Artisan perfumery course

 In September I met Alec Lawless - a highly successful artisan perfumer from the UK who uses almost all natural botanicals in his fragrances. He was teaching an artisan perfumery workshop in Wellington. (A first for NZ as far as I know!)

He appeared on the Good Morning Show while he was here - you might have caught it.

His workshop was a huge success, so he's back to do just one more in early January.

Interested? Details are here. I'll also post more soon.

Eating the weeds

Onionweed is in full, lush bloom, so it's time to dig out the onion flower tempura recipe again.

I'm told by Kiwipurler that tempura should really be made with rice flour and will be extra crispy and delicious that way, so that's what I'll try this year.

In other foraging news, Lus has a great post on chickweed on her blog.

Also, I gave a talk yesterday morning on foraging to the Kapiti Herb Society. They are an amazing, friendly, and LARGE group! I really enjoyed talking to and with them, and I think it went well - apart from the bits where I was overcome with klutziness and did things like walk in front of the speaker with the microphone (twice), making everything screech and deafening everyone (twice).

The different local herb societies around the country are branches of the national Herb Federation - which incidentally has a great website. Of particular interest are their Data Sheets which include some brilliant information on a number of foraged herbs.

(Update 2 hrs later: Oh! And I've just seen Nigel has a fantastic new gorse flower cordial recipe up at Curious Kai!  Spring is ... new foraging recipes and info!)

Geraniums ... I mean Pelargoniums!

We went foraging for these round the neighbourhood last week, and it's on This Way Up at 12.20 today.

The scented species of these plants are especially amazing. There's a huge 'rose geranium' bush down the road from me, whose leaves I've been tincturing for their fragrance; and I've just bought some apple-scented geraniums.

I mean pelargoniums.

I've written more about this group of plants at Wild Picnic.

Artisan Perfumery Course

No time to post screeds at the moment, but I thought over the next few weeks I would post a few bits and pieces about my current journey into the addictive world of smelly stuff.

If anyone is interested, there's a rare opportunity to do an intensive artisan perfumery course in Wellington in early September - using natural botanical ingredients. The teacher is Alec Lawless, an artisan perfumer from the UK. To my knowledge - this is the first time a course like this has been held in New Zealand.

If I weren't going away when the course is on (which I'm quite sad about), I would be scrounging up money to do it every way I could!
There are details here at Wellington City Council's Feeling Great site.

Herbal health

After saying I wouldn't blog much, I don't seem to be able to stay away from it!

Yesterday at the Museum of City and Sea, I caught a good half an hour of Donna Lee's presentation on herbal cosmetic and hygiene products - and was very inspired. She even sent everyone away with a sample of her tooth powder, made from baking soda, spearmint essential oil, and stevia powder. I have yet to try it, but it smells lovely.

I've been looking over Donna's beautiful website, and coveting -
a) some of her courses and workshops
b) some of her products
c) some of the resources to make your own products, which she also sells.
(And by the sounds of it, she sells more than what you actually see on the website.)

So far, my own forays into herbal medicine have involved regular lurking and link-following round the Herbwifery Forum, as well as beginning a distance course at the International College of Herbal Medicine, run by the marvellous Isla Burgess. (You can see her in the movie Earth Whisperers.)

By the way, I love the concept of herbwifery and herbwives - 'grassroots community herbalism'. More about it here.

Wood Sorrel on National Radio

Today on This Way Up I'm wandering down our street talking to Simon Morton about wood sorrel. It should be on at 1.30pm.

There is nothing so excellent as a plant that's great in savoury AND sweet dishes!

If you've come here from 'This Way Up' ...

... you're probably after the info about chickweed, which is on my other blog Wild Picnic. :)

(Or if you're reading this on Sat morning, I'm talking about chickweed to Simon Morton on National Radio's This Way Up - shortly after 1pm today.)

Independence Days Challenge update 3 (or is it 4?)

I haven't done much towards food independence over the past couple of weeks ...

No planting or harvesting at all. (Although I've done a lot of looking at my garden and pondering which things are coming up and which are not, and why ...)

Preserved: Got together with a friend, Nadine, and while our children played she made a bowl of kimchi and I made a bowl of sauerkraut, then we swapped a jar each.

I think I overdid the salt in the sauerkraut. Sorry Nadine - if you are reading this! Nadine's kimchi is, however, delicious and I have to use all my willpower to not eat it before it is fermented properly.

Eat the food: Does picking at the kimchi count? Maybe not ... Apart from that, I've been working my way through the quince syrup I made. (It was meant to be quince jelly, but I didn't boil it for long enough.) It's delicious on porridge.

I've also been making tea from the oat straw I dried, and it's lovely. Definitely going to plant a lot more oats.

Independence Days update

The sugar beets aside, this is what I've managed to do over the last couple of weeks ...

Plant something: More peas and snow peas. Lettuces. Leeks. Red bunching onions. Plantago. The peas and lettuces are looking good so far. Nothing else has popped its head up at all yet.

Harvest something: Chamomile flowers (the more you harvest, the more they produce). Self-heal (starting to take over the herb garden). Wild red clover flowers. The last green tomatoes. More dandelions for cooked greens and coffee.

Preserve something: Dried the chamomile flowers, self-heal and red clover flowers. (The clover I'm going to send out in little packages to some people by way of a token apology. A few weeks back I was meant to give a foraging presentation - but for various reasons, at the last minute I couldn't. I still feel crap about it.)

Eat the food: Made a new recipe for lambs brain curry with my son. We are ever trying to build up our repertoire with cheap cuts and offal ... The lambs brain curry is a good one because you add the lambs brain at the last minute. That means you can take out some of the curry before adding the brains and reserve it to serve to those who don't eat offal or any meat at all.

Backyard grains

Buckwheat and oats - yay - two experiments that worked, albeit on a miniature scale ... Now to see if I can grow them in slightly greater quantity this year!

Buckwheat was something I'd hankered to grow for ages. I love buckwheat pancakes and buckwheat noodles, and so do certain other members of the family. I can't get them to eat stuff made with wholemeal wheat flour very often, but buckwheat combined with white flour goes down a treat, and must be way more nutritious than the white flour on its own.

I scattered some buckwheat seeds amongst our zucchinis in spring, and they grew fantastically. (Better than the zucchinis, which suffered from various ailments this year.)

After the buckwheat had flowered, I picked the groats, and pummelled them up in our big mortar and pestle. The white starchy insides turned to powder, while the hulls stayed mostly in big pieces.

I shook it all through the sieve to remove the biggest bits of hull - and you can see the end result above. It looks just like the buckwheat in the shops! :)

Granted it's only a few spoonfuls, but it's MY few spoonfuls, and I bet those pancakes will taste really good.

I've kept the hulls too. Can you make buckwheat pillows out of those, does anyone know? I'm unsure whether buckwheat pillows are made from the whole groats, or from the empty, broken hulls. Any info gratefully received.

Now onto the oats. I just grew a few in our potato patch after most of the potatoes were dug. It was only a very small amount, but I wasn't really growing them as a grain, but as a herb.

The end result was this bag of dried oatstraw (for tea) ...

... and this tiny milky oats tincture. (There was more, but I've used some of it. It's supposed to be good when you are feeling stressed and depleted ... I feel like it's working, but I'm not ruling out a placebo effect.)

Foraging on a tiny scale

With some wild plants in urban areas, it seems difficult to find enough of them at any one time to do anything useful with.

Still, if I can store little bits at a time and gradually build up a supply, that feels quite satisfying.

Blackberry leaves, for example.

We have only little patches of blackberry where I live, and the leaves that make the best-tasting tea are the newly sprouting ones. (I've tested this out - drying new leaves and old leaves separately, making teas out of them side by side, and comparing the smell and taste. The new leaves are fragrant and delicious. The old ones are a bit gross.)

At any one time, there are usually just a few tiny sprigs of suitable tea leaves on the blackberry bush nearest us. Whenever I go past, I pick those ones, and lie them in the permanent spot I now have for them by a window to dry flat. After a couple of days I add them to the jar in the pic above.

The level of the jar's contents fluctuates as I build the supply of dried leaves up, then use or donate some. (Blackberry leaf tea is good for upset stomachs.)



I've been using a similar principle with nasturtium seedpods as well as onionweed bulbs - which my daughter often finds little clusters of in the soil. (See above!)

I've made a pickle of 50/50 water and cider vinegar, with a fair bit of added salt, and I keep it in a jar in the fridge. Whenever we find nasturtium pods or onionweed bulbs I just drop them in. Although before pickling the onionweed bulbs, it's best to soak them in water and rub off the papery outside skins.

It's like a mix of capers and mini pickled onions.

And now for some fluff

My children say they have outgrown fluffies. Meanwhile I seem to have grown into them. Lately, in an effort to reduce my caffeine intake, I've been drinking frothed-up milk flavoured with rose or lavender.

To make the lavender fluffies, I heat up milk in a lidded pot, along with with a sprig of lavender from my daughter's flower garden. When it reaches scalding temperature I add a bit of honey and stir it in. Then I take out the lavender, pour the milk into the coffee plunge-pot, and plunge the plunger up and down till the milk has frothed up.

I LOVE lavender as a drink. (A spoonful of lavender vinegar in chilled water is strangely nice too.) Lavender is supposed to help with focus and metal alertness, so I've convinced myself it makes a good substitute for coffee.

I like fluffy milk with a dash of rose-petal tincture as well. My parents have some beautiful dog rose bushes, and a few weeks ago I collected a bagful and tinctured them in vodka.

I collected a second batch of petals a couple of weeks later, strained out the old petals, and put the new ones in for a couple more weeks, to make a double tincture - so it's strongly fragrant.

And speaking of white fluffy things flavoured with rose - I was really pleased with the rose and chocolate chip meringues I made a wee while ago. I just added a couple of spoonfuls of rose petal tincture instead of vanilla to the meringue mix and folded the chocolate chips in.

I think it would also work well to put the rose flavour into the whipped cream instead of the meringues.

I guess to come full circle I need to make lavender meringues now ...

Elderflowers galore

There only seem to be a couple of Elders in our immediate neighbourhood, but the other day my mother took my children and me to a spot where they grow prolifically. After my Mum asked permission from a property owner, we harvested two bagfuls of flowers.
There were many other Elder trees frustratingly out of reach - they were on someone else's property, probably not used by the owner, but we had no way of asking the owner at the time.

Home again, I made a few things, including syrup for elderflower cordial and even elderflower junket. (No one in the family liked that except me, but I am a junket addict, and I will eat it any way at all.)

The internet presents a bewildering array of recipes for elderflower cordial - as well as wine and champagne. Everyone likes to make it differently. Here are some thoughts on navigating through the confusion ...

Elderflower/sugar ratio
A big part of the trick with the cordial is to get the proportion of sugar to elderflower flavour right, but that's going to depend on your own personal tastes. If in doubt, err on the side of adding less sugar than you think you need. It's easy to add more sugar syrup at the end if you find you need it, but less easy to up the ratio of elderflower.

Lemons
It seems important not to skimp on the lemons. They add something really important to the flavour. In my first batch I didn't use enough lemon (to my taste anyway), so I've been adding an extra squeeze to each cup as I have it.

What I did
I used the method at Gastronomy Domine - but changed the proportions, and didn't use citric acid. I will freeze some to preserve it instead.

My proportions ...
Around 20 elderflower heads
1.5 litres of water
3 cups sugar
3 lemons

I also heeded advice from other websites to remove as much stem from the flowers as possible. Some little stems are okay, but not the big ones.


Bugs!
There are these tiny little black bugs that like to live in flowers round here. They mostly crawl very fast, and I can't quite tell if they have wings or not. If anyone knows what they are, please tell me! Anyway, we found heaps in our elderflowers. I've also found big communities of them in gorse flowers, apple blossoms and roses.

Often it's good not to wash any flowers before using them, because -
(a) it can damage the fragile petals
(b) flowers readily release their fragrant/flavoursome/active components into water, and you don't want to wash any of that valuable stuff away
and
(c) if you're making something like wine, where you want plenty of wild yeasts, you don't want to wash yeasts off.

SO - I stumbled on a way to get rid of these wee beings without washing the flowers. It's a little time-consuming, and there may be a better way, but anyhow, I'll post that on Wild Concoctions a bit later today.

A secret garden

About 10 days ago, I pleaded for a friendly botanist to help me distinguish between different wild, edible Brassicaceae species. And lo and behold - one answered!

So late last week, my daughter and I headed across town to Julia Stace Brooke-White's house with a big bagful of plant specimens to show her. The minute we stepped onto the long, shaded path up to her house we were enchanted.

The path was lined with miners' lettuce, raspberry bushes and other tasty flora, and finally opened out onto her gorgeous front yard, which my daughter said was 'like a secret garden'. My photo above doesn't do full justice to its magical atmosphere.

We took our specimens inside, and Julia examined them. Her job was made harder by the fact that I had picked them too soon, and they had wilted ALOT. However, she made some tentative identifications on the spot, and suggested we leave them with her to research further.

On the way out, she showed us lots of her interesting garden edibles - and even pulled some out for me to take home (insisting, when I thanked her, that she was just doing a spot of weeding. :o)

I was also very inspired by her style of gardening, allowing plants plenty of freedom to self seed and thus adapt to suit their environment.

We headed back down the path and onto the street with a bucketful of blue borage, miners lettuce, mustard lettuce, feverfew, and 'parcel' - a cross between parsley and celery.

It was a lovely experience, and I thank Julia very much. And yes, soon after, she did email with more definite IDs for our different Brassicaceae, but that will have to be my next post!

Cleavers spring tonic

My son and I were holed up at home yesterday feeling sick and sorry for ourselves, so I dug out a lovely book I got 2nd hand last year - A Soothing Broth by Pat Willard (1998). The subtitle is Tonics, Custards, Soups and Other Cure-Alls for Colds, Coughs, Upset Tummies, and Out-of-Sorts Days.

It’s a mix of essays, anecdotes and old-fashioned recipes, detailing Willard's personal journey to rediscover the lost art of ‘invalid cooking’.

In one chapter, entitled The Change in Seasons, Willard writes:

It is an age-old tradition among most of the world’s population to produce specific brews from native plants and roots just for the fall and spring. The spring elixirs were formulated to purge the blood and organs of sluggish waste (the by-products of heavy food and inactivity) so the body would regain its strength for the summer months …

Spring tonics are foods or drinks that usually contain the young shoots of wild spring greens. And as Willard says, ‘If it can’t be scientifically proven that they purify the system, they certainly hit it with a vitamin wallop.’

I often get sick during seasonal changeovers. Maybe, I thought yesterday, what my son and I need is a spring tonic.

In her spring tonic recipes, Willard focuses mainly on dandelions, but elsewhere I’ve seen recipes using chickweed, nettles and cleavers.

Since we’ve got loads of cleavers in our garden, and since I’ve never done anything with it before except stick it to my clothes for momentary amusement - I decided to try that.

Raw cleavers leaves taste mild and slightly salty, and some have just a faint bitterness. The texture is unpleasant though - like eating velcro. Cleavers is, I've read, a perfect candidate for juicing.


I spent a good 20 minutes in the garden snipping off nice-looking bits and filling a colander. We don’t have a juicer, so I whizzed it up in the blender (stems, leaves and all), then squeezed it through muslin.

My son and I each had a couple of tablespoonfuls added to homemade lemonade. Later we added some to rosehip cordial.

Both were nice, but we preferred the lemonade combo. I've written down my Cleavers Lemonade recipe at my recipe journal blog.