Foraging and Feasting

Course outline

• Bountiful Hedgerows

  The beautiful local Dorset hedgerows, woodlands and fields are full of wild food secrets, easily shared when you know what you are looking for and where to find them. This course is the perfect introduction to edible wild plants and you will learn where to forage and how to successfully identify your finds.

• The Edible Seashore

  For the forager, the seashore holds limitless culinary potential. In this authoritative, entertaining and rather adventurous course, John Wright takes us on a trip to the seaside. In this lesson John will introduce you to the various species to be harvested, you will learn the practicalities such as conservation and the ethics of foraging; the importance of habitat; how to forage safely on the seashore; landing sizes; seasons; and equipment such as nets and crab pots.

  In the lesson, John collects and describes the seashore species he finds on the day, complete with quite a few gratuitous but fascinating diversions. The species you will discover include some crustaceans (brown shrimp, common prawn and velvet swimming crab), plants (marsh samphire, shrubby seablite, sea purslane, sea rocket, spear-leaved orache); and seaweed (carragheen, dulse, gut weed, laver, sugar kelp, kelp).

• Wild Mushrooms

  With a passion for fungi spanning 50 years and a handful of books under his belt, John is one of the most experienced of all mushroom guides. During this lesson, in which he explores both pasture and woodland, John will introduce to you the fundamentals of mushroom identification, and explain where to look for various species and pass on numerous mushroom-hunting tips such has how to spot edible grassland species even when they are not yet there and the safest places to search. People are rightly concerned about collecting and eating wild fungi, so, in addition to the edible species he finds on the day, he will describe some of those that are poisonous so you can forage safely.

• Cooking Wild Food

  Although they are simply ingredients like any other, wild foods sometimes pose difficulties for the uninitiated: What can you possibly do with rosehips or hawthorn berries? How do you cook seaweeds? How can you preserve your wild mushrooms or four gallons of wild apple juice? John provides guidance in all these things and more, and will show you that a splendid meal can be made from the most unlikely of things.