Wild food from the Park - February

Our year-long local wild food quest continued last month with another way of using the Jew's ear or jelly ear fungus that also served as the key ingredient of January's meal. This time, as our tame elder thicket had produced another excellent fungal crop, we made a mushroom tart, á la "30 minute cook" recipe by the lovely Nigel Slater.

We also found the first young leaves of this season's wild sorrel growing in the rough of the Park's golf course, so we picked some of those to garnish the tart and add another wild harvested element to the meal.

So, finely chopped Jew's-ear mushrooms were lightly fried in olive oil and butter with finely chopped garlic, sliced boring white supermarket mushrooms and some wild Stirlingshire chanterelle mushrooms that we preserved in hot vinegar in 2009, before draining and storing in olive oil. Some puff pastry was rolled out and laid on a baking tray, then scored with a knife all the way round about an inch in from the edge. The mushroom mixture was spooned out evenly across the pastry inside the scoring, and parmesan grated over the top. After baking in the oven for 20 minutes, it looked like this:

We served it garnished with the wild sorrel, topped with a wee fried quail's egg, and with fried wedges of Scottish Maris piper potatoes:

Lovely grub! I wonder, however, if we can manage not to base March's meal on this same fungus...

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