After heading off in December on Maternity leave, I have since returned to help the team forage, baby included.
We’ve had some cracking weather this week and the littlest forager and I have been out and about gathering wild ingredients for the product development kitchen.
Wild garlic is flourishing, three cornered leek abounds and the estuary is thick with sea beet.
Gorse is coming to an end and I have been anxious not to miss the last hurrah of luminous coconutty joy that it brings to the kitchen. We took a stroll around the headland opposite Trelonk Farm and gathered a fat bagful to infuse and reduce into a thick syrup for cakes and cocktails. I love the tropical flavour of the flower buds and it pains me that gorse’s menacing natural defences prohibit it from ever being a viable commercial ingredient in the Wild kitchen; no matter how hard I concentrate and how delicate my technique I always come away with at least a couple of lanced fingertips. Nature obviously knew what she was doing when she designed this bush and its probably for the best that this key early pollinator plant is not ransacked for private enterprise.
The modest quantities I come away with after an hour or so on the hillside are plenty for crafting culinary delights for private dining purposes, and I am delighted to hear that we have a large booking confirmed for June.
This week I have discovered that the following tasks are not conducive with the care of a new-born infant:
Boiling jam
Mincing chilli’s
Calculating ingredient ratios without a pen and paper.
Anna!
