Families Go Wild! 28th April 2018

What a day! 

Today was a busy one! There was lots to harvest and lots to cook, and we did a grand job!

We started the day with a nice cold drink, infused with the refreshing tastes and soothing properties of herbs such as Borage (Borago officinalis), Lemonbalm (Melissa officinalis), Calendula (Calendula officinalis), Mint (Mentha spp.) and Cleavers (Galium aparine).

Next it was time to test our knowledge of the ingredients we were to use. 

We were able to recognise dandelions and wild garlic (Allium ursinum), and discovered sorrel (Rumex acetosa) and raspberry leaf (Rubus idaeus)!

Once we had identified our ingredients, we set off to harvest and forage everything we needed from different parts of the farm.

Along the grass road we found wild garlic, dandelions, raspberry leaf and lemonbalm. In the community garden we found mint, calendula and sorrel. 

We all met back in the kitchen garden, and started to prepare our foraged feast! We washed and dried everything we found, displaying some excellent salad spinner skills.

We made bread over the fire, which burned well despite the rain! We rolled balls of dough into sausages and twirled them round peeled twigs. We noticed that they cooked better on the hot embers rather than in the flames.

While some made bread, others got to making pesto! We added sunflower seeds, salt and oil to the sorrel and wild garlic leaves, and blended until everything was beautifully mixed. For a lot of us, it was our first time eating sorrel and wild garlic, but we were brave and tried it, and found our pesto delicious!

Finally, we got the storm kettle hot enough to boil water. We poured the hot water over the raspberry leaves, mint, lemonbalm and dandelions, to make a lovely fresh herbal tea, which was the perfect accompaniment to our bread and pesto...

Note from Ilana: You may have noticed a lot of the botanical names of the plants we used have the word 'officinale' or 'officinalis' in them. This indicates that they have herbal or medicinal uses!