Yet again there has been a bit of a gap since my last post. Well you see I got told by a lovely reader that I was very talented, and then my head grew to the size of a leatherback turtle - largest of the sea turtles, can be sighted off the UK coast (the turtle, not my head) - and I was subsequently rendered unable to type as I needed both hands to hold up my massive nut.
So far in this post there has been no mention of the F-word! ('Fish', obviously. Come on!). In fact you'll have to wait until the very end to hear a mention of any of our gill-bearing friends in this bad-boy rebel of a post, because tonight I will mostly be carping on (hehe) about plants!
This stems (hehe hehe) from a day late in August when I joined a Coastal Wild Food Course run by Sonny Khan, a master of foraging and a heavyweight in the 'sustainable living' ring. Together with the other delegates, I spent a day rambling happily around the lovely Arnside coast, stopping here and there to eat it. Hmmm, I sound like a goat.
Honestly I have never eaten so much verge and salt marsh in my life. And probably dog-wee too, but I'm not dwelling on that. Who knew that so much of the green stuff growing around our coast was edible? Not me, I thought it was mostly grass! But then I am an embarrassment to The Wildlife Trusts with my poor botanical knowledge. So what have we got and do you have to look hard for it? Well, no. I took one step off the promenade at Arnside and stood on our appetiser.
From the crunchy, refreshing sea radish and the spinach-like orache, to the 'I've got a trendy reputation' marsh samphire and its mimic, the annual sea blite, there were literally edibles everywhere. The majority I believe would be best used as a salad leaf or gently wilted as you would with spinach. There are many different types out there, which is good because I don't think we have many in any real abundance on the Cumbrian coast, so it's diversity all the way. And on that note there are some best-practice guidelines you should follow when foraging to ensure the sustainability (we love that word) of the plants - best to read up about this before heading out, or even better sign up for one of Sonny's courses. It is really worth learning a thing or two about these plants because they are there, they are edible and they are far more interesting than a pre-packed salad bag, plus you get to be humongously more self-satisfied when eating a meal that you literally gathered part of. I never get to feel that smug in a supermarket!
So we spent a highly enjoyable day meandering around the coastline, stopping for a nibble of sea plantain there, an amuse bouche of sea beet (pictured above) there. My favourite piece of Arnside wildlife was sea arrow grass which tastes brilliantly like coriander but contains a smidge of cyanide and so I feel compelled to tell you not to consume it in large quantities.
In my unrelenting ignorance I expected the focus of the course to be on seaweeds, and while we do have some of those as well (gutweed, egg wrack, channel wrack...), the coastal plants were far more diverse and also much easier to prepare for eating (do a once-over for caterpillars and you're good to go). We had a quick look at the sea weeds and periwinkles in the rock pools, then going back to my fish-lady roots, I found myself knee deep in the sea, shuffling alongside a man in white underpants, performing the act of 'fluking'. It was definitely a day of firsts. Fluking is a method of catching flounder (or flukes/flooks) where you walk through the water until you stand on one, at which point you master all instinctive reactions to yelp, and instead keep the fish trapped under your foot until you can reach down and grab it. Well it was great fun but the flounder either saw me or the white pants coming and all survived to dodge feet another day.
So thanks ever so much to Sonny, it was a super course from which I went home full of knowledge and erm, roughage.
