How d’ya like them apples?

It’s the season for orchard fruits; plums, damsons, and sloes seem to have been everywhere in the last two months, and now, apples are abounding, as are the festivals that celebrate them. In this post, guest writers Dacier Outten (of the excellent Tales from under Black Hill blog) and Mary Horesh, describe the Big Apple in Much Marcle, and later I plug the forthcoming Apple Day at Kingstanding Leisure Centre.

The Big Apple is a great little festival in the middle of an important fruit growing area. Every year the seven parishes of the Marcle Ridge country south of Ledbury in Herefordshire celebrate their heritage of apples and cider, and pears and perry.

For the avoidance of doubt both cider and perry are made by crushing and then pressing the fruit and the reason that most people don’t really know of perry is because the output of perry pears is usually consumed by the local demand. Perry was big in the fifties in the form of Babycham but real perry, whether still or fizzy, is a fuller bodied drink. Purists like us are annoyed by the appearance of products under the name of Pear Cider which is a contradiction in terms but it is presumably intended to create a new drink for people taken to be incapable of understanding the difference. Drinking either can of course make you incapable of anything especially with some hand crafted farm versions going to 8% ABV or above. If the drink is made from 100% pears then it is perry but if pear juice has been added to cider we would claim is a pear flavoured cider. Many mass produced products will fall back on imported concentrate when supplies are tight but not the genuine products you can find at this event.

A few years ago there was a lot of concern with all the orchards being grubbed up around Herefordshire but we can report that the cider business is growing and on the way to Much Marcle the sight of lots of orchards being re-established added to the glorious views of the Malvern Hills, Marcle Ridge itself and beyond to the Black Mountains. Such is the growth of cider that despite a hugely reduced acreage we are drinking record volumes of the stuff. This productivity has been achieved by growing traditional varieties as dwarf trees with high yields easier harvesting.

The big name producer in Much Marcle, the centre of the festival, is the family run firm of Weston’s Cider. Their works are well worth a visit especially if you take the tour of their modern cider mill/factory. We would claim that their Stowford Press Ciders and their traditional perry are right at the top of the mass produced roll of honour. Their traditional fizzy perry makes a sound substitute for many white wines at a fraction of the cost so a trip to their shop is both a bargain and an education all in one.

At the other end of the scale is Greggs Pit which is found at the end of a farm track and situated in a cottagers plot with its small orchard of traditional fruit trees. The production process is what we would call ‘artisan’ with the result that award winning perry and cider is produced here. A custom built barn for the vats with an open front for the crusher and apple press never fails to prompt dreams of creating such a unit on our own hillside plot. The old cottage orchard has cider trees as well as cooking apples, damsons and other fruits. Not all is used for cider and perry but we are happy to report that redwings and other birds don’t let anything go to waste. Apples and pears are also bought in from nearby farms so that single variety brews can be created. If you have never tried top quality ‘champagne method’ ciders and perrys this is the sort of place you need to track down. At Lyne Down Cider you can try your palette at more traditional brews as well as fresh apple juice straight from the press.

On the Sunday at Hellens, the local ’big house’, they get their old crushing mill going with visitors helping to push the crushing wheel round in its trough; a task usually carried out by a horse! Hellen’s Perry is made from pears collected on the Saturday and as with all of the events you can usually by a bottle or two. The house itself is well worth a visit and is one of those places that always seems to have been connected with many of the great events down the centuries but it, and its residents, seem to have survived by good judgement and luck. A return visit to this house on a quiet summer afternoon makes a great outing. During the festival the adjoining barns are devoted to the sale of fruit (Flight Organics) and the study of apples and pears (Marcher Network) and there are helpful experts who will try and identify the mystery apple tree in your garden. The variety of local food is usually well displayed at this event. Added to all this bustle was the appearance of the Leominster Morris dancers who drew a large crowd.

An essential visit during the afternoon is to the Memorial Hall where you will usually find an art exhibition as well as ‘a cup of tea and a slice of cake’ as Wurzel Gummage would describe his favourite refreshment. One year we were in front of a novice ‘Big Appler’ who asked whether they had any apple cake? Yes, came the reply, about fifteen different choices! We bought about five different types and sampled pieces from each. We have our own popular recipe which was found in a book on Yorkshire cooking where it is described as ‘Somerset Apple Cake’. Althought not a local recipe, we do not find this hard to live with as we all have a fondness for counties where apples are a specialist crop and so whether it comes from the land of the Wurzels’, Gloucestershire, Devon, Kent or Cornwall, or our own dear Herefordshire, if it’s good, we’ll have it. Especially with cream, in moderation of course, as with cider and perry.

A short distance from the Memorial Hall is St Bartholomew’s Churchwhere local produce and crafts were on sale in aid of church funds. A brief rest beneath the 1,500 year old yew tree might just restore the energies sufficiently for a visit to Awnell’s Farm.

Awnell’s Farm is run by the Countryside Restoration Trust, this conservation charity aims to protect and restore Britain’s countryside with wildlife-friendly and commercially viable agriculture. The trust is committed to promoting the importance of a living and working countryside through education, demonstration and community involvement.

It has another farm just down from us at Turnastone Court where the National Hedge Laying Championships will be held this coming 24th October, hopefully ‘with a caterer in attendance’. This usually means a beer tent at the very least. Taking farming back to sustainable practices by working with nature is a welcome contrast to some of the industrial farming that can be found in Herefordshire such as the ever present expansion of growing fruit under plastic and the efforts the Potato Barons which sometimes results in our precious pink soils being washed away in heavy downpours.

Most years the event has attracted large parties of cyclists. This is an encouraging feature although we sometimes thought that their awareness of pedestrians could have been better. Was it perry they had stowed in their drinking flasks we asked? Now in its twentieth year the number of visitors cars can be a problem but it is not yet on a scale which needs major management, and a parking space is usually available somewhere. Bringing a bike to tour the various events is a good idea and means that the car can be left at some distance. I think we will try it next year, although a good set of panniers will be needed for our liquid purchases.

For a community run event the Big Apple just shows what can be done. This lengthy article is not just the perry talking but it comes from people who know how important it is for everyone to reconnect with nature, our traditional sustainable local produce and the communities who still have the skills and vision to bring it all from farm and orchard to your table.

Dacier Outten and Mary Horesh

Finally I’d like to plug a community ‘apple day’ this coming weekend in Kingstanding. here’s the low-down:

Sunday 25^th October 12pm-8pm, Kingstanding Leisure Centre, Dulwich Road, Kingstanding, B44 0EW

From 12-5pm there’ll be:

Live apple pressing, see and taste local apples turned into delicious juice with our amazing apple presses- why not bring along your apples to turn into juice
Apple trees, produce and plants for sale
Apple expert available on the day, bring a sample of any apple you would like him to identify
Traditional medieval Mummers play (3pm)
Display of over 50 varieties of apples
Fun apple games including Apple bobbing, Apple peel competition and Apple and Spoon race
Launch of ‘The Urban Orchard Competition’- enter for a chance to have a fruit tree dedicated to a special person of your choic

The event is brought to you by ‘PREPARE’ a project to harvest and distribute unwanted fruit in the Erdington area run by Artist in Residence Eleanor Hoad supported by Birmingham City Councils Community Arts Team.

For more information and Ceilidh tickets contact Kingstanding Leisure Centre on 0121 464 7890 or Eleanor Hoad on 07974 934 917 or eleanorhoad@hotmail.com

See the flyer for the event below:

Loaf hits the headlines

Loaf gained it’s first bit of press attention in today’s Birmingham Post. Three weeks ago, I had an enjoyable morning outside next to the roaring earth oven with Post journalist Richard McComb, who scribbled down almost every word I uttered, even the details of my wedding. The article could have gone anywhere, but I’m so glad Richard totally ‘got it’, and penned a fabulous piece of writing extolling the values at the heart of Loaf Social Enterprise much more eloquently than I ever could. Some of my favourite quotes are below (read the online version here):

“Tom is based here [Birmingham] for a very good reason: this is where the work needs to be done. There’s no point living in a gastro town, like Ludlow, as pleasant as that might be. He’d be preaching to the converted. This is where Tom’s revolution will have the most impact – his food revolution, that is.”

“He practises what he preaches, be it preserving or bottling, or baking 100 per cent bona fide crap-free bread.”

“He is a great advocate for real food, which he says is all about authenticity, traditions, cooking from scratch, ethical vitality and connecting with people, be they the people who you sit down and share food with or the “heroes that bring it to our plates”. Tom, and I suspect many people like him, myself included, see no reason why we should surrender our food heritage to the multi-nationals, the global buyers and the supermarket vultures.”

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules

Author of the excellent Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense Of Food Michael Pollan, recently asked for the public’s top ‘food rules’. In the NY Time’s latest ‘Food Issue’, he picks his top twenty. Here’s six of my favourites from those:

I try and follow as much as possible, what I’ve laid down in the Real Food Manifesto, not that it always works, or is always possible. My favourite is ‘shake the hand that feeds you’, which I stole from Pollan in the first place – although living in a big city, this is very difficult, something Loaf is hoping to make easier…!

What are your favourites from these or Pollan’s top twenty? What are your own food rules? leave a comment below…

Loaf Cookery School – poll results and plans!

Thanks to everyone who voted in our recent ‘what cookery skills you’d like to learn’ poll. The full results are at the bottom of this post, and they’ve been really helpful for me in planning what courses to start delivering. Coming out top is home brewing (you boozy lot!), near behind is breadmaking, dairy skills, and butchery, closely followed by preserving, british classics, vegetarian cooking, and wildfood. The results seem to have confirmed my hunch that there is a desire to learn forgotten traditional food skills – is this a sign of the recession, or is it just because they’re damn good fun?!

Breadmaking dates are already in the diary, so that’s a relief! There may also be a couple of evening workshops before Christmas too – I’m thinking maybe festive breads, cupcake masterclass, vegetarian Christmas, fresh pasta making – any comments welcome below. I’m also on the hunt for talented co-tutors in brewing, dairy, butchery, and preserving, so we can put together a nice programme for you in 2010. I have a few ideas for tutors, but if you do too, please leave a comment below. The British and vegetarian cooking will certainly feature, probably as evening workshops to start with, and wildfood and cooking will feature too, but probably not until summer 2010.

I’m also thinking about offering vouchers soon, in time for Christmas – what do you think? Make a nice prezzie?

I’ve also been wondering whether ‘Cookery School at Home’ might be an interesting thing to do. You invite a bunch of friends round to your kitchen, we lead an evening of cooking/bread/pasta etc. What do you think? Something you’d go for, or would you rather come to us? Any ideas/comments on the above or generally on the cookery school, are extremely welcome!

Better get ordering the matching aprons…

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Simpsons vs Purity – matching fine food and real ale

Last time I had a pint of Purity Brewing Co’s Mad Goose, I think I was standing in The Wellington surrounded by the smell of sweat and salt and vinegar crisps. That’s probably a fairly typical accompaniment to real ale, but following a chance meeting between Andreas Antona (Simpson’s chef-proprietor) and Paul Halsey (MD of Purity) at the Taste of Birmingham festival, that might all be about to change…

Andreas and Paul decided to put together an evening to celebrate both artisanally made food and beer, and last week at Simpson’s there was a fantastic five-course menu on offer with a different beer to accompany each dish, including Purity’s real ales Pure UBU, Pure Gold and Mad Goose, and its imported beers Veltins Pilsner and Maisels Weisse. Although Loaf wasn’t there on this occasion (we found out too late!), reportedly the evening was a real success, with around 20 guests tucking into the delicious food and beer.

Purity also had Paul Corbett, the Managing Director of its hops merchant Charles Faram, on hand to talk to the guests about how the hops in its beers impacts upon the finished flavour. All of Purity’s hops are specially selected to produce unique tasting beers, making them a great choice to match to different types of food.

Paul Halsey was there to help host the evening and he said: “Andreas did a brilliant job of designing a menu that perfectly complemented our ales and imported beers. It’s great that people are starting to realise that real ale can be enjoyed with fine food just as well as, if not better than wine.”

Purity kindly provided Loaf with the menu from the evening – let this whet your appetite:

Course One – Terrine of ham hock, chicken & foie gras, sweet corn puree, truffle vinaigrette
(Beer Veltins Pilsner)

Course two – Escalope of salmon on a bed of sauerkraut, light mustard sauce
(Beer – Pure Gold)

Course three – Slow-cooked belly of suckling pig, ravioli of braised trotter, fennel compote, spiced baby pears, honey & cracked pepper sauce
(Beer – Mad Goose)

Course four – Caramelised banana, caramel parfait, peanut butter ice-cream
(Beer – Maisels Weisse)

Course five – Welsh rarebit
(Beer – Pure UBU)

Although Simpsons were unable to provide a specific example of supporting local farms through their delicious looking menu, they are stalwarts of the local food scene in Birmingham, buying from great Midlands butcher Aubrey Allen, and Staffordshire’s Manor Fruit Farm among other local producers.

A quick google search reveals there’s a lot of resources out there for would-be ‘ale sommeliers’. Try this CAMRA guide for a start, or if you can get hold of Purity’s excellent Ales (check stockists here, or buy from their shop), here’s what they recommend:

Pure Gold is a refreshing golden ale with a dry and bitter finish that is easy to drink. It would suit light savoury and spicy dishes, such as Indian, Thai and fish dishes, especially salmon.

Pure UBU is a distinctive premium amber coloured beer that is balanced and full of flavour making it a pleasure to drink. It would go well with any red meat in the form of casseroles, stews, steak and kidney pudding and also with most strong-tasting cheeses.

Mad Goose is a classic pale ale that is zesty and full-bodied. This light copper coloured ale would go with pork and lamb dishes. (what, not salt and vinegar crisps then?!)

These two great local businesses obviously hit it off, as they are hatching plans for a second date on the 12th November, where they’ll be matching game and beer. Stay glued to the site as full details will be published here when they are released.

Were you there? Tell us what you thought by leaving a comment below.

Nettle and Cobnut Pesto – recipe

This is a great wildfood recipe for this time of year, pick the freshest looking top four leaves from the stingers, gloves on, and make sure you pick above dog-weeing height if you’re picking in the city like we were (canal towpath). If you can find a hazel tree (there’s one on Lifford Lane in Cotteridge) then you can get the cobnuts for free too, but if not check out Augernik Fruit Farm at either Kings Norton or Moseley Farmers Market, who are selling great ones at the moment. This recipe makes a decent tubful.

Ingredients

100g (shell on) cobnuts

150g stinging nettle tops (about half a carrier bag)

1-2 cloves garlic

50g grated parmesan

80ml extra virgin olive oil (change amount to get desired texture)

salt and pepper

Method

Dunk your nettles in a deep sink/bowl of cold water and stir round with a wooden spoon to give them a rough wash. Scoop out, and add them straight to a pan of boiling water for 60 seconds to blanch them. Scoop them out and add to fresh iced water to stop them cooking and retain their vibrant colour. After a minute, scoop them out with your hands (they’ll have lost their sting by now) and ring out all the moisture you can. Chop roughly, and put in a blender/food processer. De-shell the cobnuts with a nutcracker, chop roughly and add these to the blender. Chop the garlic roughly and add this too, along with the parmesan. Add a tiny drizzle of olive oil, and whizz on max for 30 seconds. Then whizz more gently adding the remaining oil slowly, until you reach the desired consistency. Taste and season. Store in an airtight container, with a layer of pure oil over the top, for up to 4 days in the fridge.

PREPARE for a bumper harvest

After reading Hungry City, with it’s (rightly) sombre view of our current food system, I was in need of a bit of a pick-up; something to cheer the heart, warm the soul, and offer a little hope of a better way. Fortunately the next day I heard about PREPARE, a community fruit harvesting scheme to use surplus fruit from gardens and common land. When I heard it was in Birmingham, I nearly fell off my seat on the number 11 bus!

prepare apple PREPARE is the brain child of Eleanor Hode, artist in residence for the ward of Erdington. Eleanor says the aim of the project “is to harvest, process and distribute unused fruit growing in peoples gardens and on public land and to get it eaten! Either as fresh fruit or processed into juice, jams and pickles that are given away to local people”

Eleanor, who’s based at Kingstanding Leisure Centre, has got some funding from Birmingham City Council for the project and has got together most of the necessary equipment for harvesting (A bike and trailer, picking stick, 2 picking bags, sheet of plastic, storage boxes etc), and has had a positive response from local residents so far. However she can’t do it alone, so is on the look out for some keen fruit spotters, pickers, and processors, especially from the Erdington area. Of course there will be plenty of fruity perks for volunteers!

Later in the year Eleanor is planning to plant some fruit trees on 2 sites in the area and to throw an event for Apple Day on Sunday 25th October at Kingstanding Leisure Centre. There’ll hopefully be lots of activities, music, and some apple juicing on a press she’s planning to make. Loaf is planning to show our support, and will certainly let you know all about it on here. Eleanor is also on the look out for a top apple expert to identify varieties and share their knowledge on Apple Day, so if you fit the bill, or know anyone who does, get in touch with Eleanor (see below), or leave a comment on the blog and we’ll pass it on.

If you’re interested in similar initiatives it’s also worth checking out the ‘Abundance’ project in Sheffield that’s been doing similar things for a couple of years.

If you’d like to get involved with the project, you can email eleanorhoad@hotmail.com or get in touch with her on 07974 934 917. Eleanor also has her own page on the artsresidencies.org, and there’s a flyer below (click to enlarge):

Hungry City by Carolyn Steel – Review

hc_sidetop

How on earth do we get 24 million meals into and out of a city like London every single day? That, essentially, is the question that Hungry City tries to answer. It’s a book about cities and how we feed them, in which Steel casts an Architects analytical eye over modern and historical food systems. She finds a modern system that hasn’t learnt from the mistakes of the past, is essentially sick, and in need of major by-pass surgery.

Working systematically through the histories of how we farm the land, get food to cities, how it is sold, prepared, eaten, and disposed of, Steel paints a gloomy picture with few green shoots of hope; from the bloody furtherance of the Empire to find grain for Rome, to modern ‘eco’ developments with Tesco the only choice for grocery shopping (as they funded it anyway).

One glimmer of hope comes about halfway through when Steel describes the role of the modern cook:

“Cooking is about much more than chopping up a few vegetables and throwing them in a pan, or putting a readymade pizza in the microwave. Because cooks control not only what goes out of a kitchen, but what comes into it, they are a vital link in the food chain – the guardians of our gastronomic know-how. Only cooks know how to source raw food, tell its quality, make it taste delicious, manage and store it, make use of leftovers. Few skills have a greater collective impact on our quality of life. People who don’t cook don’t use local food shops, invite their friends around for dinner, know where their food comes from, realise what they’re putting into their bodies, understand the impact of their diet on the planet – or educate their children in any of the above.”

As cooks we have an enormous amount of power, perhaps that’s why the food industry has been trying to take the cooking out of cooking for the last 50 years! We could revolutionise the UK’s food system in a shot if enough of us took up our wooden spoons. After all, demand drives supply.

Despite painting a depressing picture, Steel finishes on a flourish, with some humbly presented ‘small answers’. Sitopia, she describes, is utopia grounded in reality, where cities are build with food at the centre – eligible ground is used to grow food, markets and local food shops thrive, food is celebrated, local producers are linked up with the city through a lattice-like food network, food from further afield is ethically sourced, new developments are built around food networks, schools actually teach kids about food, and new houses are built with large kitchens at the centre of the home.

Is Sitopia possible? Who knows, Steel acknowledges that in it’s purest form it is a Utopian vision, but any little move in that direction is a positive move. It’s certainly hard to see in well-established cities like Birmingham where our food systems are already set in a (cacophonous) rhythm . But there’s always chinks of light, and some of the great things we’re discovering, and planning on doing ourselves, are hopefully bringing us baby-steps closer to a Sitopian Birmingham. You can buy the book here, it’s a must read for anyone who cares what’s on their plate.

Jewellery Quarter Farmers Market – 19th September, 9-3

If you’re around in Birmingham this weekend, be sure to take a detour and spend some of your hard earned cash with the great local producers at the Jewellery Quarter Farmers Market – 24 Carrots. It’s only the second market since starting out and the site is already up to capacity. It coincides with British Food Fortnight, occurring during the Harvest Festival. They say on their website:

24Carrots is adopting British Food Fortnight as it’s theme for the second market! There will be a guest appearance by local resident OJ (Kerrang & TV) from 10am and live acoustic sets from 12-3pm from a number great local artists!

Definitely pay a visit to Loaf favourites Beez Neez Honey (lime flower is very good), Kiss Me Cupcakes, and The Tunnel Brewery. And whilst you’re there, pop by the community stall and say hi from Loaf, as sadly we can’t make it until October 17th. But there is a free cupcake awaiting us, so it’ll be worth the wait!

Damson Sorbet – Recipe

damson sorbet It’s a great year for plums. They’re literally dripping off the trees, and bumper harvests are even being left to rot on the trees in kent. If plums are booming, that’s certainly also true for their cousins, damsons and sloes, as I discovered on a recent sojourn through the country lanes of Kings Norton. Fortunately I had come prepared with tupperware galore, so filled my boots with plenty of both. The sloes came in handy for my ‘very early sloe gin’, but I was left with a pound or so of damsons – too many to eat, but not enough to make the effort of jam-making worthwhile. Sorbet it had to be then. Many sorbet recipes call for egg white to help keep the smooth texture, but I thought I’d experiment without. It takes a while to complete, so plan to be home for a good 3 hours. If you want a less-involved sorbet, the ‘quick plum sorbet’ from Jamie at Home is good, and would work equally well with damsons. Anyway, here’s what I did…

Ingredients

500g damsons

120g granulated sugar

300ml water

a slug of gin (optional)

Method

Cut the damsons roughly in half, but don’t bother taking out the stones. Put them in a pan with the water and sugar and boil rapidly for 5-10 mins until tender, and the flesh is falling off the stones. Place a sieve over a bowl and pour the pan contents into it. Push the damson-flesh through the sieve with the back of a spoon until you’re just left with a pile of stones and skins. Do this thoroughly, for about 5-7 mins – you’ll notice the difference in flavour. Add the gin, and whack this in the freezer, setting your timer for 30 mins. After 30 mins whisk the mixture like a crazy thing for 30 seconds. Pop back in the freezer and re-set your timer for 30 mins. Repeat as before 3 more times, until you get to 2 hours. After another 30 mins, get an electric whisk out and buzz it for 5 mins on max. Pop back into the freezer and leave for at least an hour before serving.

A delightful early-autumn pud, hope you enjoy it.

Loaf Cookery School – what would you like to learn?

Loaf is gearing up to launch Loaf Cookery School with our first breadmaking course in November, but we’re also hatching plans to offer a wider variety of courses, getting local artisans in to share their oft-forgotten skills with people eager to soak them up. We’d love to know what you’d most like to learn to help us plan for the future, so please take a moment to answer the quick poll below. If you have any other ideas for courses please do leave a comment, we’d love to hear from you.

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Local Food Labelling – what you thought

Thanks to everyone who voted in the local food labelling survey over the last few weeks. 90% (28/31) of you thought that it would be either quite or very useful to have a labelling scheme for food in independent shops and restaurants that indicated when it was locally produced. Loaf has put in an application to the Lottery’s Local Food Grants scheme to get such a scheme off the ground. It’s gonna take about 6 weeks until we here anything, but we’ll keep you posted with all the details if we’re successful.

Very Early Sloe Gin – Recipe

sloe berries It was only after I got back from a long walk out to The Peacock, having gathered a box-full of sloes and with a thirst for G&T, that I discovered in Richard Maybe’s ‘Food for Free’, sloes for making sloe gin are best “after the first frost”. Oh well, I wouldn’t want to see them go to waste, so here is what I did with them…

I started by pricking the skins of each sloe with a skewer (a painstaking task with 750g of the things) to mimic the effect that the frost has in breaking the skin open. This will help the gin soak through the sloes and draw out all the flavour.

pricking skins of sloe berries

Next I added to the sloes Continue reading Very Early Sloe Gin – Recipe

Daylesford Organic Cookery School – Exclusive Preview!

Before any big-media even got their quills inked to review this new foodie destination, Loaf had the privilege to preview the hotly-anticipated Daylesford Organic Cookery School. Through the generosity of an old Uni chum, Loaf managed to wangle itself an invitation to the first trial day of the brand-spanking-new cookery school.

The cookery school has been 9 months in the making and is the brain child of Vladimir Niza, a passionate and extremely talented chef-nutritionist (and said Uni chum), who was senior tutor at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School until recently. Vladimir has expertly directed this project from it’s very inception and has taken care of every detail from floor (Cotswold-stone tiled), to ceiling (oak-beamed), and secured a bunch of sponsorship to boot.

The place is absolutely stunning (this iPhone photo doesn’t do it justice); a converted barn on the Daylesford Estate, adjoining the butchery and fishmonger, and adjacent to the restaurant and farm shop. Loaf saw it when it was an empty shell just 3 months prior: the architect, a co-pupil, threatened to get his own back on Vlad for the last two and a half months of stress in converting it to this! Strung-up onions adorn the walls, and wicker baskets full of herbs and cresses are always at our finger-tips. Infact a lot of the produce we use during the day was grown about 500yds away, as we discover on our lunchtime garden-tour with head gardener Jez. The place is packed with state of the art equipment, and has a nearly-complete library as an entrance lobby (next to the famous Daylesford cheddar maturing room), complete with shelves of normal books, and macbooks for guests to surf the net or do some research.

The food, of course, is stunning too. The twelve of us ‘guests’ pack out the room as Vladimir talks us through the ‘Seasonal Dinner Parties’ programme. We cook, or are demonstrated, gazpacho, salad nicoise, pan fried pollack with chorizo oil and borlottis, bean soup, roast shoulder of lamb, raspberry tart, summer berry crumble, and poached flat peaches. Everything breathes freshness, and the cooking and eating is interwoven with nuggets of Vladimir’s encyclopaedic knowledge – from the nutritional value of eggs to who invented custard (the English of course!). Vladimir is an enthusiastic and inspiring tutor – his eyes literally glint with passion. And for a moment he is able to make you believe that with a little guidance, you too can be a Michelin-starred Chef. Of course you can’t, but who cares, for a day it’s a great feeling!

The cookery school launches on the 17th of September. There’s an exciting programme of courses coming up – everything from Field to Fork to Classic English Cooking to Butchery. Much more information can be found on the cookery school website.

Taste the Wild – Review

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but the fact that I took shower gel and a mobile phone charger probably gives a few clues away. Taste the Wild’s ‘wild food weekend’ was, well, a bit wilder than I thought. That’s not a bad thing though – I think the lack of a hot shower, a flushing loo (composting is better anyway), and electricity actually helps urbanites like me to get out of city-mode pretty instantly, which is the point really.

Taste the Wild is run by husband and wife team, Chris and Rose. Chris is a designer by training, and chef by passion, Rose a wood sculptor (with a chainsaw no less!). They own an 18 acre wood in Yorkshire, which Chris and Rose have nurtured like a newborn since taking it over 5 years ago – they’ve started to coppice, dig ponds, thin out dense areas (planted by the military), and encourage young broadleaf trees to develop the biodiversity that it once had. They’ve created a clearing where we spend much of the weekend, complete with tipi’s and an amazing bush kitchen, the centrepiece of which is a 15 foot handmade table for all the kitchen preparations (chef’s do like their space).

Friday evening was a laid back affair, a hearty beef stew, and chats round the camp fire with Chris and the other four foragers-in-training. Saturday morning begins at a respectable 9am (after porridge prepared over an open fire), and I discover that my instincts were correct, the mushrooms are out in force, and by 11am on our first wild food walk, we’d collected enough edibles for a filling starter. wild mushrooms Mushrooms are enthralling, and despite Chris trying to teach us about wood avens, chickweed, and sheeps sorrel, not much of it sunk in as our eyes surveyed the forest floor for little humps of joy (Bay Bolete’s) and of pain (Fly Agaric). We paid much more attention on our second foray though as Chris tactfully ignored the mushrooms, and shared his impressive knowledge of well over 20 edible plants. I was like a kid in a sweet shop, excited by what culinary delights these weird green things could offer, and often trailing behind the group taking copious notes in my moleskine.

After lunch, and a brief lesson in skinning a rabbit, we were put to the test, and sent out with a woodland shopping list to find our dinner. We all had moderate success, but I think it’s the slowest i’ve ever walked in my life – eyes fixated to the ground, mind daring me to try things that looked vaguely like what we’d identified earlier. Still, at least I could find my way back by following the puddles of bitter-spit. As the night drew in, Chris expertly pulled together a wild food feast – wild mushrooms on a garlic crouton with sorrel salad, followed by pan-fried rabbit with mash and wilted wild greens. The wild berry compote had to be saved for breakfast we were so full.

On Sunday, Rose came into her own as we concentrated on pickling, processing, and preserving all that woodland goodness. We made delicious dandelion and burdock, tangy corn mint pickle, and surprisingly delightful rowan jelly (*must make this again, Birmingham is full of rowan trees*), and sampled many of Rose’s concoctions – fortunately many of them contained a good amount of tipple too! My personal favourite was beech leaf noyau, a mixture of young beech leaves, gin, sugar, and brandy – a pure taste of the woods, and a nice kick to boot. Sunday lunch, and the finale of the weekend, was smoked trout (which we’d ponassed ourselves) and flat breads (baked in the earth oven), followed by a beautiful meadowsweet panna cotta (made by yours truly).

I left the weekend with a fistful of herbs and a headful of ideas, and have already made my first wild bread, melilot sourdough, which tasted great, and have a meadowsweet brioche planned for later this week. This stuff can definitely be applied in the big city, I even stepped over a bunch of wood avens on my front step as I arrived home, so watch this space for more wild food and urban foraging action, right here in Birmingham.

Do check out Taste the Wild, as they run a plethora of other courses too – bushcraft, survival, mushroom days, coastal foraging etc, and next Spring they’ll be running a build-an-earth-oven weekend. Who knows, there might even be a loaf/taste wild-bread collaboration in the future – watch this space!

Tom.