Wild Pickle

Loved running these fermentation workshops for and foraging walks for Your Local Pantry - YMCA North Staffordshire supported by TopCashback 💚

The Pantry in Stoke, connected to and have been busy, made possible by funding from . We are mid running 2 fermentation workshops and 2 foraging walks, and creating recipes for the herbs outside in the planters surrounding .

We headed out into the sunshine and gathered fresh fennel, mints, walking onions, garlic onions, oregano, chard and more from the planters we worked on last year to plant edible herbs and perennials. We came back to the ymca kitchen and created sauerkrauts to take home with lots of beautiful combinations of flavours form the herbs & some lemon.

Thanks to everyone that attended for a wonderful session! 💚
We have one foraging walk left with spaces. If you attend the pantry you can come along. Please contact the pantry for further information.

Foraging Slop being served up by ai. A great article by Galloway Wild Foods to discern what is real and what isn’t. It is quite concerning some dangerous inaccurate information has been shared and taken as gospel in books or articles written by ai and with fake authors. Please take time to work it out 💚

Most of you know me for the past decade and more for fermenting & foraging stuff! It is a funny pastime to have but it’s a hyper focus and a hobby I can’t see passing by any time soon! 😂

I spend every day trying to share the love and do something to build my business around real food & flavour. To share the love a bit more and to be able to write a bit more than I can in a small post on here, I’m organising myself to send out newsletters with recipes in, seasonal foraging, books I love. If you are interested, please sign up www.wildpickle.co.uk and bare with me while I get this going and learn to write and share more 🙂

Thanks for your support 🙂🥰💚

This next newsletter has a lovely wild “kimchi” ferment that was a highlight during the Wildbiome Project 2025.

What kind of recipes & information would you like to receive?

Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤️

Love the planet and your fellow humans and the ones you love by making some food to share, connecting, doing something loving, getting out into nature with your loved ones and finding some of these gorgeous little scarlet elf cups that are up and look so pretty at this time of year! ❤️

Scarlet elf cups ❤️
(Sarcoscypha austriaca) are special fungi, they won’t be found on a plate in a restaurant, as they are not the most abundant, or on the top tasty mushroom list, so the magic and love for these beautiful fungi is in finding them for yourself or with those you love! ❤️

You’ll find them on dead, decaying, damp hardwood, often in mossy, wooded and shady areas. Aren’t they pretty?! ❤️

They can be confused with the edible Ruby Elfcup (Sarcosypha coccinea) which you can only tell apart under a microscope. This is time of year there is not anything you could confuse it with.

They can be eaten, they add colour to a pickle or a ramen dish for example. They need to be scrubbed and cleaned well and are a little fiddly. I prefer to cook these little mushrooms.

Either which way, sending lots of love out to you all today! ❤️