Ren Behan - Author Wild Honey and Rye

Food Writer

Courses

A Foraging Walk and Banquet with ‘The Foragers at The Verulam Arms’ St Albans

Nettle soup with wild garlic-infused olive oil, sweet onion tart topped with foraged herbs, blue cheese cheesecake with wild poppy seed biscuits. The kind of food you would perhaps expect to find on the menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant – not at your local pub. As a foodie with a great love of all things local, I was intruiged when I saw the menu at one of my locals, The Verulam Arms. I was even more excited when I found out that the owners, George and Gerald (also known as The Foragers) were about to kick-off a series of guided foraging walks on a local estate. The foraging was to be followed by a ‘wild food’ banquet back at the pub. So, I quickly put my name down to attend a course, flung on my wellies and joined in with a bit of hunting and gathering.  And yes, that is a deep fried squirrel’s leg on my plate. Foraging is all about taking a walk on the wild side!

The art of foraging is definitely in my blood; my Polish grandmother always told us that nettle soup and wild mushrooms helped her and her three children to survive the war. Having been sent to work on a labour camp located deep within in a forest a long way from home, just about the only food available was the wild food they could forage and cook with very limited means.

Foraging as a means of survival can be traced back to our ancestors over 80,000 years ago. As a pursuit, foraging slowly became less and less common as food became more readily available and was supplied for us. But foraging is coming back with a bang.  Our interest in self-sufficiency and a desire to re-connect with nature is growing. It isn’t just a case of finding wild food either; culinary techniques particularly suited to wild food, such as salting, smoking, pickling and curing are also re-emerging. The folks at The Verulam Arms with their menus, walks and talks, are therefore both trend-setting and inspirational on a local level, in a completely laid-back and non-pretentious way.

The aim of The Foragers at The Verulam Arms is to provide good food, as well as motivate, educate and pool local knowledge and skills. The owners, Gerald (a highly-skilled forager with a passion for fishing and artisan baking) and George (an ex-city worker who now promotes his own love of foraging to the wider world) renovated the abandoned Verulam Arms together with a common goal. With help from locals, they gave the pub a fresh lease of life, exposing wooden floors and period features, decorating it with painted silhouette’s of hunters and gatherers and bringing grandad’s fishing bag and Auntie Evie’s bureau into the mix.  As well as offering a foraged menu predominantly created now by the very young, but super-talented head chef Tommy, the guided foraging walks are a relatively new angle. They bring together local people with other local hunters and even urban gatherers to share locally foraged food. The guided walks are led by Kevan, a foraging and bush-craft expert Kevan from Woodland Ways, who brings a whole new level of expertise to the table.

The thing about foraging is that you absolutely have to be sure that what you are gathering and eating is safe and that is has been correctly identified. Getting it wrong can cause significant ailments, with some wild plants and berries being poisonous, toxic and even deadly. I myself admit to being completely clueless when it comes to identifying wild food (and this blog post is in no way meant to be a guide!) Hence, why anybody in my position should only ever go with an experienced professional or guided group.

I was slightly nervous in advance of the walk as I was attending alone and knew no one. It was a pretty miserable day weather-wise, but the foragers soon put me at ease and off we ventured as a group. I was astounded, to say the least, at exactly how much edible food we were shown how to identify during our walk. The path took the route of  a simple woodland walk; away from the road, yet still visible as a group and able to find everything within easy reach. A whole new world of food was opened up to me, almost like putting on a pair of spectacles bringing edible wild plants, including stinging nettles, chickweed and dandelions into sharper focus, as well as finding wayside kitchen herbs, wild berries and nuts from in and around the hedgerows.

In most cases, you need the permission of the landowner to forage on private land. However, path edges can be legally foraged and flowers, leaves, fruits and fungi can also be foraged from verges and country roads. Guided walks are about the best way to ensure that what you are eating is safe and that you won’t get into any trouble for doing it.

So, after a busy afternoon finding, smelling and tasting hedge garlic, nettles (only pick the tops and not when they have started to flower), goose-grass, pig-nut, elder, three-cornered garlic and leeks, wood sorrel and chickweed, we had built up quite an appetite for a woodland feast.

Back at The Verulam Arms, we were presented with a banquet consisting of some superb treats:

  • Nettle Soup and Homemade Bread
  • Homemade Cheeses (Brie and Cheddar)
  • Sweet Onion and Goat’s Cheese Tart Tatin with Foraged Herbs
  • Southern Fried Squirrel’s Legs (actually delicious!)
  • Fisherman’s Pie and Sorrel Mash
  • Rabbit and Foraged Herb Masala (amazing!)
  • Game Sausage Rolls and Home Cured Meats

The banquet was delicious and all of the food had either been hunted or gathered locally. It was beautifully presented, too, with foraged herbs and flowers. The herbs had all been freshly foraged by hand, the fish caught by Gerald, the cheese impressively hand-made from locally produced milk. The Foragers also cure their own meats including wood pigeon chorizo and pigeon as well as venison and juniper salami.

For a pub in St Albans, I thought the menu and food was quite spectacular. House wines are carefully selected, George and Gerald are about to start brewing ‘wild beer’ and tipples of  sloe gin all added to the experience. Even if you are not taking part in a foraging walk, the atmosphere at the pub is friendly and welcoming; just as it should be.

The dinner menu at The Verulam Arms is equally inspired. For first-time visitors, the Chicken Liver Pâté coated with wild butter sauce would be an excellent choice. A new wood-fired oven offering pizzas and slow-cooked joints at weekends surely presents a much-needed alternative to the below-par Sunday carvery and over-priced and over-packed chain eateries.

I would highly recommend joining in with a walk with The Foragers at The Verulam Arms and I hope that pub becomes a destination restaurant for visitors, as well as a place for like-minded foodies to meet. Since going on the walk, I have found wild garlic, used dandilions as a chocolate cake decoration and have started to find elderflowers, as well as learning more about nettles. I am looking forward to picking some wild fruit over the summer and have enjoyed asking my own mother about her adventures in foraging as a child and finding out more about her love of wild forest mushrooms.

You can find out more by subscribing to the We Foragers Mailing List and by finding Verulam Foragers on Facebook or @We Foragers on Twitter. Upcoming events are all listed via a link in the “Hunt and Gather with Us” section of The Foragers website leading to We Got Tickets. The next walk is on 27th June 2012 and you can book the foraging walk and banquet together or just the walk or the banquet. Prices start from £20 to take part in a banquet and discussion, £25 for the walk on it own or £40 for the walk and banquet. There are dates and tickets all the way throughout the summer.

Come to think of it, this would have made a great Father’s Day present, so if you are local and forgot the old man, quickly buy him a voucher!

If you are ever in St Albans, go and try it for yourselves. It won’t be a secret for long!

With many thanks to George, Gerald and Tommy at The Verulam Arms and Kevan at Woodland Ways for a very inspiring and educational afternoon! I paid to attend the introductory evening but was unable to attend. However, I was able to transfer my ticket to attend the first foraging walk.

What’s your view on foraging? Are you keen to venture out into the wild? Would you have eaten the squirrel?!

 

Cakes 4 Fun – Ultimate Cupcakes

It almost passed me by, but did you know that this week is National Cupcake Week? Yes, officially this is the week that everybody should be flicking on their ovens to get baking some of these scrumptious little morsels. Whenever I think of cupcakes, I am reminded of the course I took at Cakes 4 Fun over in Putney, London, which, in a funny way, sparked my interest in blogging.  

I took the Ultimate Cupcake Course after a chat with one of my ante-natal friends about wanting to do something creative after a couple of years of being knee-deep in nappies and baby-talk. Shortly after taking the course, I decided to start writing about my adventures in food (though oddly I never did get round to writing about the course!) and here we are today.
Cakes 4 Fun are still going strong and their courses continue to be incredibly popular, selling out fast. As well as cupcake courses they offer classes in traditional cake decorating – mini and celebration cakes, macaroons, working with chocolate paste, as well as offering baking masterclasses, chocolate truffle workshops and the PME Professional Diploma. For most of the courses on offer, you don’t need any prior level of knowldge or skills. There are also evening courses available and you are provided with all the ingredients and equipment you will need for your course.
Held in a working cake shop, as I student I got to have a look in their kitchen and see lots of people decorating the most beautiful looking wedding and celebration cakes. It was a little bit like watching an episode of the American show Ace of Cakes, with some of the most impressive creations being decorated by hand to many different specifications.  
The class itself was held in a teaching room separate to the main area of the shop and was large enough to fit six students and a teacher. Our teacher was called Rachael, and she showed us how to make vanilla cupcakes cakes from scratch and gave us a few tips along the way – use margarine if you want to produce cupcakes with a flat top (to decorate with fondant icing as below) and butter if you want cupcakes with a peak.
 
We were also shown how to pipe the cupcake mixture into the cases in the tin (you get a much more even finish and it is easier to gauge the quantity going in than if you use a spoon). Lots of people also recommend using an ice-cream scoop, but ever since taking the course I have used a piping bag, trimmed at the bottom once the mixture is in, no nozzle needed.
We then made a variety of decorations by hand using sugar paste, including using moulds and rolling the paste by hand into shapes, such as the teddy bear cupcake. We also used different types of icing – vanilla and chocolate buttercream icing as well as fondant icing and discs of icing to top in different ways.
I came home proudly brandishing a beautiful box of hand-decorated cupcakes and remember my husband and in-laws gasping at how impressive they were. I immediately uploaded the photos onto Facebook and had more comments than I’d ever received before, which is what made me start to think about sharing my adventures in food through writing about my foodie adventures.
If you are thinking of improving your skills then taking one of these courses is very enjoyable and you can learn a phenomenal amount even in just one day. The tutors at Cakes 4 Fun were all very friendly and knowledgeable and prices start from £40 for a full day course (the cupcake course is around £99 depending on the day selected.)
Cakes 4 Fun are also a member of The British Sugar Craft Guild.
Have you ever taken a cupcake course? If so, did you find that it helped you improve your skills?

A Few Highlights from Food Blogger Connect 2011

This weekend I attended Food Blogger Connect, which is Europe’s first and biggest food blogging conference held in London. 

I had no idea what to expect, since it was the first event of this kind that I’ve attended as a food blogger. All I did know was that as soon as I saw the event advertised I booked my ticket and put the event firmly in my diary to go!

The programme for the weekend was impressive from the start and as the event drew nearer, more and more big names of the foodie world were lined up to speak or hold workshops and the buzz started to grow within the food blogging community – globally!
 
Two things I definitely didn’t expect was to win a refund on my ticket just a couple of days before, courtesy of one of the event’s main sponsors Olives from Spain. Thank you so much for my pass! Olives from Spain were really generous, giving away four weekend passes on Twitter and further supplying us all with mountains of delicious Spanish olives throughout the weekend. I think we were all, almost constantly, nibbling. I have a couple of recipes to share too, from Olives from Spain, and will be posting about them a little more in the coming days.
 
(Yummy brunch and Olives from Spain demo!)
 
Secondly, I didn’t expect to meet so many food bloggers from all over the world – I had assumed that mainly UK food bloggers would attend, yet many had travelled from Europe, including Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary, as well as even further afield from the United Arab Emirates.

Twitter was totally hijacked by the #FBC11 hash-tag as we tweeted our way through the best-bits of the programme and even tweeted eachother in the same room to try and put names to faces! 

(Gretchen, Sally, Zita and Guilia)
Culinaria Libris
My Custard Pie
Zizi’s Adventures
Juls’ Kitchen
 
One of the main guest speakers even came all the way from Florida. Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen shared all her tips on how she successfully turned her food blog into a business. She now speaks internationally all about her work as a blogger, recipe writer, TV food presenter, weekly columnist and cookery book author (with two children and only working three hours a day!) 
 
Other international speakers connected with us over Skype and it was hugely exciting, for me in particular, to have the opportunity of meeting some of our home-grown experts and journalists, such as Fiona Beckett of The Guardian. Journalist and Broadcaster Tim Hayward of Fire and Knives and Alex Mead of Food and Travel Magazine also gave talks on the Friday evening, which I was sad to have to miss.

We also watched a recipe demonstration by chef and food writer Anjum Anand, who made a really delicious carpaccio of courgette, from her forthcoming book on vegetarian Indian cookery. ‘Up-and-coming’ chef Caroline Mili Artiss also partnered up with sponsors Cuisinart and Olives from Spain to show us how to make her version of a spicy black olive tapende. 

(Anjum Anand and Caroline Mili Artiss)
 
The whole weekend was extremely varied in content and there were many highlights. It’s almost too hard to pick my favourite bits as all of it was hugely relevant, informative and memorable…but I’ll try!
 
My Pick of the Best Bits
 
I was really taken by Fiona Beckett’s workshop on Writing Style. It was perhaps particularly relevant for me, as Fiona told us that she had a mid-life career change from politics, becoming a journalist and food writer by taking a Post-Graduate Diploma in Journalism. Fiona started out her career in food writing by getting a position on a features desk and after this, started to freelance.  She stumbled into blogging more recently, as a published cookery book author and as a regular food feature writer for British print publications. She now writes no less than four separate food blogs each highlighting a different foodie interest! 
 
Fiona is a real champion of new talent, having collaborated with Signe Johansen and James Ramsden in their ‘student days’ of food writing, believing also that “Blogging has brought fresh voices to the food world and are a breath of fresh air.” Fiona also talked about the differences between blogging and writing for print media, which she has followed-up with a post about on ‘How to Blog like a Journalist’ on her own blog Food and Wine Finds which is well worth a read…
 
Other essential points made by Fiona included having to be more thorough in your research as a journalist, being more critical and impartial, the importance of observing what is going on, finding your voice as a writer (and how this can be different in a blog post to the voice you have in a print piece) as well as advising us to step back from our blogs sometimes to really think about how to add value to a post.  What is it that our readers really want to know?
 
(Answers in the comments box, please!)  
 
 
Fiona also spoke about how to craft a feature from a blog post, how to find an interesting angle on a particular topic and how to really grab your audience in a piece. She went on to talk about good recipe writing, or “Delia’s Law” as she calls it, as well as giving tips on writing restaurant reviews, book reviews and how to build up contacts as a journalist. All in all, I thought that Fiona’s advice was down-to-earth, generous and perfectly timed for my own recent adventures in food writing!
 
Almost in complete contrast to Fiona’s advice on traditional avenues and methods of food writing, were three separate workshops presented by Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen who talked in depth about how to turn your blog into a business and specifically, how to build traffic, community and how to monetize your on-line blogging journey.  Her own real-life examples of how she turned a simple food blog into one of America’s leading business-blog sites was nothing short of staggering and yet in a strange way, believable and inspiring all at the same time.
 
I’m quite sure that we all came away from Jaden’s presentations feeling as though we could drive millions of visitors to our sites, bring in revenue from affiliate programmes and advertising and once we’ve expanded our social media platforms, visibility and brand even land our very own book deals! How realistic this is remains to be seen, although on the plus side, Jaden believes that British/European bloggers are about three years behind America so we have plenty of time to watch and learn.

One of Jaden’s essential pieces of advice to all bloggers is to hire a graphic designer and get a professional logo. I’d say her second most valuable point for us all was to work out our own personal value and worth and really think about the opportunities that come our way, including what we write about and how it helps us, rather than how many bloggers all-to-often help to promote big-name companies for very little or even for free.

We also listened intently to Nando Cuca from Cuca Brazuca who was in his own personal element having an audience of women captivated by his advice on SEO! He also talked about generating traffic by adding plenty of keywords, tags and categories and later on hosted a workshop on the future of blogging. In Nando’s experience, video blogging is relatively straightforward and adds value to your content adding the extra dimension of auditory stimulation. Nando was extremely entertaining as well as knowledgeable, encouraging us all, I’m sure, to give it a go! Look out for plenty more ‘You Tube’ channels being added to the food blogging world!  
  
I think another personal highlight for me was taking part in a food photography workshop by Béatrice Peltre of La Tartine Gourmande, which, apart from anything else, was a unique opportunity to watch a truly creative professional at work.  I am hoping to write a separate piece on this workshop for The Foodie Bugle because it really was remarkable and was certainly one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole weekend for me. I now have an expensive ‘wish-list’ of camera equipment to buy and so may well need to put some of Jaden’s advice into practice!
 
(Béatrice Peltre)

 

Above and beyond all of this was having the opportunity of meeting so many other like-minded and equally ‘passionate’ food bloggers (a word we were told not to use as often as we all do!) The community atmosphere was so strong, with everyone eager to make friends with each other and share their own individual experiences of food blogging. In a world where so many of us now increasingly interact socially over the web without ever meeting face-to-face Food Blogger Connect provided the perfect home for us all to finally meet to nibble, natter and network in the real world.

It was such a pleasure to meet all my fellow foodies and already, I await next year’s conference (already set for 22nd-24th June 2012) with eager anticipation.

(Christina, Judith, myself and Helen)

The Bountiful Plate
Mostly About Chocolate
Fuss Free Flavours


Thank you so much to Bethany Kehdy of Dirty Kitchen Secrets (the founder of Food Blogger Connect) and to Joslin Souza for putting together such a remarkable weekend for us all at The Hempel Hotel and to all of the brand partners.
 
(Bethany, Mayssam, Nando, Joslin and Caroline)

 

Olives from Spain anyone..?!