Fergus Drennan: a life in the day of the roadkill chef

I'm so excited about my foraging expedition with the Roadkill chef Fergus Drennan tomorrow. We're going to be out for 12-13 hours in the Herne Bay area of Kent and will be foraging for wild food in woodland, field, river and seashore. Sure to be exhausted by the time I arrive back in London.

To convey my excitement and awe at his skills, I'm posting an article that appeared a few years ago in the Sunday Times Magazine, detailing a typical 24 hours in his rather unusual (but delightful!) life:

A Life in the Day: Fergus Drennan

Fergus Drennan with his foraged feasts

The 36-year-old broadcaster and writer, best known for the BBC programme The Roadkill Chef, plans to spend a year living entirely off wild food. He lives next to the Blean, Canterbury’s ancient woodlands

"I wake at 5am thinking: “Which woods am I going to today?” I love the idea of working from dawn till dusk. I have an incredible map in my head of where everything is — river banks, woodland, arable lands, salt marshes — but the best days are when I forget about everywhere I know and strike off somewhere new.

I’m Fergus by name, fungus by nature — I spread everywhere and my bedroom is horrific. I love the idea of making random connections between things, so I can never read just one book, I have to have 10 or 20 on the go. I’ve also got a muslin cloth full of roasted acorn shells on the floor and the cat has decided to make a bed in the middle of it. I’ve had to move into the spare room because I can’t bear it any more.

My entire day is spent searching for and preparing food. Nearly everything I do is experimental and incredibly time-consuming. I’m in the process of juicing two baskets of apples to make vinegar, and then there’s the disastrous residue of yesterday’s calamity. When foraging for your own food, you’re motivated not to waste anything. I spent four days collecting rosehips and I’ve made a lovely syrup, but I’m left with four kilos of bullet-like seeds that won’t grind. I’m hoping to use them as a base for coffee. The best blend I’ve come up with is a handful of butcher’s broom, hawberry and goosegrass seeds, a couple of green walnuts and four or five aromatic alexander seeds, all roasted and ground.

I’ve never been able to establish regular patterns. I eat when I’m hungry — breakfast might be soup and unleavened wild-grain bread or, from September, conker porridge with apple syrup. And I wash when I think I’m smelly — maybe once a week or every two weeks.

I might clean my teeth every other day or I might not do it for six months. It’s a superficial thing for me. After four or five days, I’ve got a nice coating of dental plaque which is full of vitamin B12. Insects are another good source, so I turn a blind eye to termites on leaves.

I use my tandem with a trolley at the back to get around. It’s quite hard work and I’m trying to calculate the amount of energy expended versus calorific return. When I’m looking for food, I’m totally absorbed. All my attention is focused on what I’m doing, which helps me make important discoveries. I’m very in touch with myself physically — the urgent need to eat something in particular boils up from my core. Recently I wanted eggs and fish – it was an insatiable thought. Difficult if you’re trying to be vegan. I love meat, I just don’t want to be part of the suffering. Fresh roadkill is fine and inside a female pheasant you’ll find eggs at every stage of production. As I see it, I’m turning tragedy into a lovely meal.

I’ve always felt slightly on the outside of things. When I read the papers, I cry at the way the world is, and I think foraging is a balm against that. It’s also about wanting to live fully. I belong in nature, and when I’m out there I feel I’m putting down roots. It’s partly physical, my hands covered in bloody scratches, the sun on my back in summer, and the wind and rain in winter. I just love the impact of nature on my body.

The only time in my life I’ve been really unhappy is when I’ve been seduced by cash. I used to supply wild food to London restaurants, but there was a big problem with sustainability and I couldn’t live with that. My income comes from running foraging courses. When you don’t need anything, money goes a long way. I hate supermarkets, because there’s no connection with the food. My acorn flour, which I made after soaking pillowcasesful of acorns in the river to leach out the tannins, has meaning because of the story locked into it. Recently I removed about a kilo of fat from the back and rump of a roadkill badger. Naively I thought that if I simply boiled this in water it would melt. Not so. The secret is to liquidise the fat cells in hot water and strain it. Repeated boiling and whisking, followed by setting and straining, results in a pure, fairly odourless lard I can use for wild-flour pastry. I’ll make the skin into shoes.

I always have two or three different soups on the go for lunch and dinner: seaweed, nettle or chickweed and wintergreen. I gather the raw materials from different habitats and make it up in batches at the weekend. My downfall is that I’ve got the most disgustingly sweet tooth. It’s hellish. My main source of sugar is concentrated wild-apple juice, I’ve laid down 24 litres of apple and 12 of pure sea buckthorn juice. When I’m out, I graze on hairy bittercress which is cressy and very nourishing, and I take chestnuts with me which are wonderfully chewy and sweet to snack on. There’s nothing better than mushrooms fried in fresh garlic oil, eaten in the woods with the sun sinking behind the trees.

I have island tendencies which I don’t think are entirely healthy, so I’m deliberately making an effort to be more sociable in the evenings. Twice a day I try to practise Taijiwuxigong, part of the Buqi system that works with tai chi forces. It’s a healing system that helps release blocked energy and toxic by‑products from the body. I check my emails then read or meditate before I go to sleep. I don’t know what else there is to do when you don’t have a girlfriend but wish you did."

Fergus’s blog is at www.wildmanwildfood.com

Interview by Caroline Scott - it appeared in the magazine on April 27, 2008

Hot lips! Another fungus naming competition...

When it comes to naming some of the weird and wonderful types of fungus in the wild, we've had all sorts, including Spongebob Squarepants (as discussed in my earlier post). 

Now we have another imaginative, name for an interesting type of fungus : this time it's "hotlips". 

Hotlips fungus!

The fungus — more accurately known as Octospora humosa — was given the name by 12-year-old Rachael Blackman, who proposed the name in a competition to find a better way of describing the appearance of this lurid orange, moss-dwelling fungus.

"They looked a bit like lips and I thought the name suited it really well because of the bright orange colour," said Rachael. "It's exciting to know it will always be called hotlips."

More than 5,000 entrants suggested new names for 10 endangered and overlooked species lacking a common name. Hotlips is a member of a group of fungi called discomycetes, or "discos". The judges for the competition, which is run by Natural England and the Guardian, said they loved the notion of a "hotlips disco".

"It's very simple, it's very apt and it's the kind of thing that people will remember, which cuts to the heart of the competition," said Pete Brotherton, head of biodiversity at Natural England and one of a judging panel including Guardian columnist George Monbiot and Liz Holden of the British Mycologists Society.

Ascot hat mushrooms

Among nine other winners, who will receive a certificate from Natural England, was Diane Williamson who came up with Ascot hat — aka Xerocomus bubalinus — a pink-tinted mushroom similar to porcini that would not look out of place as race-going headgear and was first recorded near Ascot.

Brotherton said it was very appropriate that Rachael had won this year's competition. "They [younger people] look at things with a creativity and wonder that adults have sometimes lost touch with," he said. "She's helping to grow the next generation of naturalists and maybe she'll be one of them."

New mushroom named after Spongebob Sqaurepants

Of all the stupid things to name a wonderful new species of mushroom after... a yellow pant-wearing cartoon character really takes the biscuit.

But low and behold, the people who discovered this sea-sponge shaped mushroom in the forests of Borneo have done just that.

Researchers at San Francisco State University christened the unusual fungus Spongiforma squarepantsii.  

Spongebob Squarepants

The full article can be read here on on the BBC website.

The BBC article, which was informed by a story in the scientific journal Mycologia, said that in addition to its resemblance to a sea sponge, under a scanning electron microscope, the spore-producing area of the fungus looks like a seafloor carpeted in tube sponges.

It was these characteristics that further convinced the researchers to name the species after the cartoon character.

With its odd shapes and fruity scent, I think this mushroom could have inspired a little more imagination — something like say, Sophiforma Haydocksii.

Porcini-tini: a wild mushroom cocktail

Me with my porcini-tini at Lounge Bohemia

I'm getting married on Wednesday, much to my dismay (it only dawned on me a couple of weeks or so ago I actually had to get my self in gear for this momentous occasion, oh dear!)

So I wanted to share with you an awesome wild mushroom experience I had as part of my "hen weekend" (aka poultry party) in London.

A group of us went to a very Communist-era bunker-style bar called Lounge Bohemia in Shoreditch, where they had the most exceptional variety of cocktails. Imagine my delight when I saw the "porcini-tini" on the menu! You can see the sheer happiness on my face in the picture above...

A cocktail made of porcini mushrooms, vodka, crème de cacao, condensed milk and salt. An unlikely match made in heaven. It was delicious. Something I simply had to share for fungi fans on Absolutely Fungulous...

Food for Free: wild food and foraging

Big Issue in the North published my feature about wild food last month.

It's based on an interview I did with Mina Said-Allsopp, who runs wild food walks in Leeds and who runs the Msitu website.

The piece talks about what kind of mushrooms can be found at this time of year, the question of sustainability and why foraging is experiencing a renaissance right now.

Go wild in the country

Mina Said-Allsopp on a Wild Food walk in Leeds

Would you forgo your trips to the supermarket? Would you believe (or want to believe) that you could feed yourself on a tantalising mix of healthy and tasty foods that can be found for free in the wild?

Perhaps not everybody would be prepared to give up their ready meals for a bowl of fresh nettle soup, salad of dandelions and cherry blossom, or chicken of the woods mushroom tempura. But your local area – and potentially your own back garden – is a treasure trove of edible wild food, allowing you to feast on what nature has to offer without a supermarket checkout or club card in sight.

“Foraging is an exciting way of engaging with the world.”

The popularity of foraging and wild food is peaking – and getting celebrity chefs hot under the collar. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made foraging cool on his River Cottage series, while Jamie Oliver proclaims wild food pukka. Even the typically hot-headed Michelin-starred chef Marco Pierre White says he relaxes with a little mushroom hunting. “I could spend hours looking for mousserons, penny buns and chanterelle mushrooms.” He often did so as a child, in the grounds of Harewood House in Leeds.

Mina Said-Allsopp, 27, is a forager extraordinaire who has been running monthly Food for Free walks in Leeds and around the north for four years. “Foraging is an exciting way of engaging with the world,” she says. “It makes you look at things with completely different eyes. Everything becomes a source of food. Where everyone else sees scraggly weeds, I see fantastic chamomile or Good King Henry.”

The foraging walks cost £15 (with discounts for students) and Said-Allsopp teaches you how to find and identify wild food, including berries, fruits, mushrooms and edible greens. All the money raised goes to a children’s charity, NURU, in Kenya.

“I love teaching people about wild food,” she says. “It’s great to see the light in people’s eyes when they realise that plant they’ve been overlooking for so long is edible or that it tastes completely different from the stuff they buy at the supermarket.”

Picking fruit

Spring brings lots of exciting things for a forager. One of the most exciting foods is wild garlic, a very versatile wild green that tastes mildly of garlic and makes great pesto. “I really look forward to spring because of the chance to find wild garlic,” Said-Allsopp smiles. It’s also the time of year to hunt for morel mushrooms, which are the holy grail of the foraging world. She adds that springtime is when leaves from certain trees, like beech and common lime, are edible – “they’re young and tender and a great addition to salads”.

Summer brings another world of edible delights. “The highlight is the St George’s mushroom and the fairy ring mushroom. Later, a bright-yellow bracket fungus that oozes out of trees, called chicken of the woods, appears. In autumn there’s a bonanza of wild mushrooms, as well as all the wonderful fruits, nuts and berries. In winter, you’d think there wouldn’t be much, but there are some things like chanterelles, which can take freezing and defrosting. As long as it’s not a very severe winter, you can pick things to February. Then there’s a brief lull. Towards the end of March, it starts all over again.”

A foraged feast (found in September)

She says that the people who go on her walks always say they cannot believe how much good food there is that you can eat everywhere. “It catches everybody by surprise,” she says. “We’re such a consumer society. We’re used to buying everything in sterile packaging with best before dates. Then you go out and see wild mushrooms in a field, and you’re naturally suspicious.”

She thinks it’s a lack of understanding that leads to such suspicion and, on occasion, hostility. Once in a while, as she’s picking wild fruit, she’ll see people carrying plastic bags of similar produce bought at the supermarket. “I’ll be picking plums, mirabelles or blackberries and people will see me and get alarmed, telling me to stop because they’re poisonous. No, I try to explain. The same things you’re paying a huge price for, I’m getting for free.”

“In continental Europe foraging is normal.”

Another time she was foraging near an urban area when a boy asked her what she was doing. “I explained I was picking blackcurrants. He said: ‘Oh, are you poor?’ He thought I would only want to pick things in the wild if I had no money.”

It wasn’t long ago that gathering wild food was a normal part of British culture. During the second world war, rosehips were commercially gathered, on the recommendation of the government, because of their high vitamin C content. Now, says Said-Allsopp, we’ve lost our hunter-gatherer skills. “In continental Europe foraging is normal and popular. It’s a huge part of the culture. In autumn, families go to the local woodlands to pick mushrooms to dry and preserve for the rest of the year.”

Of course, another reason to be wary of wild food, especially mushrooms, is that they can be fatal. It’s revealing that hospital admissions for people with suspected mushroom poisoning doubled last year. The Health Protection Agency’s National Poisons Information Service received 209 calls from NHS staff attempting to treat suspected mushroom poisoning, a rise on 2009’s 123 enquiries and 147 in 2008.

But Said-Allsopp explains that the number of very poisonous wild mushrooms is actually limited. However, she adds that it is essential to never eat anything if you are not 100 per cent certain of what it is. She also says that the horror stories and old wives tales serve a useful purpose, “reminding people of the dangers inherent in wild food”.

“You do need to be really careful. That’s why it’s important to go out on a guided wild food walk. Get your confidence, learn what to pick, what not to pick. As long as you’re methodical, you’ll be fine. A good mushroom identification book will tell you how certain mushrooms only grow in association with certain trees, whether they can be confused with other species, and that you have to look at cap size, spore print and length to make an accurate identification.”

And of course there’s also the question of sustainability. Environmentalists have warned that varieties of wild mushroom could soon be wiped out if the popularity of foraging continues. On top of that, it is illegal in the UK to forage for commercial gain, under the 1968 Theft Act. Said-Allsopp’s philosophy is: “If you see something once, keep walking, if you see it again, it’s okay to stop and pick it.” But, she adds, “never pick more than you need. Think of others and future generations who’ll want to enjoy this wonderful world of wild food.”

For more information on Mina Said-Allsop’s walks, see www.msitu.co.uk

Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath wrote the poem Mushrooms

If anyone ever doubted that the symbolic imagery of the fragile and humble fungi couldn't inspire great literary minds, have a read of Sylvia Plath's poem Mushroom.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very

Whitely, discreetly,

Very quietly

Our toes, our noses

Take hold on the loam,

Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,

Stops us, betrays us;

The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on

Heaving the needles,

The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.

Our hammers, our rams,

Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,

Widen the crannies,

Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,

On crumbs of shadow,

Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!

We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot's in the door.

Sylvia Plath

Stylish mushrooms

I found these beautiful fungi-inspired sketches on an awesome blog – Circles of Rain – yesterday and had to share their mushroomy loveliness.

Each of the quietly stylish woman in the drawings (by Sarah Wallis) are mushroom witches. 

Aunt Fly Agaric

There’s aunt Fly Agaric, with a beret-style red and white toadstool on her head...

The Deceiver

There's the witchy deceiver, who, as its name suggests, has a penchant for tricking people.

Mousserons in her hair

And this sharp-nosed lady has what looks like mousserons (or fairy-ring mushrooms) growing out of her hair.

Miss Porcelain Fungus

There's the Miss Porcelain Fungus, a woman with a distinct sense of style, and some very enviable pink heels, proving a sense of style and love of mushrooms can go together very nicely, thank you very much...

Porcelain fungus is a winner

This picture of some rather magical-looking porcelain fungus has just won second place in the Guardian's 2011 International Garden Photographer competition. 

Porcelain fungus by Gerard Leeuw

It looks rather like a jellyfish floating under the waves. Titled With Autumn Coming, it was taken by Gerard Leeuw in Ermelo, the Netherlands. He says: 

"This is Oudemansiella mucida, usually found on beech trunks from August until November. I like fungi. I was really concentrating on them on that day and wanted to catch the bluish light. As the image needs to express autumn, I wanted the branches in the picture as well. And then I thought of the multiple exposure feature to give the image a somewhat mystical touch."

The translucent delicate white flesh of the porcelain fungus is edible (after washing the layer of mucus off the cap). You'll find it growing on Beech trees in small tufts of about three or four mushrooms: that's why it's also known as the Beech Tuft. And if you hear of a mushroom described as the Poached Egg fungus, that's this one too. 

You can see the rest of the images in the competition on the Guardian website here

What mushrooms can be found in the spring?

Nothing says 'spring' better than blossom (which you can eat!)

It’s been a slow few months for us fans of fungi – only a few hardy mushrooms, like chanterelles, can survive freezing and defrosting over winter.

The only mushrooms discoveries I have made since November have been a couple of impressive hauls of jelly ear mushrooms (more on this ear-like fungi to come later this week).

But happily, there are lots of things to get excited about now spring is here.

On every scattering of wood-chips, take time to scan for the ‘holy grail’ of the mushrooming world: morels, which soldier up in April and May. They’re hard to find, but in recent years have been found sprouting up on wood chips due to a process called “stress fruiting”.

But, as yet, no such luck (despite being inspired by the wonderful Mina Said-Allsopp, who found a huge batch of morels on woodchip in Leeds, the lucky lady).

And in open grassy fields, keep an eye to the ground for the mealy white patches of St George’s mushroom, which appear around 23 April (St George’s Day). Again, I’ve not managed to find any yet, but here’s hoping…

St George's mushrooms

And also look out for the delicate brackets of oyster mushrooms at this time of year, too. They grow…

Of course, there are jelly ears (also known as Jew’s ears and cloud mushroom), which can be found all year round. In this warm weather are harder to spot as they go hard and shrivelled. They are still good to pick as you can re-hydrate them, clean them up and dry them again for storage, ideally in a cotton bag.

Jelly ears - the fleshy shape of a human ear

A return to Absolutely Fungulous!

Like mushrooms retreating into their own worlds for the winter and re-emerging in the sunshine of spring, I returning with a burst of mushroomy-vigour to blogging for Absolutely Fungulous! Lots of exciting posts to come...