaving my peculiar dishes, and very amused by whole thing. Took enough food, just, but the chef managed to incinerate my last potato which was for on the way home. Never mind! On the shore and various beaches, I saw lots of edible seaweed – bladder wrack and kelp most noticeably – and would have liked to collect some, but decided that would be one thing too far for the hotel. No shellfish, though.

I got really p***ed off with watching people eat interesting soups and chocolate cakes and lamb chops; and smelling other people’s coffee or beer (strangely enjoyable, but not quite the same as drinking it!). The students were all very supportive – even to the point of offering me bits of the plants they’d bought to make tea with! At Inverewe Gardens, in the cause of education, was obliged to break off some leaves of various herbs to demonstrate the smells…. and pocket them for tea or (in the case of the chives) to munch with my cold potato and hard boiled egg. Some delicious curly kale came away in my hand as well – good with the chicken and chilli casserole I’d brought for the evening meal.

Talking of eggs, I think the surfeit is giving me what my mum used to call egg – binding. The digestion is bizarre and sporadic, and I don’t feel too well, to be honest. Think I have a touch of cystitus and wonder if the excretory system is under some stress. Drinking plenty, but it’s so BORING….

And the ducks are laying eggs as well now. New food from the garden: Solomon’s Seal shoots, tastier and more tender than asparagus and a real treat, and lashings of salad stuff. Baby lettuce leaf seedlings nearly ready to cut, and I’ve started the chrysanthemum greens. Only two weeks to go, despite the still cold weather I’m not going to starve, but what wouldn’t I give for a pie…

August 2008

Margaret Lear Berries, Broadleaved Woods, Diary entries, Fauna, Flora, Fruit, Fungi, Hedgerow, Pasture, Pine Woods, Sauce, Seashore, Seaweed, Soup, Summer Leave a comment

August – Weeks 1, 2 and 3.

More chanterelles, more wild cherries. We think it’s odd that the several fairly old cherries in a hedge line from which we gather the fruits all seem to produce fruits of varying sweetness and colour when ripe. One is almost black, another, barely red. All delicious, though. Any theories, anyone?

One long walk on 10th produced in addition to a sack of chanterelles, Plums -and-Custard mushrooms (Tricholomopsis), Birch Boletes and larch Boletes, and tawny grisettes. The chanterelles from this trip we dried, by threading them onto cotton and hanging them as garlands in our warm shed. When they are nearly dry I will de-thread them and spread them on trays over the boiler to finish before putting them in tightly sealed jars for the winter.

On the 11th, I macro-foraged! In that I went sea angling from Arbroath with friends, and caught 7 big mackerel. I hadn’t been before and must admit the sea was choppy and a tad nauseous, but I got over it and would definately like to go again. As my friends were going on holiday the day after, I managed to “forage” (borrow? steal?) 5 of their fishies too to make a round dozen which I have cleaned, filleted and frozen, or eaten. The same day, Andrew brought home a bag of field mushrooms he’d found at work, which I turned into a delicious soup.

Then we went on a week’s holiday to Norfolk, and got to try out some wild foods on Andrew’s unsuspecting (or suspecting?) family. At Holkham Beach we gathered samphire, oh how I love samphire and it especially nice after being exiled from this East Anglian delicacy for a couple of decades. Steamed for 15 minutes and tossed in butter, this unprepossessing-looking product of mudflats with its fleshy, salty stems is incomparable. We didn’t gather any more, no-one seemed that enthused except us, but perhaps we shouldn’t have inflicted the seaweed Sea Lettuce on them in the same meal. Filamentous pale green sheets you’d think wouldn’t take much to cook, but in fact it was a bit chewy. Next time I would make more of a meal of it, with some flavouring, longer cooking, combined with mushrooms perhaps…. not really a side vegetable with roast pork. The apple sauce, though, was made with a combination of wilding apples from the hedgerow, “scrumped” eaters from an abandoned garden, and wild water mint, and it went very nicely. Likewise, we all enjoyed (I think that’s the word) the mind-banditing sharpness of Sea Buckthorn berries growing on the dunes near Old Hunstanton, and Andrew brought the pips home in a hankie…..

We kept a supply of fungi going through the week – puffballs, horse mushrooms, grisettes etc. – some of which were appreciated, the rest we just ate ourselves.

Horse Mushroom

Horse Mushroom

I was specially excited by the Roman mushrooms – found while exploring the site of a Roman fort at Brancaster. Resisted some big Parasol Mushrooms (Lepiota procera) at Wretham Heath – after all it was a nature reserve – look forward to finding some more before the summer’s out.

Parasol Mushroom

Parasol Mushroom

Back home, we realised the fridge was empty so went out after more chanterelles and found, in addition, an absolute HORDE of Boletus edulis, the Cep or King Bolete. However, most of them were coated in white and contorted or deformed in a most sinister looking way. We think – but please educate us if you know better – these specimens had been affected by the torrential rain which had obviously been plaguing Perthshire in our absence and fallen foul of some predatory fungus themselves. Luckily there were some good specimens, as well as a variety of other boletes and the first Slippery Jacks. We have cleaned, sliced and set these to dry for winter, but the Ceps are for tea tonight. While out we snacked on some lovely little wild gooseberries, and checked the progress of rowan berries in general.

July – Third Week

Margaret Lear Berries, Diary entries, Fruit, Fungi, Mountain, Pine Woods, Seashore, Seaweed Leave a comment

July – Third Week
Rowan and I were camping on Mull this week, at Fionnphort in the far south west of the island, right by the beach. We stopped at a wood on the way over to Oban for a picnic, and had a walk. “Bet I can find something to eat” I said, and lo, there were hordes of delicious blaeberries (bilberries) just asking to be picked. A German couple were already tucking in so we wasted no time in collecting a bag each to serve as snacks for our camping trip. We finished them the first night though – Rowan turned purple. “You can never have too much fruit Mum,” she frowned as I suggested she might want to slow down. Later in the week she repeated it as she foraged a hedge in Salen for wild raspberries. Also in the little wood I found some Orange Peel Fungus on the path – a flavourless but attractive ascomycete we saved for breakfast.

ENTEROMORPHA INTESTINALIS
Being by the beach, seaweed had to be on the menu. Enteromorpha is bright green, roughly cylindrical and looks like a pile of translucent, irridescent guts where it grows in profusion in rock pools and shallow sea. But don’t be put off – we had it stir-fried in butter with a single field mushroom we found in the hills and it was delicious.

Enteromorpha - an edible seaweed

Enteromorpha - an edible seaweed

I threw in some Serrated Wrack (Fucus ?) as well, but the meths ran out in the trangia and I think it could have done with longer cooking.

On Iona, we found some wonderful flowers on the machair, but the only wild food was Crowberry, with black berries, and I couldn’t remember if they were edible so we didn’t. Apparently, they are – this month I seem to be getting to grips with all these odd “something-berry” plants.