Elderflower season: our first Foraging walk is today!

June is the month for Elderflowers and lovely walks.

Today starts sunny and bright with not a cloud in the sky. We are expecting 29C so it might be too hot to go for a walk in open fields, luckily enough Alexandra park is around the corner and has lots of tree cover, and  a beautiful elder flower bush to give us the main ingredient for our Cordial.

We made some elderflower thee

It is a very versatile plant and worth reading more about here

Country file had an article with more elder recipes

Medicinal information

Every year I make more and more recipes with it.

First I made the cordial, (always adding the sugar at the second stage to prevent a sticky mess when squeezing out the flowers)

Then I tend to put in the fridge the left over lemons (and slice them very thinly) and the cordial that did not fit into the bottles.  So that with the next batch I can make Elderflower Marmalade

What a lovely way to spend a bank holiday morning

Our first outing of the newly founded group: From Spade to Plate was a wonderful one.
As it was a bank holiday we had some families come and the children seem to enjoy it as much as the grown ups did.

Yesterday I picked one batch of elderflowers (from the Riverside) and added the lemons and juice in order to have a starter to finish off today.

11am sharp the friends arrived. armed with baskets and scissors, one group went to Alexandra park to pick the flowers, whilst June and 3 teenage girls made the scones.

When we came back, it became a hive of activity. The flowers were rinsed (there was a little black fly) lemons finely cut so tomorrow I can make a batch of Elderflower marmalade to have with the scones.

We bottled the juice, labelled it and went on our way bottles in hand.

This blog was first published 29/5/2017

Elderflowers from St Luke's school path

Today's From Spade to Plate was the last in this format. During lockdown we used zoom meetings to show how I cooked food from my garden and allotment. Now the weather is much better, I feel the need to get out and enjoy the local surroundings. For that reason, from next week onwards we will be going on a foraging walk and gather ingredients for tasty recipes. Before today's meeting I went out to pick a basket of Elderflower and with it we made elderflower cordial and elderflower crunch cake.

Elderflower cordial and asparagus

The sunshine has brought with it some long waited for warmth and allowed nature to catch up.
I noticed from last year's blog entry that exactly a year ago we were making elderflower cordial.
Looking around I found some lovely flowers which I turned into the first batch of cordial.

This annual activity I wanted to share with our visiting scholars as many would be able to find Elder in their own countries.

For those of the group who live near the Graduate centre, we went on a recce
 yesterday and found 5 very accessible elder trees.

The garlic in the back garden is ready to be harvested too, so that it can dry off and turned into a plat next week. We shall transplant the peppers (be sowed the seeds of peppers used earlier in the year) and inter plant them with the basil cuttings

We steamed Asparagus for lunch with poached eggs (added salt, pepper, chives and smoked zucchini)

as a sauce we used vegan garlicky mayonnaise.(with only milk and oi) or you can use the aqua faba mayonnaise recipe.

asparagus and poached eggs

strawberries almost ready

This post was originally made on 20 may 2018