Cooking with Wild Foods in the Kitchen
Wild food can literally be found everywhere, from the centre of London to the rural escape of Wales. People often tell me they’ve found a range of wild foods but rarely use them because they either can’t find any good recipes or can’t get to grips with how to actually get them in use within their kitchen.
Well I’ve got a fantastic way of using wild food which means you will be able to get them in to every single meal you cook, eat and enjoy. It’s simple really.
When I first started foraging I scoured the internet to try and figure out what certain plants could be cooked in to. Initially the classics came up – things like, nettle soup, dandelion leaf salad and rose hip syrup, but realistically there’s only so much of this one person can eat – so I started to look deeper at what else could be cooked.
“If anyone has been on one of my courses they will know that I now love to compare wild ingredients to a commercial ingredient, the kind you will find on the shelves of your local super market.”
This isn’t because I have a huge love for these ingredients, it’s simply because there’s literally masses of recipes out there that include these ingredients. So if you compare a wild ingredient to a more regular one, then any recipe that calls for that regular ingredient you can substitute out for a wild one.
I’m going to make an example below using BBC Goodfoods recipe: Mushroom and Spinach Lasagne as an example.
Find the original recipe here
The original ingredients called for are in black on the left and the wild substitute is in italic on the right:
1 tbsp olive oil – N/A
1 garlic clove, crushed – 4 wild garlic bulbs
250g pack mushrooms, sliced – 250g bolete mushrooms
1 tsp thyme leaves, chopped – 30g fresh mugwort
200g bag spinach – 200g nettle tops
300g tub light soft cheese – N/A
4 tbsp grated parmesan (or vegetarian alternative) – N/A
6 fresh lasagne sheets – Sheet of Kelp seaweed sliced to fit
Now – what we’ve done here is come up with a fantastic new wild food recipe without ever having to come up with a new recipe, we’ve merely changed out store bought ingredients with wild alternatives to produce what may appear as a truly creative wild inspired meal.
This can be done with literally every recipe in existence!
Have a look through our plant, fungi and seaweed section to give you an idea of what to pick and what to substitute it for by clicking here
Or check out more of our wild food recipes by clicking here
