Wah! Kao-chan, I hold you in a whole new respect as photography goddess after trying out taking photos with my BF’s digital SLR. So many options! And after all of this torture to my wrists from holding, aiming, and setting the (bloody heavy) thing I found out I had the wrong ISO setting and the pictures turned out grainy anyway. *cries*
Luckily ever-paranoid, I had taken some pictures with my regular camera too. But they don’t look nearly as good as the SLR ones as I’m already able to tell! Oh well, I guess I’ll be taking pictures in parallel for a while until I have it figured out.
On to the bento…
Main course: Spanish potato tortilla on a bed of salad. Black garlic olives.
Side dish: Cherry tomato salad with red onion and fresh basil; green garlic olive.
Dessert: Freshly-picked forest berries on yoghurt, all frozen to serve as ice pack (this goes back into the freezer until tomorrow).
I love summer! Not just because it’s warm and nice but it’s also the season of fruits, herbs and berrypicking. My grandmother used to go to the forest with me to pick berries and I plan to do the same with my children and grandchildren, if I ever have any. It’s so important to know where the food comes from when it’s not bought in the supermarket. How to live off the land and what delicacies there are hiding in our own forests and meadows is starting to become a sadly forgotten art, and even though I grew up mostly in a city myself it saddens me when I meet people my age who can barely tell a chestnut tree from a cherry tree and would never eat anything straight from the forest. (I say to hell with hygiene, forest berries taste the best when fresh from the branch.)
Today I went to the forest in search of mushrooms. I didn’t find any yet, although the weather was perfect – I guess there were too many mushroom pickers before me! – but I did find an abundance of wild raspberries, forest strawberries and blueberries. I’m especially happy about the forest strawberries (or smultron as they are called in Swedish) because they taste so much better than the giant strawberries you can buy in supermarkets. Talk about a taste explosion in every single, tiny berry you pick. I had a hard time picking any for later and not putting every berry in my mouth immediately!
It is no coincidence or photographic accessorizing though that amidst all the berries, there is also a flower. When I went out to the forest with my grandmother, we did not only pick berries and mushrooms!
The yellow flower giving such a pretty contrast to the red and blue berries is called St. John’s Wort or in German, Johanniskraut and can be used dried as a tea, or steeped in alcohol as an antibiotic tincture that speeds up wound healing. It is rumoured to be good against mild depressions even!
When I saw it growing wild and abundant in the forests close to here, I remembered how we used to collect it and decided to pick and dry some of my own. Herbal medicine, and knowledge of wild herbs is sadly a vanishing art here in Europe, and I am very interested in keeping the knowledge of living off the land alive, at least as little as I ever learned about it! I’m planning to write more articles on vanishing vegetable sorts and herbs on this blog as I stumble across them. Did you know, for example, that you can eat dandelion leaves as a salad in spring, if you pick them very young and before they grow flowers? (I plan to sneak that into a bento next spring, if I get the chance…)
I put the rest of the berries on top of yoghurt into muffin cups (I took two for each cup as I was worried one alone might be too soft) and froze them. I wonder if freezing yoghurt is such a good idea? But on the other hand, I do like frozen yoghurt, and I like the possibility of using it as an icepack as well, so I’ll keep you updated on whether the cups held up to the abuse when I manage to integrate them into another bento…
St John’s Wort tablets are sold as a depression remedy in health shops here in the UK. However, a word of warning – be wary of it if you are on the Pill. As netdoctor.co.uk says:
“The chief drawback is that the remedy, derived from the yellow flowering hedgerow plant, interacts with other drugs causing them to metabolise through the body too quickly. This is obviously very significant for people on the contraceptive pill or the blood-thinning drug warfarin, who are at risk of a stroke. ”
Your hedgerow stash is fantastic! Our usual scavenging season is the early Autumn – around September time when we pick blackberries and damsons from the roadsides and stew them for pies and crumbles. A lady in the village where I lived in France made jelly from hawthorn berries, which was lovely. (She also sold dandelion leaves for salad, but I declined to buy them. The name pisse-en-lit (piss in bed) somehow did not encourage me to investigate further) Inspired by her, I tried eating a hawthorn berry fresh from the bush and it was not lovely in the slightest.
When I was younger, we collected elderflowers and my mum made them into cordial, which is possibly the most delightfully summery drink imaginable. One year she branched out into “elderflower champagne”, producing several bottles of drink which were stored on the landing until they were ready. One night, we all woke to a loud bang. The pressure of the “champagne” gases had caused the bottles to start exploding. The experiment was cancelled.
Sometimes we find a few cobnuts, or wild hazels (and I think I’ve recently discovered the walnut tree in the field down the road, too). In late October or early November, we collect chestnuts and roast them – yum.
If you like hedgerow cuisine, you might be interested in a book called “Food for Free” by Richard Mabey. I have a copy which I had forgotten about, and have just been reading through it – there are tons of things you can harvest if you know what you’re doing!
But but but…I use a point and shoot too ^_^;;
I LOVE berries! Your pictures and story make me want some fresh ones right now… *sigh* Have you ever had thimbleberries? We used to pick those on the side of the road and they’re really yummy! They’re a type of raspberry.
Kaoko – I thought you were using a SLR! So I’ve got to adore your photography skills even more?
Pikko – I don’t think thimbleberries grow on this side of the pacific, but we have a lot of other wild members of the raspberry family – cloudberries, yum…
;)
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