Harvest Bounty

[spamel]

Well, I liked the pie! So did my Dad and brother, the women were a bit more fussy! I didn't get my ratio correct for my pastry so it came out a bit crumbly, but I liked it and with some vanilla ice cream, it was a treat. I'm gonna make some more at the weekend!

 

[spamel]

I've just made a crumble! It's great being able to just quickly gather some free ingredients, wash off the bugs and then make them into a tasty treat! It's in the oven baking, we're about to have dinner so it will be ready a little while after we finish eating. Like a hobbit, it will be second dinner!

 

[commandocal]

Wow nice, that pie looks great all the blackberry bushes hav been cut down near me

 

[rich59]

APPLES:-

You can store them - freeze, bottle, use to combine with other fruits to make jellies. I have made an apple wine.

It is indeed a great time of year.

 

[Stew]

Blackberry must be the most loved of the 'wilderness fruits'.

I certainly love em!

Xylaria - fruit leather? Is that similar to what Ray Mears did with the Haws in an episode of wild food?

 

[Mikey P]

Well, just before I went way (I'm here working Norway for 3 weeks), I had noticed that there were a load of early fruits, Sloes and blackberries in particular. The blackberries are not quite as sweet as last year but my German neighbour seemed to think that was becuase they had all grown too quickly due to the weird weather we've been having. The hazelnuts were abundant but not ripe when I left.

We don't seem to have many squirrels around our bit of Germany so I'm hoping that the nuts will be ripe when we get back and the locals won't have harvested them all.

In the meantime, showing excellent mission command, I tasked the missus with sloe and blackberry collection. She's staggered home with kilos of blackberries and I am looking forward to a nice bit of crumble when I get back! She's also showed a bit of intiative and done the sloe gin so we'll be laughing a Xmas . She did what I did last year and 'bletted' them in the freezer until the skins split.

So, I hope there's still stuff for me to do when I get back and I'm hoping there'll be a good fungi harvest (we had stacks of huge parasol mushrooms last year).

 

[idlefellow]

Hi Xylaria

"I am stewing up the rose hips to make a syrup that will then have the haws cooked in it"

You couldn't post your recipe could you. Been looking for decent RH Syrup now that I lent my Wild Wood book to some scoundrel who never returned it. That'll teach me.

IF

 

[xylaria]

My rosehip and haw went a bit wrong, because I put the haws in with rose hips to stew, and they were red when I added them and bright green BB pellets by the time i tried pushed them through the seive.

The rose hip reciepe I was using was:
Remove flower part of rose hip and then simmer for twenty minutes or the fruit is very soft.
Push fruit through fine sieve or jam bag/net and add it back into cooking liquid. [from experiance ware gloves if using am bag as fibre glass like hairs irrate hands]
Add 1lb of sugar to every 1 pint of liquid.
Return to stove to thicken and disolve sugar on low heat.

Alot of reciepes ask for more than one sieving just make sure the hairs are no longer in there. Some people also deseed before cooking , but this very labourious, and gloves need to be worn.

Next time I try it I will add the haws as a cooked pulp when ther sugar is added.

I will try apple fruit leather, but the apples I aren't to sweet so it might be mixed with blackberries.