Is it possible to live on wild food alone..................?

Day one (1st July):Bob Geldof?s bottom         

Day one and I?m already thinking that a whole month living on foraged food is going to seem like a lifetime.  Today has been great fun but quite daunting in the sense that it?s all been so incredibly time consuming. That wouldn?t be a problem in itself as it was time consumed most pleasurably. Unfortunately, for the next two weeks, I have to work for seven hours a day at my computer ? at least if I want to save my book deal ? which I do. It?s a real bind, which means that nine hour foraging days like today will be impossible. I knew this, of course, before starting, yet before you start to think I?m feathering my bed with pre-emptive excuses for subsequent failure, let me tell you why I?m living and eating this way in spite of knowing I?d be so busy. The simple fact is that so many people have said something like the following to me: ?It?s all very well talking about abandoning the supermarkets and living on organic veg and foraged foods, but most people simply don?t have the time. It?s just not practical.? There is much truth in this. So, rather than argue the point, I?m going to subject myself to the potential hardship of finding out just how difficult and impractical it might or might not be.

       For the last three months I?ve been eating very badly. I hurt my back after falling in the woods and have been taking lots of painkillers ? more than the recommended dose. As a consequence I?ve felt tired all the time and have tried to compensate by drinking far too much coffee. Unable to forage as much as usual, I?ve been using up my supplies of both nettle and seaweed soup. But I?ve also been on the comfort stuff ?chocolate of course, but also lots of marmalade on toast and pasta with rich sauces and lots of cheese. In other words, I?ve not been the super health forager that everybody supposes I am. That, however, is wonderful as preparation for this challenge. It means that I have become like so many others who work too hard in shitty jobs (any job that requires you to sit in front of the computer for seven hours a day is shitty, no matter what any body else says) and eat crap!  But, enough of this; lets talk about today.

       I could just eat a bowl of soup a day for a month and survive quite adequately. Nevertheless, that wouldn?t really be rising to the wild food challenge. No, the real challenge lies in attempting to eat relatively normally in terms of a varied breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. That takes preparation and I launched into this today without any whatsoever. To that end, today has been about sourcing ingredients that can be prepared as the bases for meals ? prepared as flour. Flour becomes noodles, gnocchi, pancakes, biscuits, dumplings?.The alternative would be not much different than a daily bowl of soup. It would be a daily bowl of soup and a plate of wild greens. Suitable materials to make flour of some kind are hard to come by at this time of year. Acorns and chestnuts would be fantastic but it?s just too early for them. So today I gathered about 1 ½ kgs of Arum maculatum (Lords and Ladies/Cuckoo Pint) tubers, 1 kg of burdock root and a kg of tree mallow seedpods. I?ll be experimenting with these so that in a few days I?ll be able to have noodles. If you are reading this, though, please bear in mind that Arum tubers are poisonous unless prepared in very specific ways. Also, today, I gathered a handful of wild cherries, a bag of lime blossom, a bag of chamomile flowers, a kg-ish of marsh Samphire, a big handful of seabeet, a small handful of sea purslane, a fist-sized giant puffball, 5 really lovely chanterelles, some unripe elderberries and 28 litres of spring water.

            For breakfast I had steamed Seabeet with elderberries and roasted tree mallow seeds? very strange. For the rest of the day I grazed on wild rocket, hedge mustard and wild cherries whilst I was out getting the other things. In the early afternoon I drank a cup of chamomile tea and, early evening, a cup of linden (lime) tea. Dinner consisted in marsh Samphire cooked in staghorn sumac berry extract (as a lemon juice substitute) with ?fried? chanterelles and giant puffball. I enjoyed it immensely. It was almost orgasmic, actually, in the sense that as soon as I tasted the first chanterelle a delightful sensation spread from my cheeks across my whole face and around the back of my head! Eating this way certainly makes you appreciate your food immensely. Right I must go and prep the arum tubers?..

??..Oh, but wait, of course, I forgot to tell you about Bob Geldof?s bottom! When I was out gathering with my friend Sue this afternoon at the beautiful Faversham Creek, we had to walk over a very narrow bridge. In fact it?s so narrow that you can only walk single file. Crossing on the way back we stopped to throw stones in the mud (they make the most fantastic metor-like impacts!) and to watch a bird we couldn?t identify. We found out later that it was a Little Egret. Anyway, two men came to cross the bridge and it was a tight squeeze for them to get past us. Our bottoms rubbed together as they passed, and what a famous bottom, it was Bob Geldof?s bottom! ?How was it for you?? I asked my friend Sue. ?Soft and squidgy but firm?, came the reply. What a strange contradiction!

Day two (2nd July): tarpaulin and fat lips.
    I woke up this morning feeling exhausted from the previous day?s digging exertions, my back was having its own little personal dig as well by way of a dull protesting ache, but nothing more thank goodness. I ?d love to say that I leapt out of bed eager to embrace the wild food adventures of the day. Alas, I tossed and flipped around on the bed like a fish out of water, only I wasn?t gasping for air but for a coffee ? the sweet liquid shock of a double espresso to be exact. Well, it just couldn?t be. In actual fact I?m quite excited. There is a plan hatching in my caffeine-starved brain to harvest both a passable coffee substitute and the ersatz milk to go with it. By Tuesday then I WILL have a coffee!

      So the day started early ? 6am, thinking about coffee, before I dosed off again only to wake five minutes later thinking about tongue twisters. I stumbled reluctantly out of bed, had a quick breakfast of pan roasted tree mallow seeds with steamed seabeet and fat hen prior to popping down the park to pick a purple-red pound of perfectly plump pucker-mouth wild cherries. They were pucking fantastic in fact and gave me a real lift. Who needs coffee? I then ground and winnowed the previous day?s tree mallow seeds (dried in a low oven over night) and boiled the burdock roots before working at the computer for 2 hours. Stopping for elevenses was good ? steamed marsh Samphire with wild cherry juice followed by a cup of chamomile tea. I double concentrated the cherry juice by boiling it down whilst prepping the arum roots from the previous day. Then, another two hours at the computer before lunch at two. Lunch consisted in nettle, hastate orache, fat hen and sea purslane (a mixed kilo of which I picked yesterday but forgot to mention) soup followed by wild cherry sorbet. It was all absolutely delicious, although having double concentrated the cherry juice in an attempt to make it sweeter; the resulting sorbet was just a bit too intense. I appeased my pallet with a strong lime blossom tea. Actually, it was more to appease my head because by this point I had ? as I did the day before, a pounding headache. It?s the coffee withdrawal that does it. Luckily the tea soon sorted it out. Then it was back to the computer for three hours.

         By 6pm I was feeling a little anxious that I had nothing for dinner so it was off to the woods. Half an hour?s tramping about the woods getting bitten by mosquitoes resulted in only two tawny grisette mushrooms. I felt quite deflated. But, it was quite amazing how an awareness that nothing found would mean nothing eaten fine tuned my senses, because after this I searched with a manic intensity that surprised me ? but it paid off, and five minutes later that fabulous torn golden shawl appeared: chanterelles. That was a wonderful moment, so unexpected. It really was exactly as the eighteenth century writer Dorothy Hartley describes: ?You find them, suddenly, in the autumn woods, sometimes clustered so close that they look like a torn golden shawl dropped amongst the dead leaves and sticks?. I picked a pound of them ? more than I?ve found at one time in years. Of course, it?s not the autumn but it seems that nobody has yet informed the weather. As I sat cleaning the mushrooms a light rain began to fall. Looking skyward, a most peculiar sensation started to arise in my lower lip. The rain started to come down hard and fast. I had no coat but it just so happened that I immediately came across a wonderful coat-sized piece of blue tarpaulin dumped in the woods ? ?like a torn blue opal shawl dropped amongst the dead leaves and sticks? (what a sign of the times). By this point my lip had doubled in size! What had happened? A mosquito bite on the lip ? who has ever heard of such a thing!? But of course, for mosquitoes lips must be like red rags (or even torn red shawls) to a bull, like a bee orchid to a bee, like a flame to a moth ? the perfect fat blood-full feeding trough for them to stick their anxious needle mouths into.

I left the woods and drove to the sea, collecting bladder wrack, toothed wrack, dulse, sea lettuce, enteromorpha, oarweed, sugar kelp and carragheen. Back home, fat lip and all, I cooked up chanterelles with wilted greens ? lime leaves, hop tops, hedge mustard and pellitory of the wall. It?s now 11.30 and I?m feeling ridiculously energetic. Time to blitz up those arum roots with some water, leave them to soak, drink a cup of lime tea and go to bed!         

Day 3 (3rd July): The elder goddess bares her perfect breasts

Last night my mind became so active that I couldn't sleep at all - not 20, 10, 3 or even half a wink. I even tried a triple strength linden (lime blossom) tea, but to no avail. Remembering a fantastic short story - Insomnia, by Virgilio Pinera, I double checked inside my bedside draw to make absolutely sure there wasn't a gun there! There wasn't

Because I'm rather stretched for time tonight I shall just put up the day's menue - it wasn't quite perfect but it was quite adequate.

Breakfast
STARTER
1 ripe blackberry
A handful of wild cherries
A handful of cherry plums
MAIN
Fairy Ring mushroomswith seapurslane seeds, bristly ox-tongue,
common orache, hogweed flower shoots, hedge mustard and
ox-eye daisies
LUNCH
MAIN
Seaweed and nettle soup
DESSERT
Cherry plums
AFTERNOON TEA
Marsh Samphire
A cup of linden tea
DINNER
MAIN
Wilted mallow tops cooked with chanterelles and jelly ear fungus
served with steamed burdock root
DESSERT
A glass of pure wild cherry juice


Just like yesterday, I was stuck in front of this damned computer for seven hours. However, in the morning I managed to gather 2 kg of wild cherries ? after falling down a hole; 1kg of cherry plums and a couple of handfuls of mallow tops. In the evening I gathered wild oats ? in the pouring rain, and jelly ear fungus. The monotony of computer-based work was broken by my having to change the water my pulped arum tubers are in every few hours, and by the arrival of Gerald. He is a wonderful elder gentleman who carves fantastic things ? including much of his own furniture, from drift wood gathered from the beach. I had given him what I considered to be a really good piece of elder wood, as he had promised to make a handle for my knife. Instead, he had used boxwood for the handle and carved the elder wood into a beautiful buxom goddess.





















Day 4 (4th July): Winnowing thoughts and roadkill musings.
    Slept terribly again last night  - only a few hours. However, it?s the first time in years that the problem was not the mind chatter of needless worries but, rather, the excitement about the thought of winnowing oats, perfecting arum flour and making milk! So after an immensely powerful dream about the nature of faith, commitment and the struggle against inner demons, as one does, I woke early. The day?s first wild food task was to stew some cherry plums and Mahonia berries with out any additional water. The flavour was both intense and delicious. Next came a really enjoyable activity: striping oats from the stem. Running your hand up the stem, keeping the thumb and index finger tight to the shaft as you do so, detaches the oats with an incredibly satisfying zippy-sounding ease. I managed to fill a 4-pint bowl with oats in 10 minutes (1 kg). The master plan was on its way to becoming a reality: milk for my coffee ? oat milk. For six months now a carton of oat milk has been sitting on top of my fridge awaiting any dairy free foragers that may come on one of my courses. None have, so there it sits, unloved and untried. I?ve never actually tasted it but am sure it must be good, and equally sure it must be fairly easy to make. First though, I had to put the oats in the oven to dry. I also strained the liquid several more times from my soaking arum pulp (using an old silk shirt) and put that in the oven together with a tray of semidry burdock root meal. There was one more shelf left so in the interest of efficiency I decided to grind up the previous night?s collection of Reedmace heads. All these things, then, went in a low oven for several hours: preparation for the production of both flour and milk.

     When, finally, I do get around to making the milk and roasting my wild seed coffee, I?m sure it will be wonderful. The weight of my advanced anticipation alone will, no doubt, project some future time travelling alchemical miracle to make it so. Of course, then, the experience won?t just be limited to that of taste. It will be, as much, an appreciative reflection upon the time, interest, effort, attention and crazy adventure of simply managing to produce it. No doubt it?s a cliché to state that we take so much for granted? Take meat for instance. Long lost, now, is the ritualised respect and seriousness associated with the capture, kill and preparation of animals for food. Factory farmed ?value? chickens fly off the soulless production like so much?well?.dead meat. Its debased and mundane two-a-penny familiarity renders us blind to our lost spiritual connection and meaningful awareness of life/ death processes ? the cycle of hunter and hunted, of decay and renewal, of the skilfully, even artfully, sought and found. I don?t consume much meat, only a little roadkill ? occasionally. But when I do find it, I find both a tragic and beautiful story within the sorry carcass. The meat becomes very precious and is never taken for granted. Perhaps, in order to gain a fuller appreciation of things in general we have to rebel against the deadening comforts and ultraconveniences of the modern world. Actually, today I feel more alive than I have in quite a number of years. The ordinary has become extraordinary again???..

      For the first time this week foraging has interfered with my social life, as I had to turn down a regular poker game. Still, never mind, I popped out for an hour to find dinner instead and returned straight home to cook a feast: Steamed wild greens ?seabeet, fat hen, chickweed and sow thistle, served with pan-fried ground tree mallow seed, alexanders and seabeet root and, to finish it all off, fairy ring mushrooms and sea kale! What a mix!! 
Oh?.forgot to mention lunch. It was a bowl of nettle and seaweed soup followed by a hot tottie of pure wild cherry juice. Yummmmmmmm!

Day 5 (5thJuly) Sloooow food; insanely slow food!

Late to bed at 2am, leapt out of bed at 5.30am. Have so much energy I feel quite disturbed! Then what happened: I winnowed oats, stewed cherry plumbs for breakfast, made oat milk, worked at the computer for hours and hours, picked chanterelles and fairy ring mushrooms, created the most ludicrously labour intensive lunch (ever!), worked at the computer, ate nettle soup and am now off to bed.

Today?s lunch:

Wild flour biscuit rounds with creamed Seabeet and Alexanders topped with Chanterelles and Fairy Ring Mushrooms

Ingredients
Biscuits
5 dessert spoons Lords and Ladies (Arum) Flour (CAUTION see ?tips? below)
5 dessert spoons Burdock root flour
5 dessert spoons Tree Mallow seed flour (CAUTION see ?tips? below)
5 dessert spoons Oat flour
5 dessert spoons Reedmace seed head flour
½ (15g) of the above flour mix for dusting
approx 1 cup of sea water
For the creamed Seabeet:
8oz(230g) Seabeet
3oz (85g) Alexanders leaf
2fl oz (30 mil) oat milk
1 heaped dessert spoon Lords and Ladies flour
For the fungi:
4oz Fairy Ring mushrooms
4oz Chanterelles

Method
For the biscuits:
Mix the different flours together with the seawater (filtered, boiled and cooled) in a bowl. Knead to form a firm, moist but not sticky, dough. Dust a work surface with a little bit of the flour mix and roll out the dough to a thickness of 3-5 millimetres. Cut with a biscuit cutter, place on a baking tray and cook in the oven for 30 mins at 180 deg C. Meanwhile, steam together the Seabeet and Alexanders for 5 minutes before blending in a food processor. In a small pan put a heaped dessertspoon of Arum flour. Mix in a little oat milk to form a smooth paste then add another 3 tablespoons of the milk. Heat to simmer, stirring constantly, and then add 4-heaped dessertspoons of puréed greens. Continue stirring and heat through for 2-3 minutes. While the greens are steaming ?fry? the chanterelles and fairy ring mushrooms in 2 tablespoons of water ? 1 of seawater, 1 of spring water.

 Place a dessertspoonful of the creamed wild greens on top of each biscuit and garnish with the mushrooms. Serve 4-5 biscuits on a plate accompanied by a tumbling pile of mixed chanterelles and fairy ring mushrooms in the middle.

Tips
Lords and Ladies flour: These tubers are extremely toxic, containing very high concentrations of calcium oxalate crystals in the form of microscopic raphids. DO NOT eat any until after lengthy preparation. First these raphids must be ?leached? out. Actually the crystals are barely soluble in water or acetic acid. Nevertheless, the method as described below separates them from the starch, holding them suspended in water long enough to achieve this.
The tubers are best and most easily gathered when the seed covered shaft is fully-grown and the berries are green or red (July). Dig down ? following the lower stem 6-12 inches (15-30cm) below the ground to find the tubers. Wash well and peel or scrape off all the thin outer skin. Also cut away any shoots or very beginnings of shoots and roots.
Place in a blender with plenty of water and blitz to as smooth a pulp as possible. You may then have to transfer the pulp to a liquidizer to get it really smooth. Next, pour into a large transparent plastic container. You need to pour in at least 10 x as much water in relation to the amount of pulp you have. Stir with a plastic spoon, cover and leave to settle for 3-4 hours. Then, using a siphoning tube ? so as not to disturb the sediment, strain off all the water above the sediment. Add the same quantity of fresh water as before. Repeat this process at least 7 times between 3-hour intervals (can take up to 10 times).
After siphoning off the water for the last time, line a large sieve with a piece of silk (the back of an old shirt is ideal), pour the pulp in and allow to drip dry. Alternatively, once about a third of the water has passed out you can form the silk piece into a bag and squeeze out the remaining water. Taste, but do not eat, a very small piece of the pulp. If, after trying, it leaves a tingling sensation on your tongue, repeat the leaching process several more times before proceeding (this shouldn?t happen if you have followed the procedure as described). Lay the piece of silk and semi-dry pulp out on an oven tray. Place in low oven with the door ajar or use a food dehydrator and allow to dry. This takes 4-5 hours with an initial 2 kg prepared weight of tubers. Halfway through the drying process, mix the flour/pulp about and crumble up any large bits.
Once completely dried, grind in a coffee grinder or similar. 2 kg of scrubbed clean tubers yields 400g of flour. It can be used as a cornflour substitute.

Burdock root flour
Gather a couple of kilos of tender roots in the spring or autumn ? but do not worry if some are fibrous. Scrub clean, roughly chop and boil for 45 minutes. Strain off the water and pulp them in a food processor. Spread thinly on a sheet and leave in the sun to dry Alternatively dry in a low oven as for the arum tubers above. Once fully dried, grind to a fine powder.

Reedmace flour
I only made this flower because I went to gather the pollen (for flour) and found I was too bloody late!
Gather the brown seed heads just as the pollen has finished but when there is still a little green in them if possible. Remove the upper flower spike and chop the seed heads, Blend as fine as possible in a food processor and dry as for arum flour above. Once fully dry grind to a fine powder.

Oat flour
Strip mature oats off the stem. Spread on a sheet to dry in the sun or use a low set oven. Once fully dried, wiz in the food processor for a couple of minutes. This will help break off much of the outer husk. Return oats to a bowl. Standing in a strong wind, tip the oats from a distance of a few feet into a larger bowl. This is winnowing ? removing the indigestible outer pars of the oat (the chaff) from the grain. Repeat this several times until all the chaff has blown away. If there is no wind, simply walk with both bowls as you are tipping out the grain. This will create sufficient movement of air to blow off the chaff. The grain will still have the last bit of outer husk attacked at this point. You can either just grind the grain as it is to produce a rich fibrous grain ? nothing wrong in that, or try to take it a step further. I suggest doing the later because that is how you make the milk for this recipe (not that I expect anyone at all to make it!!!!!!!). Now place the grain in a liquidizer and blitz for a few minutes. This will break off a lot of the husk but will also powder a little of the inner oat. But this is good. Sieve this to leave a flour that you can then grind. Take what is left in the sieve and liquidize it with 3 x its volume in water. Pass through a fine cloth. What you are left with is a delicious (in my highly subjective opinion) oaty liquid straw flavoured milk.

Tree Mallow flour
I CANNOT ADVISE YOU TO MAKE THIS AS I AM UNCERTAIN AS TO ITS EDIBILITY. I have eaten handfuls of these seeds for years with no adverse effects. Perhaps I will die tomorrow! If anybody has specific information regarding any possible toxicity of this seed, I would be most grateful if you would contact me. Anyway, the method is as follows: Strip the seed cases from the stem when they are fully formed but still green (if you use older seed pods it is impossible to winnow successfully). Dry in a low set oven and then wiz in a food processor for a few minutes. Winnow as for oats and then grind to a fine flour.

Talk about SLOW FOOD! Nevertheless, I found this to be really delicious.

Day 6 (6th July): Cafetiere smashing coffee!

Only two hours sleep last night - what is going on!? I should feel ghastly but don't. Nevertheless, I did start to drift off half an hour before I had to get up so was more desperate than ever for a coffee!!!! But no fear, no headaches, no worries - coffee was on its way. I prepared the wild (OK - escaped) oat milk the other day, and so was full of enthusiasm and excitement at the thought that, with just a little more preparation, I'd soon be marrying it up in nuptial steaming ersatz and caffeine free bliss to a roastily dark brown exotic stranger!
I left to do a quick morning forage within two miles of my home and managed to gather a brimming basketful of cherry plums to stew for breakfast - not the whole basket mind you; I've better things to do than sit on loo all day! Also managed to pick a healthy looking handful of pellitory of the wall. Most off it is out of season at the moment - like its sister, the common nettle; fortunately this came from a clump I had picked from about a month ago, and had grown back lush and tender.

A slight detour on the way to my first coffee ingredient really paid off with a gorgeous handful of parasol mushrooms. I had been checking the spot for the last week, thinking that with all this rain something was bound to come up soon. The night before last there had been absolutely no sign of them. They must have grown incredibly fast. Next stop 'coffee bean' gathering: cleavers seeds, hawthorn berries, green walnuts and alexanders seeds. I rushed back home, and in my manic enthusiasm to find the cafetiere managed to smash the damned thing - disaster! Nevermind, nothing was going to stop the coffee now. I took two handfuls of cleavers seeds, one of hawthorn berries, two black alexanders seeds and two green walnuts (chopped very finely) and roasted them all off. This took about thirty minutes in a hot oven. I ground the result, savoured the aroma, tipped the luscious powder into the smashed cafetiere, poured on boiling water and waited (impatiently) before pouring a cup. And how did it taste you may ask? Well, it could taste only one way and that way it did: bloody smashing! - so good in fact that I started roasting more walnuts immediately.

After working at the computer for hours I took a forage break to get some salad for lunch. And what a delicious lunch it was: Pellitory of the wall and Parasol mushroom tart with wild salad. I made the pastry case by combining burdock root, arum, oat and reedmace flour in equal proportions before mixing with a little sea and spring water. I left the tree mallow seed flour out this time - just to be on the safe side.
Whilst baking the flan base blind I puréed the pellitory of the wall with a little spring water, then simmered it for a few minutes before adding in the chopped parasols and a little arum flour. This was then cooked in the pan for another few minutes to thicken before being spooning into the pastry case. It required another 30 minutes just to set it with a firmer texture and to allow the mushroom flavour to infuse nicely. The wild salad consisted of lime and dandelion leaves, hedge mustard, daisy leaves, daisy flowers, mallow flowers and evergreen alkanet flowers. I dressed this with a little sprinkling of a spring water, seawater and wild cherry juice dressing.

Breakfast started as an initial disaster - seriously whole grain porridge that turned green and resembled exactly what I had discovered first thing in the morning: a crumpled sheet lying on the floor in the spare room was hiding a secretly wretched up stinking gift from the cat's guts. I also stewed some cherry plums to eat with the porridge. However, I found this incredibly painful to eat due to a huge merging triple ulcer on my inner lower lip. When my lip had swollen to three times its normal size, after receiving a mosquito bite a few days ago, it had also become completely numb. In my stupid fascination at its size and feel or, indeed, lack of feeling, I had chewed on the fat monstrosity. The ulcer was my pay back. I stared morosely at my scrub-water-from-a-burnt-pan coffee cursing my lip, my sickly porridge, my lack of sleep and the fact that I had cremated the green walnuts that had supposed to become such a glorious coffee. Then something amazing happened: the sun appeared, hurrah, and the blues disappeared. I mixed the stewed cherry plums with the porridge. It tasted great. The red cherry plums masked the ghastly green; the horrific acid-attack ulcer burning red cherry plums had been mellowed by the porridge. All was right with the world again.

Worked at the computer for hours as usual before thinking about lunch. Fortunately I didn't have to think a great deal because I had accumulated a respectable bowl of leftovers from the previous few days. I just needed to be creative. No problem! Actually, it was slightly more challenging than I had supposed. It's incredible what we take for granted generally. It?s also incredible what we take for granted in terms of basic cooking essentials: seasonings, oils, a few eggs to bind this and that. On what, in essence, has become a completely vegan wild food month, such basic essentials have to be worked around. Salt - that's easy, I just use seawater. But what about oil? I wanted to make potato cake style wild food leftovers cakes but these would require shallow frying. I managed to get around this by dusting them well with flour before putting them in the frying pan and then finishing them off in the oven. I couldn't rely on leftovers for the salad. So while the cakes finished off in the oven I popped out to get lime leaves, fennel flowers, dittander flowers, ivy-leaved toadflax flowers and a crow garlic bulb. The resulting dish was the best I've eaten so far. The samphire I picked last week has held up really well in the fridge, and little nibbles of the raw bulb between mouthfuls of vegy cakes worked wonders. They were still moist inside and quite delicious given how many things were in them: chanterelles, fairy ring mushrooms, parasol mushrooms, burdock root, alexanders root and leaf, common orache, hastate orache, sea purslane, ox-eye daisies, hogweed flower shoots, bristly ox-tongue, seabeet, lords and ladies flour, burdock root flour, oat flour, tree mallow flour and seawater!!! The salad was pretty good as well. I didn't dress it this time. You probably know that fennel flowers are as tasty as fennel; what you probably don't know is just how incredibly horseradishly mustard-pungent those innocuous looking little dittander flowers are! Definitely no need for dressing.

Whilst out gathering the salad I also found some curly dock seeds that were mature enough for harvesting. These are for tomorrow?s new flour making experiment. Before beginning this wild food adventure I had planned to harvest loads of the seeds to make enough flour for the whole month. Unfortunately most of the seeds were still green. Oh well, needs must, as they say, and look what devilish flours I managed to come up with instead.

Day 8 (8th July): Howling cats and hard questions.

I must have scared my restless legs into restful and slumberous submission with my threats of imminent exercise because I slept a full six hours without the slightest twitch from them last night. Still, I didn't want to face the consequences of calling their bluff so really did go swimming as threatened. Mind you, there are many other sleep snatching fiends prowling the early hours. I woke at 5am to the wailing air raid siren like battle cries of cats. My two, Elvis and Omar, were tactically position - hair on end, as two alien impostor feline fiends battled it out in the garden tree. In the end, the only important battle my two were interested in concerned who would be king of the leaching walnut tub castle for most of the day - a battle definitely won by Elvis; although Omar did hold out for a few minutes (right).

I've absolutely no time to forage for wild food or write this blog. The very fact that I am means that I'm now 4 days behind a particularly pressing book deadline for the 15th of this month. Lunch today, then, had to be a sling-it-on-the-plate yesterday's leftovers job - it was delicious though. Tomorrow I'll try to come up with something a bit more interesting and adventurous. Indeed, for me one of the most adventurous parts of this challenge involves not knowing what's to come tomorrow. It reminds me of a cycle trip I took around Ireland about 12 years ago. I just had a bicycle and a sleeping bag, cycled 70 miles a day, and as the evening twilight fell I still had know idea were I would be sleeping that night. It's the same sense of excitedly anxious intrepidation I feel now. Incidentally, that Ireland trip was the only other time I have tried to live solely on wild food. Unfortunately everything went pear or, rather, sandwich shaped, after my having discovered a wild cabbage growing on a shingle bank in the middle of a river. This was after two weeks, and I was so excited at having found something relatively normal to eat, that I was jumping and leaping about like a jester. A lady walking her dog came to enquire as to what the 'trouble was' and I explained the full story. Half an hour later, as I sat at the riverbank eating my sublime cabbage soup, she returned with a whole bag of goodies - sandwiches, biscuits, cake....! How could I tactfully refuse her kindness? No, I just wasn't up to the task and was compelled to gorge!

Well, I've come quite a long way since then in terms of transforming foraged finds into something more than just insipid (sublimely so!) cabbage water. When I made both nettle and seaweed soup at the beginning of the week I didn't add any salt, as I hadn't got around to foraging any. Fortunately today I collected more sea water to concentrate and add. Not only that though, I combined both soups and garnished the resulting concoction with some shredded nasturtiums leaves, after finding some in an alleyway, as well as a teaspoon of dried dittander flowers seasoning. Much improved!

Day 9 (9th July): Out of gluten? Get the gelet-in!

I had high hopes for the various flours that I've made: Arum maculatum, burdock root, wild oat, tree mallow seed, reedmace head and curly dock seed flour. They were to be transformed into biscuits, pastries, dumplings, pancakes, noodles, bread, cakes, chocolate and gold! Okay, may be not the last two. Nevertheless, with the first two I've already had some success. The ultimate goal though had been to make noodles or pasta. Believe me I've tried. Unfortunately, kneading flour and water together -with no matter how much bloody minded, stubborn and increasingly desperate wishful thinking, will not produce a suitably springy dough if there is no gluten or insufficient gluten present. This seems to be a sad fact, although I would dearly love to be informed otherwise. I had read somewhere that arum tubers were high in gluten, which is why I went to so much trouble leaching out all the toxins to make flour. Actually, it's a fairly versatile flour but not versatile enough. It doesn't appear to contain any gluten at all, and certainly won't make noodles - at least as conventionally understood. However, all is not lost. This one disappointment together with a further rain soaked tragedy has led not to despondency but, rather, to unexpected opportunity. At the beginning of the week I lay out some carragheen seaweed to dry and bleach in the sun. The actual method of preparation involves repeated cycles of drying and washing. All had looked well until it started raining on the second drying day, and then on the third, the forth, fifth.....you get the idea. It was rotten, smelly and ruined. Never one to give up easily, I popped the putrid mass into a pan of boiling water. I forgot about it. It boiled over - in fact ALL over the stove top. I cursed! Then, without cleaning up the mess I decided to boil up some cherries for making wine. I left the cherries for 45 minutes to go and do some work. On returning a miracle had happened: behold the gelatine! Lots of it, forming curly fluttering wave crests in a bid to catch the rising thermals and fly to distant shores. Lunch was saved! Of course, I'm not claiming to have discovered the use of carragheen as a setting agent, after all, that's the purpose I was drying it for in the first place. But what is interesting is that the further refined product (called caragheenan in the industry) is virtually ordorless and flavourless - even when produced from substandard stinking seaweed!

For lunch then, I tossed some ox-eye daisies in a small saucepan with a handful of sea purslane flowers, dittander pepper, sea salt, a tiny bit of water and a little of the residue that I'd strained and filtered from the boiled-over carragheen pan. After boiling for about two minutes I pressed it into a clingfilm lined ramakin and left it to cool. Next I chopped the parasol mushrooms finely and cooked them in a tiny bit of water with some finely chopped wild chervil. Once cooked, I broke in a few bits of my new vegy gelatine sheets. This same procedure was carried out on a pan of hastate orache leaves. Once cooled I was left with two items: cooked leaves and mushrooms that could be carefully shaped. I did so, wrapping a layer of cooked orache around mushroom balls before encasing the whole lot in blanched garlic mustard leaves. After reheating these parcels and the ox-eye daisy mould in the oven I served them with a wild salad: shepard's purse, dandelion, chickweed, ground elder and ivy-leaved toadflax. This was totally opportunistic cooking at its best. Suffice to say I felt well chuffed - hence the over the top presentation!

Now then, perhaps all noodling opportunity is not lost? I wonder, is a cold noodle salad possible? How would this be done. My initial thought would be to mix some arum flour, dried mushroom powder and some vegy gel flakes with a little water; cook this for a few minutes and then roll out between pieces of clingfilm to cool. Once set these could be cut into noodles - well, maybe!

Day 10 (10th July): Them there hail and hearty plums, they'll be a smokin'.

I picked cherry plums in such a powerfully freak hail storm last night that at one point I thought the pounding stones would knock me out. They didn?t. They could, though, have at least had the passing courtesy to dislodge a fair bounty of the sweet fruit, thereby saving me the trouble of reaching up to water-rivuleted soaking branches and, consequently, having torrents of the freezing waterproof disrespecting stuff cascade down my arms. They didn?t. At least after all that I should have stewed them well. I didn?t, they?re burnt, and I now have smoked cherry plums!. For the next few days then,  smoked cherry plums and porridge will be my breakfast lot - after all, I  just couldn?t possibly bring myself to throw them out after such an elemental adventure.

Day 11 (11th July): Apples and blackberries save the day.

These blackberries were wonderfully juicy and sweet but weren't early as you might be thinking - well, not compared to last year at any rate. On the 2nd of July last year I managed to easily pick enough blackberries to produce a gallon of pure juice. Generally speaking though they do seems to me ripening earlier year after year. Anyway, these blackberries were quite special as they postponed my smoky plum porridge until tomorrow. I was extremely fortunate to find wild apples to accompany them. The apples in question are quite extraordinary. They ripen earlier than any other apple I know - cultivated or wild, and seem to contain no balancing acidity whatsoever. When the juice is quadruple concentrated it tastes almost more like honey than apple syrup. There is only one magical tree of this mysteriously strangely shaped variety. For the last five years I've been meaning to get around to taking a few to the Brogdale Trust for identification - this will be year six no doubt!

I started this blog just as means to stop going insane with the pressures of book writing. Unfortunately it's much more fun to do this than the later. Nevertheless, I have written up 88 very interesting (in the very best possible way of course) recipes - only 12 to go before the July 15th deadline. I must admit though, there is a real problem with writing recipes when you're partaking of a month-long 100% wild food diet: fantasies of sweet liquors on tap, buckets of double cream and mountains of cheese tend to warp the mind and move the pen. I think the book will have to be renamed 'The Ultimate Greedy Bastard's Cream, Sugar, Chocolate, Liquor and Cheese Cook Book - with the tiniest tad of wild food"

Day 12 (12th July): Water from spout; noodles from nowt.

It's not that I like to indulge in gratuitous extremes, but I've always felt that if, in the first place, you do manage to find the motivation to actually get up and do something, that initial wellspring of energy soon fades without renewed, repeated and constant stimulus. That's how it is with me at any rate. So, in other words, if you're going to do something you may as well do it well; do it properly; do it thoroughly; and do it completely - or, as that crazy man George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff puts it:

"If you go on a spree, then go the whole hog including the postage."

Without the postage one stifles ones own success; with the postage, wrongly applied at least, one could die -too many arum tubers; 2kg consumed already? Anyway, water is the postage stamp of my foraging spree, without which my 100% wild food challenge would not feel complete. This morning then I collected another 26 litres of spring water, as I did on day one. I'm surprised my first batch didn't run out sooner than this morning, as I've been using it for both cooking and drinking.

Last night I tried thistle flower buds for the first time - and enjoyed them immensely. The flavour is good, but it wasn't simply the flavour that intrigued me; it was the whole wonderfully tactile processes of preparation that appealed in equal measure. As a consequence they were included on today's lunchtime menu: Crazy noodles with chanterelles, seabeet sauce and thistle buds. Perhaps the most deeply satisfying aspect of that creation though wasn't the thistles but, rather, the crazy noodles. At the very end of Day nine's frustrating nought noodle day blog I speculated as follows:

" Now then, perhaps all noodling opportunity is not lost? I wonder, is a cold noodle salad possible? How would this be done. My initial thought would be to mix some arum flour, dried mushroom powder and some vegy gel flakes with a little water; cook this for a few minutes and then roll out between pieces of clingfilm to cool. Once set these could be cut into noodles - well, maybe!"

Well, this is almost exactly what I did, but with a couple of tweaking differences. I didn't have any dried mushrooms so I cooked and liquidized two parasol mushrooms I found this morning. To this I added a little water and two handfuls of arum flour. Unfortunately there was a problem. I started to simmer this in a saucepan so as to cook the arum flour through and to create a thick cooked dough. The trouble was I couldn't acquire the necessary thickness without it sticking in the pan. As a result I was forced to add more water than I wanted. I rolled it out between clingfilm sheets and it looked, on the face of it, just how I had envisioned. That is what was so satisfying. However, I knew that even if set it would still be too sticky. To get around this I removed the top covering of clingfilm and placed the noodle sheet in a low set oven for an hour. After that I re-covered it all and placed in the fridge until cold. Dusted with a little more flour it would have easily gone through my pasta machine's cutting section quite happily. Nevertheless, I simply cut the noodles with a knife.

Day 13 (13th July): I AM THE KING - WHO IS THE QUEEN?

"Pppssst....I am coming back to normal....soon I will be able to talk to you.....although to talk to you one has to be seriously twisted...I'm sure one way or another we will commune."

And so began freaky Friday - Friday the 13th; the day, 10 years ago, after my driving instructor had threatened not to let me use his car for my driving test the next day "if I was going to bloody well drive like that!" I passed first time thanks to a superstitious last minute cancellation. Good luck for me, bad luck for everyone else. Thirteen is lucky. The day started with a wonderful text message - would she be my queen? Perhaps the day would end with 13 queens? In fact, last year I managed to collect the most fantastic succulent giant Chicken of The Woods fungus. It weighed exactly 13 kilos. The omens where all good so I leapt out of bed and was in the woods by 6.15. I felt lucky; today I would find porcini and Chicken of the Woods; today I would find magic.

One of my best porcini spots is also adjacent to a good area for Chicken of The Woods, and right near by is a pretty reliable chanterelle spot that I hadn't visited this year until this morning. Were there any? No, of course not. None! Niente! Nada! Yes, last night's words had reaped a speedy vengeance. No chanterelles; no Chicken of The Woods; no porcini; no nothing. I stomped here; I stomped there; I stomped everywhere. Twenty minutes later I finally stomped into a stand of butcher's broom, scratched my arms, cursed loudly and looked around - I was totally and utterly lost! Everywhere looked the same. There were no outstanding features from which to make a mental note of where exactly I had arrived, that is, except for one large beech tree. Not that this was just any tree mind you. No, far from it; it was the king tree, standing tall, forlorn and alone. "I am the king -?- who is the queen", was the burning question engraved on its truth seeking trunk. This was freaky Friday. A glimpse of red pulled at my peripheral vision. The queen running through the woods with a tray of jam tarts! No, another heavily berry laden stand of butcher's broom. I considered my options and realized there was only one thing to be done. Big red berries were entreating me to accept only one possibility - turn them in to coffee; a peculiar coffee; a mad coffee; an Alice in wonderland coffee. I walked and gathered, walked and gathered, walked and gathered. Within half a mile I counted thirteen bushes - yes, THIRTEEN! But number 13 was no ordinary bush, no, far from it. In the thick of the woods and there lying at the base of the thorny leaves was a lovely white bandana! I filled this with berries and walked, and walked and walked trying to get out of the woods. Eventually a narrow mud track opened out onto a grassy meadow outlined by the distant blue of the sea - such a peaceful calming place. Only now did I realize how anxious I had become. But where was I? I walked the length of the meadow to a wooded corner that seemed to offer no possibility other than to re-enter the woods. In I went and walked....and walked...and walked. I stopped to have a wee, and looking down I saw a foot print in the mud. It looked vaguely familiar. I measured up my foot and pressed it down in the mud. Yes, same size, same print. Back to square one. There were the butcher's broom stands. There was THE tree! And this time just behind the tree I saw a couple of mushrooms that I'd not noticed before looking faintly embarrassed by my stupidity: Blushers (Amanita rubescens)

I set out in what I considered to be the opposite direction and a brisk 10-minute walk soon brought me out into another meadow. What a beautiful meadow; a lost meadow; a meadow from times past - a meadow full of butterflies. I considered taking a photograph. It would be a hassle though. No doubt every time I got near one it would fly away. Besides, photographers are always snapping away at them so why bother? At that moment the words of my uncle came to mind - good words, inspiring words in fact. Earlier this year he had related an occasion on which some one had posed this very question.? Why do you want to bother photographing that butterfly; people are always doing it; it's been done." And what do you think his utterly wonderful no nonsense reply was? Simply this: "Yes, but not by me!" The decision was made then, and after much careful ducking, diving and general creeping about I was all set: tripod adjusted, obscuring grasses slowly, gently, quietly and oh so carefully brushed down and out of site. I pressed the auto focus. Damn, it was focussing on the background. So, carefully, slowly, gently I set it on manual, again delicately pushing aside the obscuring grass. The perfect meadow brown on the perfect fleabane flower is an image probably caught by countless others - but not by me. I pressed the button. Nothing. Pressed again. Nothing. "Replace battery pack" came the message on the viewing screen. Freaky Friday; Friday the thirteenth!

What of the day's food though? Well, one great thing about popping down to the woods for a 15 minute forage and getting lost for three hours before breakfast, is that a subsequent breakfast of grainy oats and burnt cherry plums actually tastes pretty good. Thankfully that's the last of them and tomorrow morning I'll be gathering some fresh plums.

Actually, after the morning's excitement I felt quite inspired. Lunch: sea purslane pancakes with wild flower, leaf and rosehip salad. The ingredients, as usual, were just a fortuitous mix of what I had or happened to find. The pancakes were made using arum flour, carragheen gelatine and a little sea salt. These were filled with a few chanterelles combined with seabeet leaf and chopped stems bound in a marsh samphire puree. The salad consisted of the following flowers: wood sorrel, fennel, dittander, common mallow and nasturtium; and the following leaves: garlic mustard, hedge mustard, alexanders, dandelion, chickweed and lime. This was given a tangy twist with the addition of Rosa rigosa hip pulp and skin. Dinner consisted simply in nettle soup followed by a big bowl of fresh blackberries. Delicious!

Day 14 (14th July): If you listen, they will teach you.

Just a couple of days ago -Thursday in fact, I was thinking about intuitive knowledge and innate awareness, and about how these may or may not facilitate the identification of both nourishing elements and toxic principles in plants. Indeed, I pursued this line of thinking almost, but not quite, to the point of purchasing a book on the subject. The one I had in mind was Stephen Buhner's The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature. I thought about this again last night. More to the point, I tried to stop thinking just for a while, just for a minute, just for a second, as I contemplated drinking my Butcher's Broom coffee. I drank a third of a cup. It was amazing. A leap of faith could only take me thus far. Not the seventy thousand fathoms deep of a full cup swigging Soren Kierkigaard, only the mere third of a cup depth of a doubting Fergus. But it was a start. I do have a problem, and that problem is that, more often than not, I'm far too rational: Rational in the face of the almost self evidently irrational, of the mysterious, and of those all too familiar magical synchronicities. Try as I might to ignore them they push harder against my resistance. So last night I went to bed questioning, wondering, doubting as to whether or not intuition and the radical interconnection with the world that its workings imply has a role to play in what I do. I fell asleep. I woke up. The doorbell rang, and the postman handed me a parcel that had come to me from California by way of Fresh Partners (my agent). Mysterious indeed! I tore it open and a card fell to the floor. There was the answer: 'If you listen, they will teach you."

I threw back my Butcher's Broom coffee with relish. Delicious. Thank you Sunny!

Regarding food; today was the both the first time I?ve felt hungry and the first time I've almost come a cropper -not the exact phase I used! I went to collect Ramsons (wild garlic) seeds so as to vary my salads with a bit of sprouting. Unfortunately the seedpods had all burst and thrown their little black loads. True, the moist earth was covered in them, but it was too much of a fiddle to prize them from twigs, moss and small clumps of soil. However, the good news is that I did manage to gather about 10 ramsons leaves in good condition - that was a real surprise to me at this time of year. Wonderful, I would find giant puffballs and Chicken of The woods, fry them in great big delicious chunks and wrap the leaves around them. Alas, no. One soon learns doing this that realistically, until you have the ingredients in your basket, culinary plans are just a stomach tease. The 'almost come a cropper' part, then, was that by 3pm I had a few leaves and berries but nothing substantial for lunch. I was hungry. I raided the fridge and freezer - for what, I don't know. And then there it was - brother pie, the twin of Day 10's pie; an extra made and set-aside for which I had had no recollection until discovery.

Well, that would do very nicely followed by blackberry and red current sorbet. And it did!

Day 15 (15th July): Foraging the grub for a lightening sandwich.

Yesterday was extremely demanding. I ran a 12-hour foraging course. I enjoy such courses immensely. However, ensuring that all the participants are well informed, well fed and well looked after - particularly in terms of health and safety can leave one feeling a little weary the next day! Also, It's been the first time I've ever run a course whilst being on such a restricted diet. Consequently, we all found ourselves in an unusual position, one certainly that required a considerable amount of trust on their part. After all, can you imagine going to a dinner party, the host cooking up lots of delicious food for you, and yet not eating it herself!? Imagine further, that half the ingredients used were strange and unusual foods for which you only had the host?s word that they were safe to eat. That was my foraging parties predicament. However, they did eat well and tried everything, and I believe they enjoyed it all immensely.

So what grub did we forage exactly? Well, here's a somewhat surprising clue as derived from an article discussing the vegan contention that sufficient dietary intake of vitamin B12 can be acquired through plant sources alone. Writing in The Vegan, Stephen Walsh explains:

"The confusion in this area arises from a conceptual error. Many raw food or natural hygiene advocates believe that our evolutionary diet and that of our great ape relatives did not include an external source of B12 and then conclude that humans shouldn't need such a source. In fact, all the other great apes - even the gorillas - consume insects incidentally along with their normal diet of fruits, shoots, leaves and nuts. Chimpanzees show particular enthusiasm for collecting and eating termites, which have high measured levels of B12. After capture, the blood B12 levels of most primates drops rapidly when they are fed on a hygienically grown and prepared plant-based diet. It is therefore not surprising that humans also need an external source of B12"
(The Vegan, Autumn 2002)

Day 16 (16th July): Magnificently magnified mycological moth wings encounter the seriously suspect slime of the stupendously spiky spear thistle.

The result of this fortunately short-lived encounter was a marriage neither made in heaven nor in hell but rather, in the realms of diabolical culinary insanity. Had you told me three weeks ago that I would be pureeing spear thistles to make an accompanying sauce for Cuckoo Pint based unidentified mushroom pancakes, I would have thought....- well, actually, I wouldn?t have thought anything whatsoever; my legs would have been acting on behalf of all thought as they propelled me at breakneck speed as far from your wickedly sounding curses as possible! Fear has that power to make us run and keep running. Some of us never stop. But in fear there are lessons to be leant that, if embraced, can lead not to fright but to the fun and excitement of adventure. I suppose that inherent to the nature of adventure is the fact that you don't always know where that adventure's going to take you; it is unplanned, spontaneous, chaotic....wild! And in the wild state intuition takes hold. Selecting wild fungi becomes a liberating expression of profound trust rather than a mad murderous form of mycological Russian roulette. Rest assured, I am not suggesting in anyway that intuitive techniques ought to replace rational and systematic knowledge based identification methods; no, far from it. However, perhaps at some point along the way ones protective stabilizers can be cast aside so as to really enjoy the ride............

Day 17 (17th July): An arum a day keeps the doctor away - well, apart from the ones bearing sickeningly condescending smiles and frighteningly straight jackets!

As a culture and cross culturally we, as human beings, manage to punctuate the year with festive celebrations reflecting key transitions or times of power and plenty within nature's all encompassing realm. As the embodiment of such, we not only envision a diverse pantheon of mythical and semi mythical beings - the green man of spring plenitude, the grape bearing Dionysus of debauched bacchanalian revelries, the shamanically journeying St.Nicholas with his red and white mycological attire and fly agaric gorging reindeer, but have also designated countless plants as being similarly associated either generally with these figures themselves, or as bearing witness and symbolic reflection to the specific attributes they embody. And yet, two plants seem conspicuous by their absence, by the absence of their seemingly self-evident symbolic potential to carry the explosively creative force of a dawning tradition; a new underground wave of ecstatic celebration and raging wild festivities: Arum maculatum and the Betulas or various birches. In the latter case it is the inebriating brew made from it's shaft flowing phallic sap that almost seems to cry out for the absent bacchanalian carnival throng of stumbling licentious debauchery. Then, the cock headed cuckoo pint (pintle - a slang dialect for 'penis' according to Richard Mabey), with it's semen-like starch oozing scrotal tubers, seems to literally light the way, leading us deeper and deeper into the gloaming woodland's blanketing twilight with its seed headed fire touch. What magic awaits us there!? Arise the Arum Man. Prepare the burning initiation with your skin puncturing needley sap. Lead on, lead on........

Today was a frightening day, an unnerving day. I ran out of all flour of any variety. This is a problem because it takes at least 2-3 days to gather, sort and process the raw materials before a fine usable flour can be had. This is doubly problematic because tomorrow I will be in London for virtually the whole day. What can I take for a packed lunch? Anyway, I made a good start this morning by collecting 2½ kilos of arum tubers - 500g more than I did the first time. This took 1½ hours, which is pretty good going. Mind you, it did take another 1 1/2 hours to scrub them all. If all goes to plan that should give me 500g of flour. On Thursday I will gather further flour plants.

Day18 (18th July): Nothing to eat from the shops that isn't either excessively over packaged or burdened with food miles? Who gives a fig!

I left for London at 7am this morning and got back at 9pm. This was a day I had dreaded given that it had so unfortunately coincided with my having run out of all supplies - except about 3oz of wild flour pastry and a bit of soup. In the grass near the station I spied a good-sized circle of healthy looking fairy ring mushrooms and made a mental note not to forget them - they would be my dinner. For breakfast I gorged on fantastic ripe cherries and blackberries that were also near the train station and, for lunch, took with me a double-concentrated nettle and seaweed soup. With four different back-to-back meetings to attend throughout the day I had thought I would need, appreciate and definitely benefit from this new high octane advanced botanical formulation. Indeed, I did - especially after finding a few of my salty wild flour biscuits wrapped in a little bag and stuffed in the side pocket of my rucksack. Blessed be the fairies - or an incredibly poor memory! At the time of making those biscuits I had been somewhat disappointed in the result - far too salty I had thought. Nevertheless, sweating and dashing from place to place, I revised my opinion. With each bite my whole body smiled, informing me that, OK, perhaps ordinarily they would have been too salty but today they were nothing less than perfect. Nevertheless, of the food items I did take with me, there was one other that really made the day. I knew that at all these meetings I would be offered tea, coffee or some other kind of drink. I also knew that if I didn't take something particularly and distractingly flavoursome, I'd be drooling over everybody else's coffee and drifting off into caffeine dream-time. The answer was a whole thermos flask of hot wild cherry juice. Amazing stuff! A swig throughout the day kept me alert the whole time - very unusual for me. What a long way I've come since the day before commencing this wild food adventure. That evening I lay awake trembling at the thought of a slow and painful caffeine free suicide.

Let's forget about the food items I took up to London because the day's greatest pleasures came from the belly of the beast herself. London provided, and not just well but magnificently, astoundingly! OK, I know about global warming: I know also that London has it's own microclimate, one that means that - everything else being equal, on a given day London can have a 2-4 degree higher temperature than the surrounding counties; and I also know that sometimes plants can fruit earlier than usual because...well, because...because they just do. I know all these things, but I never thought that they would add up to the most scrumptious fully blackened mulberries and the most pendulous of sweet succulent figs in July. But they did! These gems were tucked away in a small central park. Leaving the park with the lovely people I'd come to meet, we discussed the issue of fruit trees in public places and the fact that very few people ate from this particular mulberry tree - not knowing what the fruit were. I glanced an appreciative look back towards the tree. A young father stood below as a little boy clambered about the branches for the tree's luscious fruit. The next generation already knows.

Days 19-22 (19th-22nd July): Flour power!!!!!!!!!

I'm now about two thirds of the way through this wild food month. It will end on August the 3rd rather than on the 31st of July. Although the challenge has been and continues to be an immensely enjoyable one, in some ways I'd really like it to finish as soon as possible - excluding all animal products has made it far harder than it could otherwise have been so successfully completing the month would be enough for me. Unfortunately though, I couldn't get an earlier booking for my post-diet medical so will have to continue until then. But what is fortunate is that I have two things in my favour which will help me sprint for home, in what must now be the dietary home straight: steely determination and flour power! Running out of flour a few days ago was the lowest point of the month for me. I managed to gather some of the raw materials on the day I ran out. However, a full day in London followed by putting on a 12-hour foraging course left me with no time to prepare them. Tomorrow I will be running another 12-hour foraging course then, on Tuesday, I'm off to Gent in Belgium for five days. That will be seriously challenging. I'll be concentrating and powdering my soups to take with me and of course I'll be packing all my various different flours. Best of all though will be the biscuits I'll be taking - as yet unmade.

This might sound like a waffley digression but it's actually the biscuit story: A couple of days ago I gathered about 10 really good wild garlic leaves and had wanted to wrap them in fried giant puff ball which, sadly, I'd been unable to find. Not to be defeated, I hatched a plan even more likely to be doomed to failure: making my own humous! Wild garlic leaves, I had considered, could be blended with wild poppy seed and boiled burdock roots (as a chickpea substitute). All was going very well. The corn poppy seeds were harvested (about 2 tablespoons worth), the roots gathered and the wild garlic leaves were waiting patiently in the fridge - or so I thought. Unfortunately they had given up waiting, had got into a giant smelly sulk at my inability to find a puffball to combine them with and so had decided to completely decompose - the rotters! Nevertheless, this was actually an irrelevance. Before checking on the garlic a frantic search for the burdock roots had resulted in nothing other than the dawning realization that, yes, I had dug them up but, no, I didn't have them as I'd left them behind in the flippin' field! The great thing about phoenixes - and yes I am fantasising about eating one - is there indefatigable ability to rise from the flames, in this case in the form or wild cherry and poppy seed biscuits. My mother helped me pit the wild cherries - all 12 kgs! Actually, I boiled up 10kg and expressed both juice and pulp through a sieve to remove the stones. These were for a pure cherry fruit bar experiment. The fresh-pitted ones are for three different things - summer pudding (pitted and frozen until I've all the necessary fruit), pitted and dries for a totally wild Christmas pudding recipe and, also pitted and dried for my lovely poppy seed biscuits.

Day 23 (23rd July): Getting to the heart of the wild food challenge.

I can't do anything sufficiently well if my heart's not fully in it - and I don't mean 99%. For me doubt is the bane of my life - self-doubt, philosophical doubt, religious and spiritual doubt, all are virulent poisons in whatever guise. True, doubt manifesting as the tinniest of fractions or percentages - like medicine in homeopathic dosage, can act as a positive stimulus in many instances and in varying situations; yet, ultimately, and over prolonged periods of time, it destroys any firm ground which must, quite literally, act as a springboard for positive forward momentum and consequent success.

There is of course always room for questioning ones motives so long as that questioning does not become pathological. Pathological questioning is a manifestation of the most virulent form of doubt, and although it may not stop you in your tracks will slow you down, drain your energy and leave you in a constant state of exhaustion.

I was greatly inspired by comments made by the magician and performer David Blain some years ago - at the time when he was embarking on his Frozen in Time challenge. Having completed a three-week total fast (not excluding water though!) about 6 years ago I know that any difficulties are purely mental. Asked by a journalist how he could do it, how he could stand the repeated acts of submersion into freezing cold water as preparation for his stunt, David Blaine simply commented that that once he had made his mind up to do it, that was it. That is the key: no doubt; 100% commitment.

At university I used to love writing essays but found them almost impossible to begin - often feeling that the task was quite simply impossible. One technique really helped me get around this. I would tear off four blank sheets of A4 paper and meditate upon them for half an hour, visualizing them full of my (wise!?) words. What they would be was unknown, all that was known with 100% certainty is that within a few days they would be there - time would pass and commitment would generate its own creative force.

Day 24 (24th July): Preparations for a journey.

Before setting off for Gent earlier this evening, I spent the morning making final preparations for departure - the two most important being to finish off both my wild cherry fruit slice and powdered soup. Last night I took 12 frozen portions of soup - 6 of nettle and 6 of mixed seaweed (dulse, laver, carragheen, sea lettuce, enteromorpha, toothed wrack, bladder wrack, sugar kelp and oar weed), defrosted them and then poured the whole lot into a pillowcase to squeeze out all the liquid. I boiled the liquid down to about 1 pint before remixing this with the extracted solids. I spread the resulting mixture out thinly on an oven tray and left it over night in the oven at the lowest possible temperature. This morning I ground the resulting solid mass to a fine powder in my coffee grinder. 12 bags of soup now weighs in at a grand total of 198 grams! That divides into 33 g per day including tonight.

Day 25-29 (25th-29th July): We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. You'll find he is a whiz of a Wiz if ever a Wiz there was. If ever oh ever a Wiz there was The Wizard of Oz is one because, because, because, because, because, because - because of the wonderful things he does. We're off to see the Wizard, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!

What a perfect crossing: a sublime, floating, dreamy, sun-kissed, gently wave-rocked trance of a crossing. From Ramsgate to Ostend we lay - Mike, Anna and myself, backs to the deck, weight fully given and held by the boat and undulating sea:Oceanic and elemental bliss.

Before starting this wild food month I had assumed that I would be at home in Kent for its duration. That I'd planned to go to a taiji congress in Gent, Belgium, during the last week of July is something that had completely slipped my mind. I have lived near Canterbury for almost 20 years now and, from a foraging point of view, staying put for such a prolonged length of time has distinct advantages. Certainly in situations when I wish to forage but am pressed for time, knowing the locality well pays off - especially in terms of knowing exactly where to go to find specific forageable foods without time-wasting inefficiency (of course, such inefficiencies have there place, are usually extremely productive and, with hindsight, turn out not to have been inefficiencies after all!). On a 100% wild food diet the comfort of a well known locality becomes paramount, and although I was very much looking forward to visiting Gent, two things made me slightly anxious: my lack of familiarity with the local habitat and the fact that Gent is a city.

I gathered red grapes from the hedgerow, managing to produce a litre of pure sweet juice, about 60 lovely ripe figs from one especially virile tree, hundreds of delicious hazel nuts from around the local sports centre and, from the same place, a daily replenished supply of full-flavoured pavement mushrooms (Agaricus bitorquis), a gorgeous and repeated shirt staining splatter of tree shaken mulberries as well as the expected complement of salad leaves and greens

In the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament there is repeated reference to the sweet smell of burnt offerings made to Yahweh - usually indicating meat sacrifices. Some authorities suggest that the sweet smell refers not to the meat itself but to the use of frankincense. Maybe, but for me, as predominantly a vegetarian, it's a strange association and one that I've always found faintly nauseating - an aroma unbefitting of God. Now, though, I have made a fantastic discovery - a truly ambrosial sweet smell befitting all and any God or gods - the sweet aroma of not quite fully ripened hazelnuts boiling in spring water! After a few days this became the basis for every dinner as the whole cooking process became almost addictive (unlike the daily shelling of 150+ nuts that was certainly far from addictive!). First I would boil the halved nuts for a few minutes before adding the fungi and, lastly, the vegetable leaves. I varied the dish by using differing combinations of fungi and leaves each day.

Day 30 (30th July): Simon the fisher of men starts to wheel me in.

Some people may question the notion that the body knows what it needs nutritionally. Is such knowledge - if it can be said to exist at all - simply crowded out by the dictates of modernity? What is clear is that amidst the deafeningly caffeine-busy roar of modern society there are vested interests keen to drown out the very possibility of that still small intuitive voice. It has been claimed that most Westerners fed antidepressive chemical solutions by the pharmaceutical industry - those overblown pseudo-panaceas such as Prozac, Citralapram, Seroxat etc, are actually Omega-3 deficient due to a diet of over-processed foods. However, such deficiencies are merely symptomatic of deeper and more fundamental deficits within the whole Western world view and (dis-) order - deficiencies for which the only lasting remedy is a full scale revolution ........ Anyway, of course, it's common knowledge that pregnant women can experience cravings for specific and often unusual foods - foods that, perhaps unbeknown to them, do in fact contain the unique nutritional qualities required by the mother or growing baby at specific times throughout pregnancy.

Thoughts, images and desires can also impregnate the mind, swelling to a nagging maturity that demands immediate fulfilment in action. For the past 6 days I've been harbouring a growing obsession for both fish and eggs, and although in recent months - and after a break of many years- I've come back round to the idea of eating fish that I myself have caught and killed, passing by Simon's fish counter at the Goods Shed Farmers market in Canterbury today was just too much too bear. He read my need and wheeled me in. I'm now the proud owner of a smoked haddock and smoked mackerel- as fishy and slippery as my shifting moral sensibilities. I'm greatly looking forward to eating them in a couple of days as a smoked haddock omelette and....well, perhaps I'll just imitate a guillemot and toss the whole mackerel straight down my throat!

I wonder if perhaps my diet is lacking in essential fatty acids. Fish - especially oily fish are a good source of omega 6 fatty acids. However, for maximum health potential omega 6 intake is ideally balanced out with a corresponding dietary source of omega 3 fatty acids in the ratio of between 2:1 and 4:1. It is just as well then that just before leaving Ostend last night I had a good nose around. The result was a great bounty of evening primrose seedpods. The seeds are rich in omega 3:gamma-linolenic acid (GLA) and this morning I produced almost a kilo of seedpod flour - the experimentation continues.

Of course, the use of intuition is all very well but, it might be argued, without sufficient knowledge, one is taking great risks. Consider the following: Flax seeds are also a good source of omega 3 fatty acids, and yet the unripe seeds are known to contain a natural form of cyanide. What about unripe primrose seeds and curly dock seeds and tree mallow seeds and...........

Day 31 (31st July): The last supper.

At the moment I'm struggling to write a book on wild food. With in that, my aim is to record at least all the butterfly and moth species whose larvae feed on the wild food entries I've included - if not a whole wealth of other creatures large and small. In a more ecologically aware age it is surely time to go beyond the current growing awareness of wild plants - an awareness divorced from the broader ecological and environmental picture; an awareness that, in seeing wild food plants purely in utilitarian terms vis-à-vis human consumption, risks creating a situation where the last supper really does have an end-of-days biblical resonance for a whole host of insect species. We need more foragers with acute ecological and naturalistic sensibilities such as Richard Mabey and less of the let's-strip-the-countryside-and-deliver-to-swanky-London-restaurants breed. However, even given these noble thoughts, I still would not have believed that I could ever have found a maggot endearing. But I did! I spent about an hour photographing the various gymnastic escapades of the maggot (let's call her Hazel!) in the picture to the left. What a beautiful creature she is!

So, what was my last supper?

Four Layered Nut Roast Served with Dulse and a Wild Rocket and Chickweed Salad.

INGREDIENTS
For the nut roast:
215g shelled hazelnuts
290g seabeet stems
100g giant puffball
100g chicken of the woods *
130g marsh samphire
50g Lords and Ladies (Arum maculatum) flour (CAUTION: see day 5)
20g dried carragheen seaweed
20g fresh jelly ear fungus (formerly Jew's Ear fungus - a corruption of Judas' Ear; he is reputed to have hung himself from an elder tree; and, quite frankly, no last supper would be quite right without Judas making some sort of appearance!)
10 nasturtium leaves
1 tblspn dried dittander flowers
1 tblspn natural sea salt
spring water

*Some people are sensitive to this fungus - not that I've ever met such a person, so caution should be advised. According to Steve Kirk, writing in the latest edition of The Bushcraft Magazine, "a significant percentage of people (1 in 10) who have eaten this fungus have exhibited an allergic reaction, so when your first time comes, try only a little. It is particularly important not to eat it raw. Also, avoid any growing on conifers, eucalyptus or locust trees (Robinia) as these seem to cause people the most problems."

For the dulse:
50g fresh dulse
25g crow garlic bulbs
10g crow garlic seeds
spring water

For the salad:
30g chickweed
30g wild rocket
a few wild rocket flowers
1 teaspoon ver juice
1 teaspoon wild walnut oil

METHOD
For the nut roast:
Rehydrate the carragheen in a saucepan with 2 pints of spring water. Boil for 20 minutes, strain off the seaweed pressing out as much liquid as possible and boil down to leave 8 tablespoons of liquid. Layer 1:Shell and halve the hazelnuts. Boil these in a little water with 1/4 of the sea salt. Once there is only about 2 tablespoons of water left in the pan with the nuts mix in 2 tablespoons of carragheen extract and a 1/4 of the arum flour, the finely chopped nasturtium leaves and dried dittander flowers. Continue cooking on a high heat stirring all the time for another 2 minutes. Tip nuts into the bottom of a loaf tin and flatten down. Layer 2: Chop the seabeet stems into inch-long pieces. Place in a saucepan with a little water (half covering) and boil for a couple of minutes. Still on a high heat, mix in 2 tablespoons of carragheen extract, a 1/4 of the salt and a 1/4 of the arum flour. Continue cooking for a further 2 minutes before layering the stems on top of the hazelnuts in the loaf tin. Flatten down. Layer 3: Slice the mushrooms and cook using the same accompanying ingredients and using the same method as for preparing the 2nd layer. Layer 4: Prepare and cook as for the other layers 2-3 except, of course, substituting marsh samphire as the main ingredient. Cover the loaf tin with foil and bake at 200 deg C for 30 minutes.

For the dulse:
Simmer the dulse in a little spring water for 10 minutes. Add the whole crow garlic bulbs and continue cooking for another 10 minutes. Add in the crow garlic seeds and simmer for a further 2 minutes.

For the salad:
Pick rocket leaves from plant stem and remove any tough lower stems from the chickweed. Mix the leaves together and sprinkle over a little ver juice - extracted from several bunches of under-ripe white grapes, and some wild walnut oil (15 pressed large nuts produces about a teaspoon of oil).

To serve (hot or cold):
Turn out the nut roast and - once cold- cut into slices with a sharp carving knife. Reheat if desired. Serve accompanied with the dressed salad and cooked dulse.

This is perhaps my favourite amongst all the dishes I've come up with this month so it seems both quite fitting and fortunate to finish with it. The different flavours and textures all work well together however, for me, the best thing about it stems from the fact that it's a classic make-use-of-leftovers dish. The seabeet stems where left over from the day before I went to Belgium and the marsh samphire......well, what a state that was in! I had picked a bag of it to take with me to Gent but had left it behind. I found it rotting in the garden on my return. Nevertheless, after picking through it for half an hour I did managed to rescue just enough to produce a generous layer for the nut roast. The roast also used up the very last of my sea salt and arum flour - as well as the hazelnuts from my travels.

I have found that as a general rule when using carragheen extract to set various food items, if you wish to eat them hot - especially if intending to cut or reshape, it is best to allow the food to cool thoroughly in the fridge first, then cut or shape and only after this reheat.

1st August: FINISH! A gorgeous day; a day for gorging!!!

Any diet - especially if prolonged, has implications for heath. Some diets may produce positive short-term benefits yet, if followed over a prolonged period, produce detrimental effects on one?s health. Of course, some can have both immediate short term benefits as well as longer term ones when they are pursued not as 'diet' in the narrow sense, but as 'diet' in the broader and more general sense. At that point, even following a fairly rigid and restrictive eating regime, the diet has become second nature, the obvious and continued health benefits do the talking in terms of sustaining motivation, and the whole process has been integrated harmoniously with one?s life or life style. At the moment I'm uncertain into which category a 100% vegan foraged diet would fall - I think it would probably be the former, unless certain vitamin and mineral supplements were taken, at which point, obviously, it wouldn't be 100% foraged (if such statistics actually matter).

I haven't been for my post-diet medical examination yet, but a wonderfully unscientific "I feel great!" would seem to indicate that, at least in terms of my health, the outcome has been nothing but positive. Pursuing such a relatively restricted diet was a challenge. Nevertheless, I really do believe that the degree of that particular challenge is as nothing when compared to the challenge of avoiding what I call the elastic band effect. This is a common place observation particularly amongst those that one might call career dieters: lose vast amounts of weight and then, in the weeks and months following the end of the diet, pile all the pounds back on again - plus, sometimes, a few extra to boot! Why this happens is complex and very much down to individual psychology and habitual patterns in both thought and behaviour. Returning to the rubber band metaphor, it is as if to suddenly embark on a radical change in diet is to begin with a band of very thick elastic whereas, on the other hand, gradually integrating the diet into one's prior eating arrangements is to stretch one?s efforts against a much thinner and less resistant elastic. The question is how to stretch that elastic band so far and for so prolonged a time that, like old rubber, it loses all its elastic pull, snaps and liberates, and is unable to drag you back to square one? Certainly much of the back-dragging tension can be released by understanding the diet in ever increasing circles of interconnectivity and meaning rather than in more reductive ways - the ultimate reductive ways, of course, being those that obsess purely about fat or calorie intake.

At the very beginning of the third week into my diet - at which point I had lost a stone - a friend of mine remarked on how I should write a book on ?The Wild Food Diet?; a book which he anticipated would become the basis for the next faddy and fashionable diet sensation. I thought he was serious at first until he then delivered his punch line with absurdist aplomb: "It would be great, lose a stone in two weeks and then 10 stone in 20 weeks!" Perhaps to the clinically obese this wouldn't sound absurd at all but, of course, my friend knew that I weighed 10 1/2 stone! I dismissed my friend's book idea out of hand as, indeed, it was meant to be. However, over subsequent weeks, the idea has returned repeatedly to mind - each time in less outrageous garb.

Such a diet has both simultaneously much against it and much to recommend it. Clearly, for any diet to work for a large number of people it has, in the first place, to be realistically achievable. As regards a foraged diet - whether 100% or otherwise, this isn't currently the case simply due to the vast majority of would-be forage dieters' lack of botanical knowledge. Imagine though that you could hire a personal trainer for a month. Imagine, of course, 'Dr Fergus Drennan, nutritionist and wild food expert' - with his Dr Gillian Mckeith qualification - guiding you to dietary success (£5000 per month whatever happens - death is no excuse for non-payment; thank you very much!)! Seriously though, for the vast majority of people such a diet would provide a wonderful education in general nature awareness. It would be rich in meaning, connecting to much wider issues concerning ecology, sustainability, a sense of place and purpose and so on.........

So, did the elastic snap me back to chocolate and chips garnished with a bit of wood sorrel? Not as yet. However, I'm sure that a month is not sufficient time to undo longstanding poor eating habits - and I do have a few. Actually, in the last week I have been obsessing about just three things, none of which, fortunately, fall into the loving-junk-food-on-the-rebound category: fish, eggs and a pasta slice I made a couple of weeks ago. The eggs and fish I probably desire because there is some nutritional element in there for which my body has started to fall short. As for the pasta slice, after running a foraging course midway through my wild food month I was left with a substantial amount of leftovers. At lunch we had prepared nettle and seabeet pasta (both those plants used as pasta colouring) with wild mushrooms and various Chenopodium species, as well as a large wild salad with slow roast cherry tomatoes. At the time I didn't eat any due to the non-wild elements: the pasta flour, salad dressing, cherry tomatoes and frying oil. However, not one to waste things, I blitzed the lot in a food processor with a couple of beaten eggs and seasoning, then pressed it all into a baking tray and cooked it in the oven for half an hour. So, not having tried this before, I was curious to find out exactly what it was like. The result, as it turned out (not always the case with these experiments!) was lovely, as was everything else - the kipper, omelette and only partially wild salad.

31st August(Now later; much later): Foraging and the environment - ecological implications and sustainability issues.