Frugal food from the sea

In If you go down to the sea today, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall introduces a wealth of food to be found for free on the beach, including leafy greens, seaweeds, herbs and shellfish. The article includes top tips and inspiring recipes from John Wright, and concludes with six tips for safe eating!

Perfect preserves

If Jacky's post on hunting down seasonal food to make jam has inspired you to do the same, then here are some recipes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on making the most of seasonal fruit. You could also check out River Cottage Handbook No 2: Preserves by Pam Corbin from your local library for more.

• Black beauties: blackberry recipes
• River Cottage Bramley lemon curd
• Soft options: strawberries, raspberries and blackcurrants
• Links to seasonal recipes

You don't have to use wild food as a base, but this Hot hedgerow chutney is worth trying.

Café No-bucks

As I write, I am drinking a cup of home made coffee. And it hasn't cost me anything, except for the electricity to heat the water. A combination of the credit crunch, being a skinflint and a desire to escape the clutches of the over-powerful Tescos has led me to start to explore the world of foraging. More on that is very likely in future blogs, but for now, back to the coffee.

During WWII the nation's coffee supplies were cut off, and you can only imagine what that would have done to the nation's morale! A coffee substitute was made from acorns instead by chopping them up and roasting them (I don't know who discovered that worked, but I'm guessing it was very old knowledge that had fallen into general disuse).

So I got curious and had a go. You need to remove the outer acorn shells with a sharp, serrated knife, then chop the nut into small pieces. You're meant to roast the pieces twice, chopping smaller after the first roast. I roasted mine once, as I left them in the top of the oven for a bit longer than intended - around 15 mins, probably. The result was a charred-looking mess which both smelled and tasted a lot like coffee. The bits ground down well enough in the pestle and mortar & looked something like instant.

So far so good. What about when you make it into a mug of 'coffee'? It tastes very good actually. I may even prefer it to the real version, as there is not the same sharpness to the taste. I have no idea about the caffeine content though or other side effects but I'd rate the experiment as a success. The only downside appears to be - apologies squirrels - it takes about 5 acorns to make a spoonful of the coffee powder, so I will have to work quite hard to make a useful supply.

Post scripts: I have found articles afterwards saying that you are supposed to leach the tannin out of the acorns by soaking or boiling them, because they contain too much - my recipe didn't say anything about that! I also found some recipes for coffee alternatives from the American Civil War, which may be of interest to some readers.

Wild Food

Wild food - the kind you have to forage for yourself in the countryside - has seen a resurgence of interest of late, I'm told. Perhaps the likes of Fergus Drennan (that man who cooks roadkill), the popularity of SAS Survival manuals, and Ray Mears, have something to do with it.

I've been doing some foraging of my own . No roadkill, just in case you were worried for a moment. I blame my Granny - she took us mushroom picking as children, and grew most of her own fruit and veg, which we picked and helped her make into jam in the long summer holidays. And then there has been my growing dissatisfaction with the supermarkets that are geared so much towards getting maximum profit for minimum quality produce, and their preference for selling prepackaged foods over whole veg... and the limited availability of cheaper products. And then the sudden food inflation on top of all that.

I've quickly realised there are certain benefits to wild food that didn't cross my mind as a child, when squeezing behind raspberry bushes to get at the best fruit. So here they are - in no particular order:

- Fresh air and a bit of exercise (it makes a nice early evening walk going berry hunting or mushrooming)

- You can't really watch Telly when you're busy in the kitchen

- You start to appreciate food more and don't waste so much when you've put effort into collecting it yourself

- You learn about plants & their uses

- Less food miles - the food itself hasn't gone very far, and you probably haven't needed as many trips to the shops

- Tastier food - I've discovered some new flavours and realised that my home-made jam is much nicer than what you can get in a supermarket

- A more varied diet - ever seen elderberries or stinging nettles in Tescos, anyone?

- A sense of history - not that long ago, this activity was 'normal' (at least some readers of this article will think I've gone off my rocker) and people were much more directly reliant on the land and what was seasonal.

The main downside is the amount of time it can take - that, and the fact that you start somewhat obsessively looking about you for the food in the nearest hedge.