This is just a brief post as it’s getting late and I’ve spent most of the evening cooking and baking… The Healthy Forager does not sit still!

My friend Darren popped round yesterday to bring courgettes and peas (in exchange for seaweed). They were all beautiful specimens so I decided to do them justice with a special meal – courgetti with Giant polypore, onion, sorrel, herbs and seaweed, with peas scattered over it and accompanied by a glass of Candiglirach Reserve.

Earlier today I spotted a Himalayan honeysuckle lurking in a bit of ‘waste ground’ under the electricity cables. Waste grounds are the best. This lovely plant is likely an escapee from a garden, as it’s definitely not native to Scotland. The berries are most unusual: very soft in texture (you only need to look at them and they burst), they taste like bitter black treacle with a hint of toffee. They scream out to be turned into something special, which I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll think of something.

It’s now less than a week to go with my Wild for a Month challenge – where the challenge seems to be more and more “how to eat it all”, as opposed to “will I have enough to eat”. I’ll be cooking some wonderful final meals (well, for this month!), so watch this space.

This week I became freshly aware of the importance of ‘variety’. While in theory I could survive this month solely on the tatties from our garden, this would make it into a miserable affair. The tatties are very tasty, don’t get me wrong, but to make a day exciting, there need to be different flavours and textures to look forward to.

Nutritional guides tell us to ‘eat the colours of the rainbow’ for a reason. As a rule of thumb, the various colours in fruit and vegetables correspond to certain nutrients. And we need all of them. As a forager and grower, eating a riot of colour is no problem at all! Yellow raspberries, orange carrots, red cherries and peppers, purple plums and blackberries, blue blaeberries, green nettles, sorrel, dock and plantain, brown seeds and mushrooms.

That sorts out the physiological needs. Then there is our mind to consider.

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to pick up a box full of windfall apples.

I made a wonderful compote, which is by far my favourite breakfast. After two weeks of berries, it felt amazing to taste apples again! Now, when I wake up, I look forward to my bowl of warm compote. It’s comforting.

The other thing I’ve been missing is chocolate. Yes, you can totally have a balanced diet without chocolate, but my soul would gradually sink into despair. So this week I made my own: from the roasted and ground seeds of the Linden tree:

Yesterday I went a step further and used the Linden powder to make boozy cherry brownies… Oh my, that was an incredible success! Here is the recipe:

Linden & dock seed brownie with boozy cherries
Ingredients:
1 egg
60 gr buttery
15 gr finely ground and sieved linden powder
80 gr sugar
20 gr white bread flour
10 gr ground dock seed
Handful of wild black cherries cooked in homemade blackberry wine

Mix everything together and spoon into the smallest cake tin you have (or muffin cases). Bake for 20 mins at fan 150C.

It has a perfect brownie texture, gooey and dense, but well cooked. It’s chocolaty and the cherries go beautifully with it.

So, psychological needs and physical needs – making sure they are both met is a recipe for happiness. That, and the joy of waking up to the sound of rain!

So many people treat life like a race
But I personally go at a slower pace
I go with the seasons
I eat what I find
I don’t have many reasons
To clear my mind

Sometimes I wonder “where do I fit in?”
Then I smile, as I see my reflection in a cherry skin

Well fed and happy, the healthy forager takes to its keyboard. Originally I had planned to post everyday during this challenge, but believe it or not, there has not been time! The whole process of thinking about where to go, picking stuff, thinking about what to cook with it, stocking up on dry stuff (leaves for tea, flour for biscuits, seaweed), and then cooking it is absolutely relentless. The actual eating takes seconds ;-).

In times of old, people’s lives were organized around this. They also would have had a much richer natural larder to pick from – no housing estates or new Aldi’s with huge carparks taking the space of what could have been wild land.

That said, I’ve found one mushroom today that is making clever use of our built environment: the Agaricus bernardii.

This impressive looking specimen likes to grow in salty areas. However, in the picture you see me standing beside the Aberdeen-Alford road. Not a sea in sight. Why does it grow there then? Well… it’s because of the gritting in winter! This sprays the verges with enough salinity for this mushroom to carve out an existence in a microhabitat. Shop-bought button mushrooms are of the same genus as this one – many of the features are the same. Apart from the size!

Something else has been popping up this week, going by the rather ominous-sounding name of ‘Giant polypore’. They grow out of the base or roots of (mainly) dead beeches. To eat them, don’t wait until they are the size of monsters – pick them while they’re young. Here’s a picture of me salivating over one:

I picked a few fronds off it and stir fried them with carrot tops. It made a delicious lunch:

One particular highlight of the week was finding the mushroom species that was the first wild mushroom I ever ate: Boletus edulis, or porcini. I hadn’t expected to find it so soon in the year. Right next to it were some chanterelles, so I cooked them together in another lunchtime stir fry with cucumber, seaweed, sorrel and flowers:

Yesterday, John and I went back to Cove to pick more seaweed. We went quite a bit further across the rocks than I did when I first went, and we discovered many fantastic rock pools. I was absolutely in raptures as I’ve not seen these things before (in The Netherlands the beaches are just sand). I loved clambering to an outcrop together and taking in the view. I think I screamed a lot :-). (“I want to stay here forever!” “I want to live on a rock!”). Here’s an attempt to capture the moment:

On that note, I’m going to sign off and sink my teeth into a batch of freshly baked dock biscuits. Having to bake them myself makes me realise quite how many I get through in a day… I’ll keep that secret to myself! See you in the next post.

This evening I went to see the doctor for my suspected hernia. An operation would severely challenge the foraging! Over recent days the pain had got a lot less and when the doctor asked ‘where do you feel it’, I had to admit that at this point I’m not feeling any pain at all. A manual check confirmed that there is no hernia at present.

He asked me how I sustained the injury. I mentioned the cherry tree. “And where was it that you picked these cherries?’, the doctor asked, with the same inquiring tone as if to ask about an ailment. For one second I thought this was somehow relevant to my injury, but then it dawned on me that he was after my foraging spot!

I’m mightily relieved that all is needed is a gentler pace of exercise than my usual routine for a while.

In celebration of all things vibrant I cooked a wonderful dish tonight. Chanterelles, homegrown cucumber and onion, Himalayan balsam flowers (doing my bit to halt the spread of this invasive species), sorrel (hugely underrated but the absolute star ingredient), seaweed sprinkles and some herbs from the unofficial herb garden at Hazlehead. Look at this, wouldn’t you want to eat it?

I’m quite proud of our cuucs as well. I’ve lost count how many we have had from the greenhouse, but they just keep on coming. I found this whopper lurking behind some leaves:

I mentioned ‘seaweed’ above and you’re probably wondering where I got that. Well, yesterday at low tide I cycled out to Cove and descended the 13% gradient towards the harbour (and yes, back up again of course…). Exposed rocks presented a wonderful green and brown larder. I found sea lettuce, gutweed, oarweed, serrated wrack and kelp. When washed and dried they taste amazing and are a nutritional powerhouse.

Tomorrow I’m back to work and I’m very excited to have bartered for some eggs with a colleague! I will make some unusual foraged jam for her, and I’ll be supplied with eggs from hens that she has reared herself. I haven’t quite decided what I will do with them, but thoughts are turning towards a Spanish omelette with our tatties and some tomatoes from the windowsill. Guess what I’ll be dreaming about tonight!

It’s the 1st of August and that means my challenge is well and truly underway! Last night I had my last chocolate and Snackajack. More significant: after supper I had my last coffee… For the past 20 years I’ve started every single day with a strong shot of caffeine. Oh my word, I wasn’t quite prepared for what hit me this morning. By 10am even the word ‘zombie’ was too active a term.

On a breakfast of gooseberries, blackcurrants and dock bread I decided to stick myself in the river to see if that would work its magic. It certainly was a wonderful dip, but when I came out I still just wanted to sleep. Gradually, over the course of the afternoon it lifted and I felt more like myself.

In the warm sun I delighted in picking the first of the blueberries, nice big fat ones. There’s something very special about picking wild fruit after you’ve been swimming in a river.

Near Hirn I found a stretch of country lane where I got some key ingredients for my supper:

Back home I cooked up a storm! I made courgetti with homegrown produce kindly donated by our neighbour, and I added chanterelles, sorrel, nettles, thyme, nasturtium leaves + flower, and squash flowers. The result was absolutely scrumptious and so good that I’m going to make the same thing again tomorrow. The wine in the background is elderflower, named after my newborn niece who saw the light of day at the same time as our wine was bottled.

I’m also pleased that I’ve been able to feed my ‘inner cookiemonster’ quite well today. Over the past few days I’ve been practising making biscuits with dock seeds. They are sweet and nutty – excellent for an evening snack (and a mid-morning snack)(and a mid-afternoon snack)(and a midnight snack). I eat a lot of biscuits. Did I say that already ;-)? At least these dockies are healthy as well as tasty, so I feel better about eating them.

The same dock flour also goes in my bread. It was a bit of a disaster to begin with: it has no gluten so there’s no point in doing any stretching of the dough. John looked at it and made some comment about something having crapped on the kitchen worktop. So you can imagine my hopes were pretty much rock bottom. Nonetheless, the resulting loaf was excellent!

In the garden, many things are ready to harvest. We’ve now got tomatoes, lettuce (see above), cucumbers, onions, potatoes and carrots.

Tonight I’m going to relax with a glass (I like tea in a glass) of Pineappleweed tea. It smells like camomile and really does help you drift off. Though I doubt I’ll have any problem with that tonight! Pineappleweed grows on poor, sandy soil and can often be seen at the entrances to fields:

So all together it was a good start to my challenge, and I’m excited to see how I will feel once the caffeine withdrawal symptoms fully wear off. Watch this space…

This blog post does not have pictures. Instead, what I’m going to try to do is conjure up a picture in your head. A picture of what ‘happiness’ means to me. So, read it slowly, and try to imagine what it would be like. Some of the things I describe may not be your thing – but try to imagine them anyway.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…

It’s Saturday morning. You wake up after 9 hours of deep sleep. Before you went to bed you had Pineappleweed and chaga tea and you’re so grateful to yourself that you drank that, and not a whisky nightcap. Your body feels fully rested. Nothing hurts. Your head is clear. You are keen to get up and go outside. You have energy.

For breakfast you eat the cherries you picked yesterday. Large, shiny and sweet. Together with a chunk of bread that is earthy, rich and has a crackly crust. You don’t even put anything on it, because it doesn’t need it.

You set off on your bike (gently, because we do have a hernia!) and you breathe in the refreshing scent of morning. The sky is overcast, but the air is soft and the wind is in your back. Nothing hurts and you’re grateful for the ability to ride your bike despite your injury. You enjoy the feeling of your quads working. You sing out loud.

You get to the river and there is nobody around. The water looks inviting. You strip off and slide in. The water is cool and it goes right to your core. Your skin and your senses are fully alive.

Using only your arms and keeping your legs folded behind you, face-down, you slowly swim across to the other side. Underneath you, the landscape changes. Sand, stones, rock formations. Canyons, cliffs, underwater beaches. Then the fish appear. Young salmon the same colours as the stones. They are not afraid of you. You swim together, you follow their paths around the rocks. You no longer feel the cold. You feel you belong here.

Coming out, you rub your skin until it is red. Dry clothes feel like an embrace. You drink large mouthfuls of warm tea and you feel it spread throughout you.

Back on your bike you ride on for a few miles, when you find a line of cherry trees. Heavily loaded with black and red fruit. You stand underneath them. The cherries are large. As you grasp one, you feel how cool they are and how perfectly they fit into the palm of your hand. Each turn of the branch reveals more. You eat them straight from the tree until your fingers and your face are purple with stains.

You pick some more, to share with your love. You imagine the look on his face. You are excited.

Cycling back home via a different route, along country lanes lined with raspberries. There are more than you could ever eat. The wind is in your face now, but it doesn’t matter. You feel strong. The bounty all around you makes your heart swell with happiness – your heart sings.

This is what happiness feels to me. A state where I’m one with nature – on it, in it, and it in me. A sense of deep gratitude for being alive today.

It’s been a while since my last post – I have been preoccupied with physical pain. As one of my friends knows, my enthusiasm far exceeds my climbing ability, so when a 1.60m small person tried taking on a 5m tall cherry tree, it had to go wrong at some point. Sadly I think I’ve sustained a hernia in the same place where I had one before, many years ago.

I told my student and they knew me well, as the first question was: “But did you get the cherries?” Ha! Yes, I did. They were delicious. But I’m awaiting a scan and then a likely operation. I still have a little hope that it might be a torn muscle instead. Meanwhile I’m drugged up with very strong painkillers, which enable me to get about just far enough to get some tasty grub. I have been told “no swimming”, but nobody said anything about “no floating”, so that’s what I’ve been doing in the river, just face-down with prescription goggles, observing the plentiful wildlife below:

As a result of not posting for two weeks, I have a massive back log of food pictures to share! All the stuff you see below was picked since my injury, which I find encouraging as it shows it hasn’t completely knocked me out of the game.

First up are some beautiful potatoes. This bowl is just from one plant. We have 20 plants, so go figure!

With these lovely potatoes, and together with the first of our onions, I made a Vetch soup. Vetch is abundant right now and I wanted to pick it before this week’s heatwave. It tastes a bit grassy, pea-like, which is not surprising as it’s from the same family.

The herbs come from Hazlehead Park. Next to the restaurant is a border with all sorts of plants. I imagine the original owner intended this to be a kitchen garden. I doubt the current owners are using it as such, and nobody stopped me when I walked in wielding a pair of scissors. I’ve dried them in a low oven. I think I’ve got thyme of two kinds, marjoram and sage.

Things are also happening in the fruit department. The Shire is absolutely bursting at the seams! I can cycle about 20 miles in my current state, which is far enough to pick a bounty. It’s an exceptionally good year for cherries. We’ve also got blackcurrants, redcurrants and gooseberries. The other plant on the photo is Pineappleweed, which makes a lovely calming tea. In the background, our elderflower wine is bubbling away nicely.

And then there were the mushrooms! We had one morning of rain this week, which brought them out. I feel immensely grateful that a beech forest starts about half a mile from my house, featuring most types of mushroom that I would also find further afield. I picked a wonderful collection of Charcoal burners later that day (they shoot up out of the ground at almost visible speed) and later on discovered that a beech log had started sprouting tiny pinheads of oysters. I feared that the heatwave might kill them off, so I went back the next day and the next with bikebottles full of water. It paid off! Yesterday and today they had grown enough for us to eat them:

To end this epistle, let me tell you about another fruit that most people don’t eat, but which is in fact quite tasty: the fuchsia berry. Fuchsias come in lots of different varieties, and some berries are tastier than others, but they are all edible. Look for the plumpest ones that come off easily. The taste, I’d say, is something like a cucumber with very faint notes of fig. Give it a go!

I’ll keep you all posted about the results of the scan and whether it is indeed a cause for surgery or not. If it is, I will probably the first patient in the Albyn hospital to ask if they can bring in their own foraged soup. August is August, after all. Watch this space!

Orange is good. As a Dutch national, this fact was drilled into my head from a tender age. And as it happened, the most fantastic, memorable moments of the past week involved wild food that was indeed – well, orange!

I stayed in Glen Affric this week, and had two aims: cook chanterelle omelettes, and swim in one of the lochs. It turned out that the swim was a lot easier to realise than finding the mushrooms! Despite being an ancient forest, wetter than Aberdeen and covered in moss, the chanterelles did a great job at hiding. However, as luck would have it, coming out of the water and walking back to the road, I saw these little beauties growing right beside the loch. Searching hard and continuously while on the road (got a stiff neck to prove it ;-)), I found more. And the next day, too.

In the end I found enough to cook myself something absolutely divine on both nights. Added to the orange delights was an Orange Birch Bolete:

This beauty grew half a mile from where I was staying, and I picked it before breakfast. It needs to be cooked quite long, about 15-20 minutes, to remove any toxins. It was in pristine condition and large enough to feed me twice.

On the last day, I cooked up a feast with all this, and was able to sit outside in the sun with a glass of white. I felt so blessed to a. live in this part of the world, b. have acquired enough foraging skills to make this meal that I wouldn’t have gotten any other way. Unique flavours and textures, fresh from the surrounding forest:

Back home, the Orange Fest continued. There were some brown things as well (Scarletina boletes!), but this afternoon I was thrilled to find Salmon Berries in a large thicket growing very close to home. Just a bit of woodland I normally never walk through. The Salmon Berries is a member of the rose family, and you can tell that from the fact that the flowers and foliage is carried high on the stem. It was a wonderful experience to walk *underneath* the bush to pick the berries, a bit like picking grapes off a vine.

At the end of this week I’ve got a few more days off, which I shall spend exploring our own woodlands here, in search for more orange, yellow and brown, and who knows maybe some other colours. July is a season of bounty in many ways – I hope everyone who can, will make the most of it. Enjoy!

June is that time of year where some mushrooms from the early Spring are coming to their end, while some summer mushrooms are popping up for the first time. Yesterday I cycled near Echt and came past a perfectly manicured lawn, with several large boulders on it. Or at least so I thought! When I looked more closely, it turned out they were gigantic Puffballs, the size of a watermelon:

I touched them and they felt slightly wobbly, so any moment now these two could literally explode and send their millions of spores into the air. Their lifecycle complete, and hopefully spreading themselves far and wide.

Later that day, I went for a walk in our local woods, and to my great excitement I spotted some yellow dots in the moss. Baby chanterelles!

People walking by must have wondered about the sanity of this person who a. lay face down in the moss, sniffed and went ‘WHOAAAH’ (they smell of apricot), b. proceeded to water said moss from a bike bottle! It’s been very dry recently and I hope that by watering them every day, they’ll have a chance to grow full size and be ready to eat in a couple of weeks.

Tomorrow I’m off to Glen Affric, where I’ve been told grow more mushrooms than anyone can eat in a lifetime. Well, I’ve got 3 days so I’m giving it my best shot ;-). Watch this space!