If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It’s autumn. Officially(ish). Which means you get some great sunsets out in the countruside. The hedgerows are also bursting with food. On a short walk this evening, beside the regular crab apples, mushrooms and edible fungus, and the flowers I couldn’t identify, there was all manner of edible berries ready for picking…

Elderberries, which go well in apple pies, or add weight and substance to blackcurrant jelly. Alternatively, they’re a bit of a tradition where cordial is concerned, which isn’t hard to make.

Rose hips, which as kids we used to break open and use as itching powder. The seeds inside each berry are hairy and stick to the inside of your clothes in a very unpleasant manner. Properly treated, though, they can be brewed as a tea or used for rose hip syrup. Make sure you get rid of all the hairs, though, or you’ll be itching inside and that’s dangerous.

Blackberries. Everyone knows what you do with them.

Sloe, which is the colour of a nice ripe plum and about the size of an olive. They’re most often used to make sloe gin, although they’re not the source of the gin itself: you have to buy that and add it to the fruit and leave it to ferment for two months, at the end of which you can pick out the berries and munch on their alcoholic goodness.

Loads of nuts. Beech and acorn in particular. If you chop and roast the latter, you can use it in place of coffee, as indeed the government encouraged the populace to do during the war. It worked, although it’s rather fallen out of favour since. More ethical than Nescafe, though.

There are lots of hawthorn bushes, all heavy with berries, which seem to dominate every hedgerow around here at the moment, and whose leaves go well with nuts or cream cheese. I thought I’d also found some late-fruiting wild redcurrants, but looking them up since getting home it seems that these are actually guelder rose, which isn’t particularly edible.

If you follow any of this, pick something and die, it’s your fault. No recommendations contained herein.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Journal, Kitchen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.