I’m three weeks into my challenge to only eat foraged or homegrown foods for a month, and it has made me freshly aware of the importance of ‘variety’.
While in theory, I could survive this month solely on the tatties from our garden, this would make it into a miserable affair.
The tatties are tasty, don’t get me wrong, but to make a day exciting, there need to be different flavours, colours and textures to look forward to.
Eating for the body vs eating for the soul
Nutritional guides tell us to ‘eat the colours of the rainbow’ mainly for physical health reasons.
As a rule of thumb, the various colours in fruit and vegetables correspond to certain nutrients, and we need all of them.
As a forager and grower, eating a riot of colour is no problem at all; yellow raspberries, orange carrots, red cherries and peppers, purple plums and blackberries, blue blaeberries, green nettles, sorrel, dock and plantain, brown seeds, cobnuts and mushrooms.
That sorts out the physiological needs. But then there is our mind to consider.
Time to try DIY chocolate brownies
And the mind of this particular forager had been missing chocolate.
My husband has been very considerate to eat his after-dinner fix out of my sight, but still.
Now I know that you can totally have a balanced diet without chocolate, but my soul would gradually sink into despair.
So this week I made my own from the roasted and ground seeds of the Linden tree.
These majestic trees grow everywhere in Aberdeen and are in seed right now, so go and have a look.
I picked mine from Queen’s Terrace Gardens at Albyn Place.
The leaves of the tree are edible, too, but this is best done in the spring.
Finely sieved, the Linden seed powder smells just like cocoa. I made truffles that went very well with a cup of raspberry leaf tea.
The day after I went a step further and used the Linden powder, together with dock seeds and a bartered egg, to make boozy cherry brownies.
The cherries, once again, came from Drumoak and the booze was provided by Candyglirach blackberry wine (named after the nearest farm where I picked the fruit).
It was a rich, chocolatey, knock-you-off-your-feet kind of pudding. An incredible success!
Foraging in Aberdeenshire for apples in August? Never!
The other thing my soul seems to crave as the days get shorter is apple compote.
I had resigned myself to the thought that I probably wouldn’t eat any apples in August, as it’s usually mid-September to October time before they are ripe.
And eating berries for breakfast was perfectly fine. I like them. But I love apple compote.
So I couldn’t believe my luck when I found some windfalls in Peterculter.
I cooked a big jar full of appley comfort, which is a great incentive to get out of bed in the morning.
A fun(gi) trip to the golf course
On the mushroom front, things are looking bright after the rain we had earlier in the week.
It didn’t take long for the fungal delights to spring up from the ground.
On Tuesday I took advantage of the heavy rain to forage on the golf course (nobody around, so my head was safe from flying objects).
I was rewarded with a long line of beautiful Larch Boletes, growing in symbiosis with the tree after which they’re named.
A little further on my walk, on Springfield Road, I found one of the best-tasting edible mushrooms: The Prince, with the stately Latin name “Agaricus augustus”. It’s in a class of its own.
All these different and exciting foods, and I got them for free.
Our natural world, of which we are a part, can provide so much more than most of us know.
As I’m entering my fourth week of living off homegrown and foraged food, I hope that I’m starting to inspire others to go out there and have a go for themselves.
Toughest moment: Cycling past one of my favourite apple trees to find it chopped down, apples and all. I cried.
Highlight: Waking up on Monday to the sound of rain. For all of us, but poignantly so for foragers, rain equals food.
Is it possible to live solely off of foraged and homegrown food? Well, this month Mirjam is giving it her best shot.
Mirjam Brady-Van den Bos is a psychology lecturer at Aberdeen University. You can follow her daily foraging adventures on her Healthy Forager blog.
And you can donate to her challenge of going all of August eating only foraged or homegrown food in aid of the River Dee Trust here.
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