Wild Food UK, Back to Basics Part 1

hi I'm Marlo from wild Fuji K out on my daily bit of exercise today and I'm gonna do a different type of video for you today it's the 13th of April 2020 which means that at the moment we're in the middle of the covert lockdown 2020 I'm sure will be known as the year of CO vid I don't know when you guys are watching this but I hope you find it useful because I figured I'd do a different type of video today normally I find things that I consider really interesting and do a longer video about them in more detail but I'm gonna do a sort of back to basics series over the next few weeks when I get the chance to get out and find places like this to help you guys that are stuck in because most of the things I'm gonna talk about in the next few minutes you will find in your gardens if you're lucky enough to have a garden or in any green space or Lane like this one which is just around the corner from my house if you're living in a flat in a city at the moment I feel really really sorry for you home stay strong and we will get through this so anyway let's get started on the plants like I say back to basics and there is nothing more basic for a forager than a dandy lawyer now dandelions here they're known as a diuretic her hence the French name piss on Lee but they are also known as one of the healthiest foods that foragers can go for personally I don't eat them very often because they're quite bitter and I'm reasonably fussy as a forager but they are one of the healthiest leaves around and you can make them reasonably tasty by blanching them or by another little trick that I know which is to cut the leaves of the dandelion back and put a pot on top of them to block the Sun from the leaves and then they'll come through a little bit lighter and a little bit less bitter full of vitamin A I think they've got more vitamin A than any other green so there are a good healthy green with loads of other vitamins in them for you Don de Leon that's where the name comes from teeth of the lion and just in case you didn't know anyway dandelions like I say a real foragers basic don't overlook them in amongst them we've got this plant here which I've done a full video on before this is our common hogweed and this one will probably feature in almost every one of my back to basics video videos that I do because it really is a stupendous edible as far as I'm concerned in the foraging world and it grows almost everywhere that's why it will be in almost every video that I do and this this is kind of your ideal hogweed shoot we treat this like asparagus so just blanch it to soften it up and get rid of these leaves and then chop lighter butter in the pan and you've got a lovely lovely tasty green I will say to any of you that got sensitive skin though either get someone else to pick it or wear gloves when you pick it because it can give people skin irritation and the sack I'm being careful not to get the SAP on my skin at the moment because the SAP of this plant is phototoxic which means that if you get it on your skin while you're picking your skin can burn it reacts badly with UV radiation or sunlight so take a bit of care when picking your hogweed but it's everywhere and it's really tasty we use it for soups we use it for shoes we use it as a vegetable the leaves and the stem have a different flavor so make up your own recipes with it that's what we do my left hand but you can see this plant is much more pi night now this is another plant that you will find in almost every hedgerow anywhere in the country it's called chervil it's in the same family and that's the wider carrot family the carrot family is really interesting for foragers because it has edibles like carrots and hogweed and chervil but it also has some of the most poisonous plants in the northern hemisphere of the planet I've done a whole nother video on hemlock and lock even and you'll see in that video if you watch it or look it up on the website that it looks almost identical to chervil now chervil has a grassy sort of parsley ish flavor it's not worth the risk as far as I'm concerned with regards to novices picking it because it has some highly poisonous look-alikes the difference between these two is that chervil and the poisonous members of the family have this Pie night leaf structure which is as you can see very feathery pie night means split so this one split four times maybe five and that's once twice three times four times so this is a four times pie night plant which is different to hogweed because hogweed when you look at the open leaves there's just one leaf on either side and you can see that more clearly on the more mature plant now hogweed does have a poisonous look-alike it's giant hogweed well not a poisonous look-alike but a dangerous look-alike so watch my videos on giant hogweed as well as hogweed if you're gonna pick this but this is the best thing i've shown you so far onwards and upwards we've got this lovely white flower poking through this is a plant that you find in again almost every green space and hedgerow at this time of year you can see it's got this lovely white flower which looks like it's got ten petals but if you look closer there's actually only five petals which are all split halfway down this is in the cardamon family and it is an edible plants called stitchwork the only bit of it that I like to eat though is the tips and the flowers they're quite tasty and they adorn my salads at this time of year but the leaves and the rest of the plant really aren't worth it it's nice to know it's there though just to make your salads look pretty let's keep going up here now I recommend that all of you guys stay away from ferns entirely people do fiddleheads of Bracken but they have to be cooked because otherwise they are mildly carcinogenic and the ferns really there's none of them that I personally enjoy eating I think most of them are quite toxic which isn't good for you here's another plant you're likely to find in every hedgerow now this leaf shape is sort of reminiscent of the leaf shape of a buttercup Oh buttercups have much more well much less separated leaves though buttercups and the whole Buttercup family are worth staying away from this isn't in the Buttercup family though this is herb Robert and it is an edible but it's absolutely disgusting so don't go just here is some dogs mercury again a very common plant now this one is poisonous this one is even I believe potentially deadly although I know of no fatal poisonings from dogs mercury now dogs mercury grows in almost every bit of woodland that you will ever go to the only thing I've ever heard of people mistaking dogs mercury for our little shoots of ground elder ground elder is a nice parsley flavored plant it has a different leaf system to dogs mercury though so to rule out that mistake I'll show you now dog's mercury has opposing leaves so they oppose their they oppose their they oppose their opposing meaning that they're on either side of the stem ground elder does not have leaf system so really there isn't anything that looks like this no I would eat apart from ground Elder plenty of dot there's doc everywhere Doc's are edible curly leaf doc is good a horseradish which looks very much like doc is a lovely plant it is the horseradish that you buy in the shops and it grows in places like this as well we do use the roots of burdock which is a different looking member of this family but in general doc leaves are not for the kitchen table they are a good Plessy bow when you have a child who's our goose grass Willie's leavers now you'll be surprised to know but cleavers are actually edible they are obviously quite coarse these are the things they'll stick to almost anything but the tips flavor but it's sort of bitter with a kind of almost hint of coffee to my taste buds try them for yourself and the tips of the young staff are perfectly edible a bit of a complicated one for the forager because there are some poisonous members of the veg family venture in the pea family as you can see here it's a climber like a pea don't know if the camera can pick up those tendrils there but you can see they're for climbing up other plants well then it grows a range of different flowers and the ones that you want to go after as a forager are the ones with purple flowers that's common mainly common veggies are really tasty pea flavored plant I happen to know that this is common even though it's not in flower because I've been picking from this spot for years but if you don't know what type of itch you've got then you should leave it behind until you find out and the easiest way to find out what type of it is is to wait for it to flower this little tip here it tastes almost just like a pea from the pot and the flowers of common veg and my favorite floral addition to a salad from a taste point of view they really really are lovely go to the other side of the road and there were some little yellow flowers down here if we could come and you'll have to get close I think this is the last knockings of our lesser celandine flowers now here's the leaves of your lesser selling bean that's points a bit of grass right I get bigger than this and the leaves are eaten but only after being well cooked home the same with the root system of this plant which is actually more interesting than the leaves the leaves and the roots I believe contain pyrrol oscidyne alkaloids though that's why you have to cook them they used to be modern science knows better so if you cook them you can destroy those alkaloids and you can make the pea sized groups or the pea sized nodules all over the root systems taste quite nice after you've boiled them for about 20 minutes they taste a little bit like tiny little potatoes and off of every selling bean plant you get about 20 of those little nodules now look how many 17 plants there are around here any gardeners amongst you will know this plant because it covers an area early on in spring and then flowers yellow nice and early and then you end up digging them up so what else have we got going down Hawthorne this is a great one for this time of year this time of year I happily eat the leaves of Hawthorne they're not the tastiest leaves in the world but not massively bitter they certainly taste nice when you've got a little bit about Samak vinegar dressing on them and my sweet dressing goes great with these leaves and these leaves when I'm picking wild salads at this time of year they they're kind of my lettuce substitute there's two reasons for that they are abundant although you do have to watch out for the thorns and secondly they're really really healthy any of you that have watched my videos will been foraging with me before know that when I cook I tend to cook with quite a lot of butter and these leaves have pretty much the most antioxidants in them of any wild leaf in the UK so I I use them not only to bulk up my salads for free with tasty greens but also to help clean out my circulatory system which is a good thing what else do we have coming down here a very common plant from our green spaces right here we have Erin maculatum old lords and ladies this is the young stuff and it can grow in amongst your wild garlic and it can also look very much like common sorrel which doesn't grow here but I'll do that in another back-to-basics video soon the reason it's called Erin maculata maculatum means not Immaculate and that's because of these black spots all over the leaves and you can see as you can see on this one in my left hand they don't always have those black spots there's also a version of this with white veins or white sort of patterning on the leaves so that version is also just like these not edible the reason these aren't edible just let the surprise that's only happened once but that's one of the benefits of this lockdown is that the roads have been taken over by by the pheasants around here I'm lucky lucky enough to live in rural he referred during this lockdown and yeah the roads deserted near to where I live which is the way that I'm liking it just now but anyway Erin maculatum Lords all let lords and ladies or cuckoo pint you might know this as don't eat this because it contains what called calcium oxalate crystals now there's a tiny little needle sharp crystals which if you eat these leaves will inflame your mouth quite badly a chef friend of mine ate some of this thinking it was sorrel one day and he described it as eating paper cuts which is clearly not a very nice thing to do so don't mistake this for your sorrel the way to tell the difference is that the Arum has rounded tails as you can see there if you do find common sorrel common sorrel has pointed tails they come to a much more definite point than this so don't don't even nibble any Arum it's not clever thing to do just behind the arab we've got some yarrow killya mili file now mili foil nee means thousand leaves and you can see why it's got an incredibly pine eight leaf structure and achillea i think that's partly to do with the kill ease i think kitty marched or him and his armies marched with it in their their shoes because it's good for your skin it's the best styptic that we know of all that I know of in nature a styptic will help your your cuts clot and stop bleeding and it's also I believe a mild antiseptic so this is a good plant for for rubbing onto wounds or for making a poultice out of if you've cut yourself it also makes really nice tea but it's not one I would stick into my salad bag not unless I was quite desperate so this is one that you will find again almost everywhere now lastly we're gonna finish on a little highlight home because just down here thank your best zoom in on it just down here we've got the most famous of the eight pearl mushrooms rcent George's mushrooms and as you can see they grow in your green spaces where there's grass normally they'll grow in a ring and this ring goes over the other side of this hedgerow and if you look if you stand back a little bit will you'll see that the grass where the mushrooms are growing is actually longer than the rest of the grass around that's cuz the mushrooms help feed the grass and make it stronger in a way that I've got time to explain just now but some Georgie's mushrooms are one that we consider safe for novice foragers and that's because they've got a few key characteristics first of all there's not many mushrooms growing April full-stop rings in grassland where the grass is promoted by the growth of the mushrooms underground thirdly they are white all over the gills the stem and the cap cut them in half they are white all the way through now something to note there is that the gills are only tiny they make up a very small part of the vertical space in the mushroom this mushroom is mostly flesh it's not a dark guild mushroom like the ones that you buy in the shops and it's not a thin sort of flimsy stemmed mushroom which you do see around and about now normally white all over is a warning sign in the mushroom world there are lots of highly poisonous white all over mushrooms like the destroying angel for example which is just as poisonous poisonous as the name suggests but most of them do not grow in April and last thing to me is the most important thing now this mushroom has a very distinctive smell it smells of kind of sawdust to my knows people in books it gets described as a as a mealy smell a bit like you know sawdust maybe at the bottom of a hamsters cage which doesn't sound too appealing but it's a very distinctive smell which makes this mushroom 100% safe as far as I'm concerned for novice foragers if you've got those key characteristics it's white it's April or early May it's in grassland it's stout and fleshy not hollow or flimsy and it has a smell the French markets throughout this time of year throughout late spring because it's so tasty it's not a mushroom that I would just fry up though if you're lucky enough to find your some georgia's mushrooms they're an unusual flavor in the mushroom world and just fried up with butter I don't particularly like them but what they are fantastic for and I mean amazing is for creamy mushroom sauces it's not difficult just add some cream and butter whilst you're frying the mushrooms and maybe a tiny bit of mushroom stock salt and pepper bit of onion if you want to early on and you've made a lovely lovely pasta sauce that's what listen George's mushrooms are full now lastly I'm gonna finish on that cuz that's about as much as I think my camera man's arms can handle for this little back to basics first video but lastly I want to say a few things so I've got a newborn baby at home congratulations to my wife Rachel she is an amazing woman and she did amazing things but what the hospital did for her whilst we were stuck in there for 11 days through quite a quite a torrid birth experience was even more amazing I really want to thank the NHS and all the heroes that are working there through this covert outbreak for everything that they did for me and my wife and lastly to all of you guys I want to say a few things so first of all stay safe secondly stay positive but most importantly at this time the best thing you can do is stay away from each other and we'll get through this coded anyway if you want to find out more go to www.michelintransport.com

Channel: Wild Food UK

Views: 36,486

Rating: 4.9316473 out of 5

Keywords: Dandelions, Hogweed, Stitchwort, Cleavers, Goosegrass, Common vetch, Lesser celendine, Yarrow, Hawthorn, Lords and ladies, St. George's mushrooms, Dock, Burdock, Herb Robert, Common hogweed, Wild food uk, foraging, foraging uk, wild food, edible plants

Id: vVPSXlTjQEw

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020