Hi from the Shropshire hills

[Tere]

Hi folks!

 

Thought it best to introduce myself now I've got my feet wet and started to post

 

I live on a 37 acre hill farm in a remote part of the Shropshire Hills, right on the border between England and Wales. Ludlow is my nearest foodie town 25 miles away, with an impressive array of independent food shops and a lovely award winning farm shop, although I will admit that most of my food comes from online supermarkets and is topped up by special trips there. Popping out for a forgotten basic item is a 12 mile round trip so I do a fair amount of planning ahead. My husband works in London in the weeks and I am really a grazer when he's not there, saving my weekends for major cooking efforts. I cook on a combo of a conventional oven and a coal fired Aga which we fire up at weekends, dragging out the sous vide occasionally (I really should cook with it more!).

 

Style wise my cooking varies a lot - I always do some sort of roast dinner on Saturday evenings, but other than that it can be all sorts of cuisine, although I am partial to doing a long slow cook recipe on Sundays as the Aga is great for that. I'm on a curry kick at the moment and trying Lebanese food having been bought an enormous book for Christmas. This weekend we're having laksa, slow roast pork belly and shabu-shabu (we lived in Tokyo for several years and loved the food and the service culture over there). I bake my own bread sometimes and we are lucky enough to have an original 1840's bread oven that we've refurbished and are trying to figure out.

 

We both love eating out and I come to London fairly regularly to try out new restaurants, as well as having a fair go at all the restaurants in a 20 mile radius.

 

Wine wise we both did the WSET Advanced qualification when living in Japan and I am noodling about whether to take on the diploma. As a contrast I also enjoy making my own, often from ingredients that I've foraged (I'm a keen forager and have found plenty of good things to eat on the farm :D).

 

Any questions, ask away

Edited February 4, 2016 by Tere
I am addicted to brackets :P (log)

[Deryn]

Welcome to eGullet, Tere! You definitely belong here and I am looking forward to living vicariously through your posts about your life and your culinary adventures.

 

I am already jealous of your Aga as well as the antique bread oven and your proximity to Wales. Such beautiful country. My father was born and raised in North Wales so that area is close to my heart. 

[Smithy]

Welcome, Tere!  You do live in a beautiful part of the world, and like Deryn I look forward to reading more about your cookery...or your baking, or foraging, or wine, or - well, any of it.  It sounds like you'll fit right in.

 

What are some of the specific items you can forage around your farm?  Are there any you can forage now, or are you under snow cover? Do you preserve any of your summer bounty?

 

If you have any questions about how to use the forums or where to find something, don't hesitate to ask a host.

[Tere]

It's been an incredibly mild winter so far with very little snow, unlike when I got snowed in for a month 2 weeks after moving in because we weren't sure we needed a 4 by 4 so hadn't bought one. We had heavy snow a couple of years back in late March too, with devastating consequences for local farmers as they couldn't get to the sheep. But I guess a usual winter you might have a week or two. I'm 900 foot up though - you get more actually on the tops of the hills rather than the river valley where I am.

 

Right now it's too wet and miserable most of the time to think about going out picking anything much.

 

Late spring, I forage elderflowers for cordial, wine and liqueur (although actually I tend to attack the giant bush at the local train station to preserve mine for the berries), jack in the hedge (garlic mustard, http://www.naturessecretlarder.co.uk/wild-food-useful-plants/jack-by-the-hedge-alliaria-petiolata.htm) which I use to make flavoured oils, as a drizzle for fish, and last year it made a fine hedgerow pesto with some local cheese, localish rapeseed oil, and foraged hazelnuts. Dandelion season I often pick a bunch to cook down and use in tortellini fillings and so on - I have a lovely recipe from Antonio Carluccio that uses a nut sauce and then a dandelion egg and parmesan filling. I want to try the young shoots of common hogweed which are meant to be tasty but keep on not getting round to it. I debate fern fronds but ditto (and I need to do more research on the ones I have because not all of them are a great idea - however I happily ate sansai in Japan with no issues). A little bit of wild sorrel goes in salads occasionally. My next door neighbour has a wonderful field mushroom spot and doesn't like mushrooms so I get a bucket or two of those each year. I just have ink caps which are tasty but cook away to nothing so I don't bother. You also have to cook them right this instant! 

 

Autumn I forage blackberries, elderberries for sauces, rosehips, bullaces (little wild plums), crab apple and hazelnuts for the most part. There's a couple of sweet chestnuts on a neighbouring farmer's land we sometimes harvest with permission (we get just enough for the Christmas stuffing usually). We also have a couple of apple trees on the land. There's wild strawberries and raspberries but usually I don't get to them before the birds . There's whimberries (a small blueberry) locally on the hills but they are such a faff to pick I usually pick them up from the Ludlow food centre - a local lady makes excellent whimberry jam.

 

Mostly I freeze things. I made blackberry whisky last year because they were so abundant. I always make bullace and sloe gins and love crab apple jelly. Apples get turned into puree, pie mix, and I press juice to make applejack.  Rosehips get foraged because they are pretty but I've not found a spectacular use for them yet - I made apple and rosehip jelly last time which was meh. I might pick some hawthorn berries this year - we bought a spectacular hawthorn jelly in Stockholm to go with cheese this year. I made bullace cheese and that was very tasty so hoping it would be similar. I'm still a beginner at jams and the like though and tend to over cook so need to work on that one!

 

Hazelnuts make noccello and also go in pestos and cakes - the yield can be pretty variable though!

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Hi Tere, and welcome to eGullet!

 

I agree that you will fit right in here, and I too am looking forward to learning about your life and culinary adventures across the pond.

 

Do you keep any animals on your farm, aside from perhaps your adorable avatar?

[helenjp]

You got a wine qualification while in Japan! Gosh....by the way, did you find any Japanese wines that you enjoyed? I keep looking, but they seem very expensive for what you get.

I'm very jealous about the blackberry whisky.

 

[Tere]

8 hours ago, Thanks for the Crepes said:

Hi Tere, and welcome to eGullet!

 

I agree that you will fit right in here, and I too am looking forward to learning about your life and culinary adventures across the pond.

 

Do you keep any animals on your farm, aside from perhaps your adorable avatar?

 

We actually sell the grasskeep on the majority of land to two local farmers who run sheep on it. One always put the breeding ewes on it so we always have a supply of cute lambs without any effort on our part. Works very well

 

We may get chickens at some point but don't right now.

 

My avatar cat is actually an ex kitty but I do have two elderly barn cats, who are really basically furry slugs who sit in front of the Aga all day now that their mousing days are over  

[Tere]

7 hours ago, helenjp said:

You got a wine qualification while in Japan! Gosh....by the way, did you find any Japanese wines that you enjoyed? I keep looking, but they seem very expensive for what you get.

I'm very jealous about the blackberry whisky.

 

 

I used the very very simple recipe from here: https://www.rivercottage.net/recipes/blackberry-whisky. I've just bottled it after a year and it's very nice already. Will see how it is once it's matured a bit I guess!

 

The qualifications I did were in English so it's not as impressive as it sounds  WSET have an office in Tokyo and there's a huge amount of interested wine lovers out there so although most of the courses were in Japanese they had one set aside for English speakers. I have drunk Japanese wine and the wine I think is most successful is made from the ancient grape koshu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koshu_(grape)) but it is very light and delicate, almost too delicate for me. It's a good pairing for Japanese food though. There's plenty of other things out there to try but the reds in particular can be a bit jammy. I think Japan is probably a hard country to make wine in because of the high humidity levels. I've had a decent icewine or two though. I think the domestic market pretty much drinks it all up. Japanese whisky, of course, can be excellent. 

 

One of my favourite restaurants in Tokyo (we make sure to book when we go) had an all Japanese wine pairing which was pretty decent when we tried it. Not sure it was all Japanese the last time we went though. Here's what looks to be a decent blog post about the restaurant http://www.tinyurbankitchen.com/aronia-de-takazawa/ . Such pretty food, and Takazawa-sensei and Akiko-san are both adorable.

[Darienne]

Welcome to eGullet.  It's a good place to be.

I am really curious.  You eat Hogweed?  I thought that Hogweed came in Giant and was extremely dangerous and poisonous.  Obviously you cannot be eating the tender shoots of a poisonous plant?

 

[helenjp]

Thank you for that restaurant recommendation Tere!

[Tere]

There's basically two sorts of Hogweed in the UK, Giant, which is bad juju and you stay far far away from, and Common, which is the edible sort. This blog post explains it very well I think http://monicawilde.com/eating-cooking-common-hogweed/ and is one of the sources that got me curious. I've spent a couple of years staring at what's on my land and it's definitely the Common variety. You can collect the seeds and use as spice too. I have some dried seeds at the moment - they are bitter and quite peppery. I could imagine them being used as a spice when spices were hard to come by. You have to take care when picking it though. I wear gloves when handling it.

 

Good site about it here: http://www.gallowaywildfoods.com/?page_id=948