Food Made Slowly: Pickled Ash Keys

I love food. Probably too much.

I also like trying new foods. Living in Los Angeles, I had access to just about every cuisine imaginable available to me within 5-10 miles. One of the most difficult things about moving from West Los Angeles to rural Fife was getting used to the fact that if I wanted halfway decent Mexican or Chinese food (or any other ethnicity that wasn't a part of the British empire), I needed to learn to cook it myself. When I left the Scottish countryside for the outskirts of metropolitan Cardiff, the greatest consolation was the availability of Continental, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, African/Caribbean, Indian, and Halal markets. When looking for housing, one of our biggest problems was finding a house with a kitchen big enough to accommodate our accumulation of herbs, spices, and sauces from different cuisines (not to mention my homemade pickles, preserves, brews, and infusions).

As much as I love eating a variety of world foods though, I recognize that living in the UK and eating a diet heavy in exotic produce isn't particularly sustainable. So, alongside my attempts to up my game in Thai, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Korean cooking, I'm also trying to learn about foraging for local wild foods, herbs and spices, and plant-based medicine.

In Los Angeles, I was never close enough to wild spaces to even think about foraging, but when our nearest neighbor was about a mile away, it was easy to look at all the green (and yellow, and red, and purple) growing things around me and wonder which of them might be useful. I still consider myself a very novice forager, but I'm learning to identify and use new plants all the time, most of them just by keeping my eyes open during my daily 1-mile walk to the train station. It's amazing the variety of useful and/or edible living things I've encountered just within the village: hawthorn, brambles, nettles, plantain, cow parsley, common hogweed, ground ivy, elder, red valerian, garlic mustard, herb Robert, and ivy-leaved toadflax. (To my great disappointment, I haven't yet found any local ground elder, sweet cicely, or wild garlic).

Ash keys in situ

I subscribe to a number of mailing lists and Facebook groups about identifying and using wild plants, and a while ago, I got an email containing a recipe for pickled ash keys. At the time, I didn't even know what an ash key was, let alone whether or not I'd like them pickled, but a couple of weeks ago, I noticed several clusters of the seed pods hanging from a row of ash trees about 50 yards from my front doorstep, so I looked up the recipe again. I still have no idea whether I'll like them, but I've been in a pickling mood recently, and for the cost of two cups of vinegar, a few spices, and an hour of my time, I figured they were worth a try.

Crochet project: Jute Basket

The Viking/Victorian shirt has been hibernating recently, partly due to indecision over a minor construction detail, and partly because all of my limited supply of energy has been devoted to my application for Indefinite Leave to Remain (aka permanent residency) in the UK. I've continued to make some things, but they tend to be either brainless chipping away at slow, tedious projects (like stitching over the anachronistic metal eyelets on my wedding cotehardie, or knocking out a few more embroidery motifs on my early 19th century shift), or quick, instant-gratification type things like baking, making lemon curd, or gathering elderflowers for cordial.

Today's post is about one such instant-gratification project: a basket/bag crocheted from jute garden twine.