A new book by Biddy White Lennon and Evan Doyle caught the eye lately.
Wild Food, Nature’s Harvest: How to Gather, Cook and Preserve (O’Brien Press, €16.99) is a comprehensive guide to collecting and using free ingredients.
Actress and food writer White Lennon and chef Doyle have been have been grasping nettles, snipping fungi and wrenching up sea weed for many’s a long year. Mushrooms are regarded as one of the trickiest wild foods because of the possibility of poisoning and even death. The book focuses on the easiest ones to identify.
“In the restaurant we serve 12 or 15 mushroom varieties when they are in season, but there are maybe as many as 50 edible varieties out there. Ireland may have more wild ingredients available than anywhere else in Europe,” Doyle says.
Could be just the book to peruse this spring, to get out there and start foraging and harvesting.
