The search for the perfect foraging bag(s)

I've found them!

You see, I've thought about foraging bags a lot over the last little while. What makes an ideal foraging bag? Where can I get one? Or should I make one myself?

Until just the other day, I'd mulled over four options (and used two of them):

Option 1: A wide wicker basket

Pros
* It's traditional, and makes you feel all bucolic.
* It's great for keeping your wild finds intact and un-squashed.

Cons
* I'm darned if I want to lug one around with me everywhere.


Option 2: Old plastic bags
Pros
* They're waterproof.
* They're light and super-compact. You can take several with you, and keep the different plants you find separate from each other - very helpful.

Cons
* When I start finding uses for old plastic bags, then I start to think of old plastic bags as useful. And as soon as I start to think of them as useful, I start trying to collect more of them. And then I'm contributing to plastic bag proliferation - which I don't want to do.
* They're weak and don't stand up to prickles.



Option 3: Reuseable shopping bags

Pros
* They're a sustainable option.
* They're strong.
* They're more compact than a basket.

Cons
* They're not compact enough. Because I like to take several, and because they're bigger than they need to be for foraging, it gets bulky.
* They get full of soil and pebbles and twigs, and I feel I have to wash them before I use them for shopping again.


Option 4: Making my own foraging bag
Pros
* I would be exactly the bag I want. It would be extremely lightweight but very strong. It would contain smaller bags within a bigger bag. There would be at least one bag in there made of very light waterproof material for wet or muddy stuff.

Excuses - er, I mean Cons
* I don't much like sewing.
* I'm not very good at sewing.
* My sister has the sewing machine at the moment.


So anyhow, I was thinking I would just keep on making do with the re-useable shopping bag option, when I went into Moore Wilson Fresh and, lo and behold, I saw this:
And it opens out into this:

These re-useable fabric bags are designed to hold your fruit and veges for supermarket weighing. And all the things that make them good for that, also make them good for collecting edibles from the supermarket of the wild.

They're strong.
They're lightweight.
They're sustainable.
They're just the right size.
They can be rolled up compactly.
There are lots of them for keeping things separate.
They breathe.
You can even wash your plants while they're still in the bag!

Okay - they are not different sizes, and there isn't a water proof one, but I can live with that. (And maybe take along just one reusable shopping bag as well.)

Called the Onya Weigh, this set of bags is made in Australia and costs about $14.00 here in NZ.

I did hesitate before buying it, as I thought about how one of the reasons for foraging is to escape consumerism. But then I thought - this is the only thing I have ever purchased for foraging, and hopefully will be the only thing I ever do.

So I bought it. $14 well spent I think. And now I have, if not the perfect foraging bag, at least something pretty close.

P.S. Thanks to Joshua Vial for letting me use his pic of a New World bag caught in a local tree. Drop in and visit his No Plastic Bags campaign.

We used our solar box cooker!

Still a couple of weeks to go before we get into prime solar cooking season here, as calculated by my Dad, but it was a beautiful day today, so we thought - why don't we have a go at something that only needs a short amount of cooking?

Boiled eggs it was.

We started at around 10.30am. We put the eggs in our black pot and covered them with warm water from the tap. I know warm water was slightly cheating, but I was desperately trying to maximise our chances of success, given that it's so early in the season, and the sun is still relatively low in the sky.

We put the pot in the cooker on two stacked cake racks to raise it up slightly and make sure the underside of the pot could heat up properly. (We had problems last summer with our panel cooker when we didn't raise the pot.)



We closed the lid, angled it towards the sun, and left it for a bit. At this point I learned my first lesson of the season: Make sure the outside of your pot is absolutely dry when you put it in the cooker!

I had given the pot a quick wash before we used it, and hadn't dried it properly. After it had been in the cooker for about half an hour it started to steam up the window. We had to open it all up again, wipe down the window, dry the outside of the pot, and then start again.

We left the eggs cooking there till about 3.30pm ... or maybe it was 4.30. I'm a bit confused by daylight saving.

During that time we moved the cooker about three times to follow the sun. As you can see from the pic below, by the end of that time it was practically falling off the deck. (And so was the cat.)



We opened the pot nervously. The water wasn't boiling, but a promising cloud of steam billowed out ...



My son did the honours with the first egg. The white was cooked.


And so was the yolk!


Hurray! Our box cooker works!

Our kombucha lives! (I think)

I have unfairly maligned my mother in law. She didn't throw out our kombucha at all.

I found it the day before yesterday in the darkest recesses of our fridge, looking like - well - something you would find in the darkest recesses of your fridge. (But kombucha always looks like that anyway.)

People describe kombucha colonies as 'pancakes', but I think they look more like placentas.

Ours seems to have had a baby placenta - or maybe there were already two before we lost them in our fridge. I can't quite remember. I'm not sure if either of them are still alive or not, but they're not turning black, which is apparently a good sign.

I've taken the younger one out and put it into a big jar of sugar/tea mix to see if it's still doing its thing. I should be able to tell in a few days time, I hope.

Flower fritters

This is just such a cool idea - dandelion flower fritters. We found it here at LearningHerbs.com.

The batter's really simple: a cup of flour, a cup of milk, and an egg. You just gather open dandelion flowers, dip them into the batter whole, and fry 'em up (turning once or twice till brown on both sides).

They end up crisp on the outside; juicy and just a little sweet on the inside. Yum!



We've been bingeing on them, and here's what we've learnt -

* The flowers have to be new. Older flowers get fluff in them as they start to turn into dandelion clocks.

* Some of us like them dipped in soy sauce.

* Whole onion weed flowers make great fritters too!

Also - I've been experimenting with onion flower tempura, and as soon as I get a recipe I'm happy with, I'll post it on my recipe journal site. (In the meantime I've put up our version of lemon kefir icecream.)


(25/10/08 - Update: I've put up the onion flower tempura recipe here.)

The social side of sourdough

So I have Rebecca's wonderful Kaitaia sourdough starter. Now I'm going to do a similar swap with Ruth in Westport. (Ruth's sourdough starter is twelve years old, and quite well travelled.)

Unfortunately all I can offer Rebecca and Ruth at the moment is an IOU, since I washed my last starter down the sink some time ago in a brain-dead moment. The pressure will be on for me to try and get a new one going this summer that will make a worthy exchange!

I love the ways that live cultures connect people. Sourdough, kefir, yoghurts, kombucha ... You can share them with friends so easily. If you keep them going, you always have some to give away.

And I love the way they can span time and space. Swaps by post link people across geographical space; and the many live ferments that are looked after within families and passed down through generations link people through time.

(Although what happened to our kombucha? I have a sneaking suspicion my mother-in-law threw it out while kindly but zealously cleaning out our fridge for us ...)

There's also another quite different way that fermented foods bring people together. A lot of fermentation processes are about preserving food (cheese, sauerkraut, miso, to name a few). Preserving is often done in bulk, and so it makes good sense to get a bit of a working bee going when you're doing it.

Apparently in some parts of the States they have 'sauerkraut parties' - where everyone comes along bearing cabbages and other veges, which are then pooled. Everyone works on the chopping and brining together, and then leaves with their share of the finished jars of sauerkraut.

It sounds fun. Anyone interested in doing this sometime this summer?

Introducing Uglybread

One of my favourite pieces of advice came from a cheese making course I did with Katherine Mowbray last year.

Katherine said: when you make cheese, don’t get too stressed out if things go wrong because (within reason) no matter what mistakes you make, you’ll still end up with cheese. It might not be the cheese you intended to make – but it WILL STILL BE CHEESE.

I remembered this advice today when I was making bread. This was not the bread I intended to make – but it IS STILL BREAD! (I’m sure the general principle behind this reassuring advice could be applied to many things, food and otherwise.)

I made this bread with the lovely sourdough starter that Rebecca from Farmlet sent me the other week.

The trouble was, I made a very moist dough and then attempted to cook it on an oven sheet without putting it into a container. In the oven it began to spread, rather than rise.

I wasn't sure what to do. I wondered whether I should just leave it, and accept that it would be a very wide, low bread - but I didn’t really want to.

I wondered whether I should shore up the sides with a couple of ovenproof containers - but I could only find one that was the right shape and size.

Finally I decided to scoop it all off the oven sheet and put it into a loaf dish! I'll leave you to imagine how that went.

I ended up with a very rough, crumpled pile of dough in the loaf dish, and as it rose and cooked it didn’t smooth out.

So – above is the end result. I call it Uglybread.

I was going to say that it still tasted very good despite how it looked – but actually I think it its roughness added something ... I’d smothered it in olive oil as it cooked (because I like the way it makes a crunchy crust). And with all those bumps and folds there was plenty of extra surface area to go crunchy.

Anyway – thank you Rebecca! This is the first loaf I’ve made with your sourdough starter. It proved beautifully, and the flavour is divine – with a strong sour tang that I’ve been missing from the sourdoughs we’ve bought in stores lately.

Solar cooking with whatever you've got

Lynda has experimented with pizza box cookers.

Free is making a panel cooker from a car sunshade. (And has other plans too.)

Solar Cookers International are currently promoting the 'Fun-Panel solar cooker', which they say you can make in under an hour - with a single cardboard box, some foil, tape, string and glue. (Plus an oven bag.) The box cooker we made this year was pretty simple - but this is simpler! I'm keen to try it.

You generally need to solar cook in a thin, dark pot that will absorb the heat. However, thin dark pots that are the right size for your cooker are not always easy to find. In the book Cooking with Sunshine, the authors give several ideas for improvising:

* You can paint the outside of a pot black.

* You can drape a black cloth over your pot.

* You can even cook baked potatoes or corn in old black socks!

Guest posting

This isn't food related at all - but I've just written a guest post for author Tim Jones' fascinating website - about my OTHER passion, children's literature. That's here.

(Hmm ... I can perhaps make a tenuous solar cooking connection, as Tim is not only an author but a sustainable energy activist ...)

Wild concoctions

I've never been one for precision with quantities and measurements - as anyone who has ever tried to teach me cooking, woodwork, metalwork, or craft would attest to. (And so would the World Sweet World editors, who had to try and take a photo of my solar box cooker that didn't show up all its rough edges and irregularities!)

BUT - I've set myself a task to try and keep track of recipes I experiment with, so that as well as ditching the ones that seem hopeless, I can replicate the ones that work, and refine the ones that almost work.

I've set up another blog as an online recipe journal where I'm going to record the recipes that I'm completely happy with, and want to be able to repeat. It's here - at Wild Conconctions.

(Only one recipe there so far, and I'm not sure how fast I'll be adding them, but at least I can now.)

Now I know it's really spring

The spring issue of World Sweet World is out.

I just love this little DIY magazine, and not because I have articles in it. (It's more like the other way round; I wanted to write articles for it because I love it.)

If I had to sum up World Sweet World in one word, it would be 'friendly'. Reading it makes you feel a part of something good. (It has many other virtues too of course - it looks beautiful, for one.)

I have an article in this issue about making and using solar cookers. I also interviewed children's writer and illutrator Ruth Paul for a second article about wind farms and children's environmental picture books. (They sound like disparate subjects, but somehow it worked. Ruth lives right by the Project Westwind wind farm site - so she has an interesting perspective on wind power.)

The spring World Sweet World also contains a nice bread recipe, an article about eco-friendly coffins, and a lot of other things that I didn't get a chance to look at properly because I was just surreptitiously flicking through a copy in Juniper, while I wait for my free copy in the mail ...