Challenge seven: Live off the Island

Apologies for the delay in this one guys - as you see, I've been rather busy!

After a week of scouting out all that Brownsea has to offer, and discussing with the staff here how I can do this without killing myself, I stepped up to the mark for Andrew's challenge to live only on foraged food for the day. He added the disheartening p.s. "Food foraged from the BBC canteen doesn't count!" Well Andrew, thanks to the oddly skilled warden Justin and boatman Mike I not only fed myself from the Island, but did it in style with three delicious meals - taking fresh, local and seasonal to the extreme! As Justin said "any idiot can be uncomfortable"

What follows is a little diary of my delicious day and a few of the things it taught me.

7am - get up and start the hunt for breakfast. To be honest, this one was easy due to the large number of very free-free range chickens that roam the island so it was really just a matter of finding where they lay. Fresh Brownsea eggs, not a bad start!

8.30am - Begin the forage proper, on the hunt for acorns, chestnuts, fungi, fruits and greens for lunch. After several hours wandering the island, head in the vegetation I did begin to appreciate what life for our hunter-gatherer ancestors must have been like. A lot of walking, not much reward! At this time of year the main autumn food glut has passed and with an island full of extremely efficient squirrels the truth is that it was hard work to find food.

As my stomach began to rumble and I rooted through pile after pile of neatly shelled nuts at the base of the chestnut trees, I wondered how it was that I'd suddenly dropped several places in the food chain. I found myself reduced to being entirely at the mercy of the red rodents, hoping they had left me some scraps to glean lunch from...And then I found it, the mother of all chestnut trees where there was food enough for us all. I loved that tree because it meant I didn't have to eat insects for lunch.

1.30 - Met Justin at his cottage for the grand cook-up. Five hours, broken up by our daily production meeting with the BBC team, had earned me about a dozen chestnuts, two acorns, a handful of fungi, some rosehips, 18 blackberries and a bunch of nettles. Riches! Oh, and some beautiful Brownsea rabbit... Now at this point I should come clean about the source of the rabbit. Mike and I did faithfully put traps out the night before, baited with carrot and chocolate (a rabbity favourite apparently), but alas, not a nibble. So bearing in mind that the residents routinely eat rabbit here and not particularly wanting to go out with a gun, I kindly accepted the offer of a rabbit from property manager Angela's freezer, caught on the Island a few months ago.

2.45 - Sit down to the most delicious lunch of rabbit, nettle and fungi stew with chestnut and wild fruit bannock - see recipes at the bottom. I'm not exaggerating when I say this was one of the most tasty and appreciated meals I've ever eaten. Fresh, foraged fare. Have a go if you can get the ingredients!

4.00 - After a little sit down to recover and let lunch warm me through, I headed to the jetty for a spot of fishing. Boatman Mike met me there for a quick fishing tutorial and a whole lot of doubtful looks. I don't know why, I only caught my gloves in the hook a few times and I think quickly picked up the old flick and throw casting action. "you'll know if you catch one because you won't have a clue what to do" he smiled broadly at me as he left me to my rod and line in the gathering darkness. I've been fishing before, but only in a fish farm where the fish practically jump into the net shouting 'eat me eat me', so after an hour of fruitless casting and reeling I was starting to think fish was off the menu for supper.

And then something extraordinary happened. The line suddenly took on a life of it's own and, as predicted, I had no idea what to do. So I did a fair bit of hopping around the jetty - no doubt to the great amusement of the BBC dive boat who were preparing for Simon's live dive. Assisted by Anna Guthrie, who had come to offer moral support, I eventually worked out how to reel the beast in and landed my very first pollack. Unfortunately, being completely dark, and rather occupied by a large slimy fish, there are no photo's of this momentous moment so you'll just have to believe me.

5.30 - Me, Anna and fish head back to the Villa where I bit my lip and got stuck into gutting, filleting and de-scaling my supper. After a break to watch the penultimate Autumnwatch I sat down to a gorgeous, subtle and outrageously fresh fish supper with a large contented smile on my face.

Three hot meals and a lot of wandering and waiting later, I not only lived off the Island, but ate good food from my immediate surroundings, delivered straight to my plate in the ultimate in sustainable gourmet foraging.

And more than that, I learnt a great deal about the Island, what's growing here, life as a squirrel and the ins and outs of line fishing in all it's slimy splendour. There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how we've become completely removed from our food and I have to say, taking up this challenge did make me acutely aware of three things -

1. In normal life, I eat A LOT! We live in such a world of plenty...

2. Most of the time, I have no idea where my food has come from and the huge amount of work that's probably gone in to getting it to my plate.

3. If it came to it I could totally go bush on Brownsea.

So there you have it Andrew, you may have made me a wild-food convert!

Wild Food Wednesday recipe's -

Rabbit and fungi stew

Ingredients:

2 small joints of rabbit, pan fried to sear

6 amethyst deceiver mushrooms, beheaded

1 large field mushroom

2 large handfuls of nettle, washed and chopped

3 small garlic cloves (you'll just have to allow me this one)

Sear the rabbit with the garlic, add the mushrooms and nettle to cook through then pour in some hot water and boil for about half and hour to get all the juicy goodness from the bones. Add a stock cube and a dash of sherry if you're not roughing it like me.


Wild fruit and nut bannock

Ingredients:

Sweet chestnuts/acorns/hazelnuts/beech mast, peeled and blanched

Rosehips, halved and de-seeded

Blackberries

Crumble the nuts a bit and roast them before pounding into a sort of flour with pestle and mortar. Add a little water to make a sticky dough. Squash in the fruit, shape and fry like a giant fruity burger.