Was delighted to be invited to the Wicklow music festival Beyond The Pale and to talk on stage with Ali Dunworth about, what else, mushrooms (!) and all of the ways that they are magical. And why they should be on your plate!
Courtney Tyler of Hips and Haws Wildcrafts and Ali Dunworth
It was so enjoyable and what an incredible festival. The music line up was incredible.
Courtney showing tasters to share, pickled mushrooms and mushroom chocolates
I brought some interesting mushroom tasters to share. Some balsamic pickled shiitake mushrooms, dandelion buds and wild garlic. Also made some Lion’s Mane and peanut butter dark chocolates.
Dei, Dearbhla, Courtney and Grainne
Best of all I got to bring Sadhbh the bus and my dearest girlfriends!
I am so happy to report that we will be offering another full day intensive workshop where we will explore medicinal mushrooms in depth. We will make medicine together to bring home with you. We will share a full day together in the beautiful space in a very special venue in Blessington, Co Wicklow, Ireland.
Join us in this intensive medicinal mushroom full day workshop for a fascinating exploration into the diverse and mysterious world of fungi! Together we will explore the many ways that you can incorporate mushrooms into your life as various medicinal preparations and as delicious food.
We will: -Study and learn about 10 species of medicinal mushrooms, half of which grow wild in abundance around us in Ireland/ UK. Some samples will be on hand to see/ touch/ smell and taste. We will learn about their health benefits and immuno-modulating properties, including links and references to scientific studies.
–Learn how to identify them, their habitat, their physical properties. We will learn about how to safely dry or preserve mushrooms to keep their properties intact, or indeed how to enhance or harness their properties, such as providing us with a bio-available form of Vitamin D and other minerals, vitamins and antioxidants.
–Medicinal Mushroom preparation– We will discuss and demo how to make an aqueous extract, alcohol extract, alcohol-free glycerin extract and the benefits of these vs how and when to combine these for a dual or full-spectrum mushroom extract. We will learn how to create water extracted mushroom powders. We will discuss when there may be contraindications for use.
-Learn how and why mushrooms offer powerful nutrition and learn some delicious recipes and easy ways to bring mushrooms into your diet and wellness routine. Special preparation consideration for enhancing nutritive value and to safely use and consume wild fungi. We will discuss some different cooking methods and a variety of food preparations including: drinks, desserts, mushroom jerky, gomasio/ food condiments, pickles, etc.
–How and where to source medicinal mushrooms: which mushrooms are possible to forage from the wild and which fungi are easier to cultivate and some resources about how to do this. We will share some reputable sources and how to choose good quality mushroom products. We will learn about how to distinguish from a fruiting body and mycelium and their respective medicinal properties.
You will be provided with a recommended reading list and extensive notes and you will go home with a medicinal mushroom preparation made together on the day.
Medicinal mushrooms drinks, tasters and a healthy lunch will be provided on the day.
There will be some dried mushrooms and dual-extract tinctures available on the day to purchase, should you like to.
Where: Blessington, Co Wicklow- the location will be disclosed closer to the date. You may need a car to travel, but we can arrange collection from a nearby train or bus if needed.
When: Saturday 16th July 2022 Time: 1030-1600
How Much: €155 Early Bird (£132) / €175 Full Price (£149)Early bird tickets are available until the 1st July 2022 and are full price of €175 after that date.
**PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU WILL BE CHARGED IN POUNDS STERLING, HOWEVER THIS EVENT WILL INDEED BE RUN IN IRELAND!
***THE EXCHANGE RATE WILL FLUCTUATE DAILY BUT SHOULD BE VERY CLOSE TO THE EURO PRICE PLUS BOOKING FEE.
This is a book that I always recommend on my fermentation workshops. Its written by the Irish author Dearbhla Reynolds and is packed full of easy to follow recipes. And not only how to make the ferments, but what to do with them!
I spent many a fermentation crazed 3 or 4 day and night frenzy whipping up her recipes.
Delighted to be reunited with this wonderful book after having ‘lent’ my copy out and never got it back!
Here is a Rice Miso Breakfast idea that I am going to make in the morning:
Doesn’t it sound good? Are you a savoury breakfast lover also?
Rice Miso Breakfast recipe by the Cultured Club.
In conjunction with the book or instead of, another resource of hers that I cannot recommend highly enough is her online course: Saucy- The Secret of Sauce. I love it because even I am guilty of having soggy kimchi at the back of the fridge or preserved lemons lingering and languishing in my pantry- unsure of how to use them to their potential. This course gives you 26 saucy recipes of how to use ingredients like those to transform them into incredible tasting and probiotic live sauces.
We spent a full day and night soaking and cooking kilos and kilos of beans in preparation for the workshop.
There were lots of lovely folk in attendance: lots of nutritionists, chefs, beginning to advanced fermenters, and all around cool people.
Here are some images of the workshop. I’d highly recommend a workshop with Robin if you are interested in expanding your knowledge of the magic that is koji.
We all went home with our own jars of sweet miso- and it should be ready to taste in 6-8 weeks.
Some pics from The Cultured Club in Belfast with The Koji Kitchen Miso Workshop
On a totally separate but very important aside- we were lucky enough to eat the best Indian food I’ve ever tasted on this trip. EVER! My tastebuds almost couldn’t cope. And it just looked like a nondescript bog standard take-away. If you are in Belfast you must taste this food! Bites of India at 97 Ravenhill Road. I will be dreaming of that dinner for a long time to come!
There are soo very many books that inspire me and that I learn from. Here is a small selection of books and authors whom I admire and respect. Among many others! I’ll do more posts with other books to share with you another time as well.
This is one book post of many: as I am a huge book-aholic! It’s an addiction that I am happy to feed. There are more book posts here in my blog and on Instagram.
I get asked so often to recommend books and resources that I like to learn from. The following are some excellent places to start!
Hedgerow Medicine by Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal. The book focuses more on medicinal plants, how to identify, harvest, process, recipes. A great place to start from and a beautiful book, full of recipes and methods to use these local wild plants as medicine. (Plus, having met them a couple of times- they are beautiful people!)
River Cottage Mushrooms by John Wright. A great beginners guide to edible fungi and their dangerous lookalikes. I also enjoy listening to his other Foraging books on Audibles.
Edible Mushrooms by Geoff Dann highly recommended.
Trees in Britain by Roger Phillips (also any or all of his Foraging books, he’s a legend, who sadly just passed recently). If you’re interested in mushrooms, you’ll soon learn that you need to know the trees!
The Forager Handbook by @miles_irving_wild_food High end and Chefy recipes and an excellent resource of edible wild foods found in the UK and Ireland. A fellow Association of Foragers member. Not a beginners book I would say but it’s a great compilation of wild plants and elaborate recipes.
Eat Weeds Cookbook by @eatweedsuk Robin Harford. Another Foraging wild food legend and fellow AoF member. His website is comprehensive and I’d recommend signing up to his mailing list.
Extreme Greens Understanding Seaweeds by Sally McKenna a great book with seaweed ID and delicious easy to use recipes to incorporate seaweeds into your every day diet.
New Wildcrafted Cuisine by @pascalbaudar I love all of his books, a pioneer in new wild food processes including Fermentation. Follow him on Instagram and you can also sign up for his online classes.
@alysf Alys Fowler The Thrifty Forager. Beautiful simple to follow book, she has another one about preserving also. Great for urban foraging.
Botany in a Day @thomasjelpelI’m excited to be learning more about identifying plant families with this book. He also sells a card game to help learn these skills.
I was fortunate to take Joe up on an offer to visit his woodland. Joe lives on a farm in Tipperary and his family planted up some of the fields with forestry in March 2000 as part of a long term plan to reinstate the native woodland habitat.
When Joe, Eimear and Selina were telling me that there was a huge abundance of fungi there, to be honest I thought, yes, there are so many fungi in so many places – yet I was not prepared for what we came across!
In my naiveté I totally underestimated the drive to Tipperary from Wicklow, in my mind it was an hour at most. However it was well worth it, not only for the fungi, but to spend a surprisingly lovely day with really special people! Joss, Anna, Manini, Jamie, Joanne, Anna, Selina, Eimear, Joe and myself.
It was a wet and soggy 25 October when I arrived after a 2.5 hour drive there. I was greeted by Joe’s warm smile and a sputtering campfire that Joe had gone to much effort to light along with a gazebo and tables to meet everyone around.
We laid out some of my favourite mushroom books, some dried mushrooms samples and medicinal mushroom tinctures to discuss and introduced ourselves to each other. We then headed out to explore the undergrowth of the Norway Spruce plantation. It was like entering an enchanted fairy glen and we were immediately greeted by literally hundreds of thousands of mushroom fruiting bodies.
mushrooms in huge abundance amongst a norway spruce plantation in Tipperary
Mushrooms in crazy abundance amongst a Norway spruce plantation in Tipperary- have you ever seen anything like it? I haven’t! This was in every direction!
Thank you to Anna and Selina for some of these images!
I am intolerant to most dairy so Iove to find ways to still be able to eat cheese!
I love this book Artisan Vegan Cheeses by Miyoko Schinner
I’ll share here a photo montage I shared as a story on Instagram of the process:
This last step with blending in the oil is what gives your cheese a cheesy texture when kept cool in the fridge, much like a brie consistency. The nutritional yeast adds a cheesy flavour.
This was one of the most memorable days of my life. I would like to share this story with you. The only photo I have of the day is the one below.
I will try to challenge myself to make a video telling this story. So far I have only shared it with close friends and I tell some of the story here: in my interview with Sophie and the Soulfinders.
In the meantime I will leave this post here to remind myself to challenge myself to write this experience out for the world. If you actually read this, give me a nudge to finish it:)
A few of the women and I enjoyed painting ourselves up in achiote and having a fun photoshoot with candles on our last night together in the Ecuadorean rainforest.
I feel very fortunate to have crossed paths with and spent time with the formidable Judith Hoad. I first met this woman in 2003 when I was studying Naturopathy at CNM in Dublin.
She made a strong impression and years later I tracked her down once again and this time committed myself to a long drive up to the wilds of Donegal for a long weekend every month for six months.
Myself and four others were amongst the last to attend Judith’s “Natural Medicine for Householders” course around her kitchen table, next to a warm wood burning range at her off grid cottage way up there in the wild lands of rural Donegal.
It was a transformative experience for me, and one that I can say with certainly changed the course of my life. The exposure to her intentional off grid and simple living was eye opening and sparked my passion in living in alternative ways.
We spent many afternoons around Judith’s kitchen table, learning from her hard won wisdom of experience. Judith was nearing 80 years old and had learned all she knew the hard way, experience, intuition, books but limited access and certainly no internet.
She generously passed on her knowledge to us, as we sat in rapt attention. She is a tough taskmaster and you have to have thick skin at times if she gets cross! And at the same time, we learned about the food that grew in her garden, both cultivated and wild. We learned how to make salves, creams, lotions, tinctures and decoctions.
We were served delicious healthy soul food full of love and care and received her cookbook of favourite recipes at the end of the course.
Ill always be grateful for having had this opportunity.
I have very few photos of that time but here are a few:
