 It's autumn and we have an embarrassment of fruit. An awful lot of apples need to do something with it and I thought I'd go for a little autumn forage to provide something extra. Now foraging you can find all sorts of things in your foraging. Best not to do foraging in town unless you have no alternative because there's just so much rubbish there and also the plants tend not to be the world for artists. I'm going out of town off down the little green lane and this will take me the quickest way possible to the canal. In society we're given certain options as to what we can consume and that's basically it. We're told to believe that this is all the options we have but there is more out there. You just have to go and look for it and many of those other options are protected in law. Now some people think that foraging is a form of stealing and that you're going out of the countryside and you're taking stuff. While theft and stealing is regulated by the theft act in 1968 and section one of the act defines what theft is it's taking with the intention of permanently depriving somebody of something and that sounds very straightforward in terms of foraging but there's an exemption. Section four paragraph three there's a specific exemption for anybody who picks wild mushrooms on the land or picks flowers, fruits or foliage from a plant growing wild on the land and does so without the idea of commercial gain so just going out to collect your own various bits and pieces that's fine. Now I'm on a footpath, no problem by that public footpath. Lots of areas of land are what they call access land under the country so I wouldn't write some way out. There is an exemption under the croat that basically means anybody who removes or damages, destroys any plant which includes foraging loses their rights of access. It's still not stealing but you don't have any right of access anymore. So here we are, blackberries, give them a taste, see what they're like. I like to take a clip top container not just because it's easy to carry but they have that little gasket in the lid so if the juice leaks it doesn't fill your rucksack full of juice. And when you pick a blackberry don't squeeze the berry cut your fingers behind the berry and pull towards you. Now if the blackberry is ripe it will literally just fall off and if it's just about ripe then it will come. If the blackberry doesn't come when you very gently tug at it it's not ripe and you don't want to be picking it anyway. And so you just work your way through picking away at the blackberries don't take them all, don't take the ones with the red leave some for other people to take later on. Carrying on down the canal out towards the countryside. Here we have some hawthorn berries. Now these are probably not quite ripe but if you take a hawthorn berry give it a squeeze. You'll see it has a sort of yellowy piff with a large piff in the middle. And these are actually quite nutritious but don't eat the piff, take the berry give it a suck, chew it up, suck it get the piff out and then spit the remainder out. You'll also see other things walking down the tote path. Here's some crab apples. It's very rare to find crab apples, real crab apples. They tend to have crossed bread with cultivated varieties which is why they're so big but if you try and eat one of these you'll get a bad stomach because they're not very good for you. They do contain not a pectin though so they're very good for making jam. Been about a year for butterflies this year and there seems to be a sudden flurry of butterflies towards the end of the summer. Sunning itself on the leaf. Here's rose hips. And rose hips are hard little berries from the dog rows. Now you try and squeeze one, it won't move it's completely solid. And that's because it's packed full of little seeds. Now the seeds are an irritant you definitely wouldn't want to eat one and it can even irritate your skin. So if you take the outside of the berry scrape out the pips, you're left with the shell. That's not really edible either but what they did for many years particularly during the Second World War they would cook those shells with some fluid and produce this very thick rich syrup which is very high in Vitamin C, very good for you. Let's continue picking blackberries. You'll see the brambles, they tend to just wind their way through the hedge row and stick out. The trouble is because they flail the hedges every year these days and the berries grow on the second year's growth then it's actually quite difficult to find blackberries and other types of fruit because flailing does kill hedges. That's the problem with modern hedge management. Oh well look, I seem to have filled my box and we've got to the edge of town. Now blackberries are very heavy, they're very full of water so if you put them in a bowl of cold water the blackberries fall and all the bits of rubbish or the bits of cobweb and things will just float to the surface and you can skim them off. I'm making some basic pastry, plain flour. I'm using oil but you could use margarine if you wish. Some people add sugar to their pastry, I'm adding a little tiny bit but not a lot. This is an awful lot of pastry. Well that's because I just picked 1.2 kilos of blackberries and I've got about 2 kilos of apples to add to that so that's an awful lot of apple turnovers. Peel the apple, these are industrial apples they were grown and bought if it was an apple which wasn't sprayed you wouldn't need to do that. I'm not adding sugar to this mix what I do is I add mixed fruit that adds sweetness but it also adds minerals it's better than the empty calories of actual just raw sugar and then in go the blackberries. Now you see the whitest tinge to this that's because I've sprinkled it over with lots of semolina and the semolina when it's cooked will swell up, absorb the juice so it doesn't run everywhere and make a mess and also semolina adds a bit of protein. So here's my big wad of pastry it's had some time to stand while I was peeling the apples and now I'm just chopping it into lumps ready to make each of the turnovers. The reason I'm making apple turnovers is it's quite simple. If you make apple turnovers you don't need lots of pie tins all you do you roll up the dough put the fruit inside and it cooks inside this makes life an awful lot easier. Now I'm going to start by putting some of the mix into this bowl why I'm doing that will become apparent later. Pack it in, level it off and put it to one side. Now I'm going to flatten out the table and begin to roll out each of the lumps of dough not in a circle but in a sort of oval shape and that's because I want to fold these in half I'm going to wet the edge and scuff it a little that's so that it provides a better seal if you just roll the edge together sometimes it leaks when you cook bit of water softens the dough makes it seal a lot better so now a scoop on a quarter of what remains and then form it into a little pad of fruit inside the circle of the dough and then pull it over the top and I begin just by tamping down the edge and then I'll turn it over to make a good seal so that when it cooks in the oven the juice and the blackness and the apples doesn't run over there now of course that's a sealed container now so what I have to do is put a couple of holes in the top because otherwise the steam from cooking would burst your little pastry envelope so there we are turnover number one it's turnover number two and there's turnover number three and now we have turnover number four and what I'm going to do I'm going to freeze these these are very large each one would last us about a week once it's been cooked and by keeping them in the freezer then we can keep them for a few months if you want to what I'm making now is a crumble topping and some people do very dry crumble toppings but this topping that's more like cookie dough or shortbread bit more oil bit more sugar and then just liberally sprinkle it all over the top and again the recipe for pastry or crumble you'll find those all over the place next morning the crumble has been cooked and already has been eaten the turnovers have been in the freezer overnight and as you can see they're a bit icy because they're frost that will keep us going for at least a month or two months so that over the winter we can take them out and cook much better than jam making because you destroy less in nutrition and you're adding less empty calories in the form of sugar what I'd encourage you to do go out and discover your local area find what's there and if you walk regularly towards the end of the year you'll know all these whole form berries and you'll be able to supplement your everyday food with the taste of the wine