Food Safari at Harvest at Jimmy’s

I knew there was a growing interest in foraging for wild food, but nothing prepared me for the hundreds of people who took part in our wild food forays at Harvest at Jimmy’s in mid-September! Over the course of the festival weekend we took nearly 300 people into the woods and along the hedgerows at Jimmy’s Farm, near Ipswich in Suffolk.

Harvest is a food and music festival which has run for several years in Suffolk with the support of television presenter, Jimmy Doherty, Jamie Oliver’s best mate from school! The food side of the festival featured demonstrations from such illustrious names as Yottam Ottolenghi, Mary Berry, Monty Don and Matthew Fort.

Food Safari teamed up with Olive magazine to hold a programme of cookery demonstrations with chefs Madalene Bonvini-Hamel and Ross Pike of the British Larder near Woodbridge and Mark Lloyd, chef and wild food expert, with his own pub The Appleford, near Oxford. All three chefs demonstrated dishes using wild food and game from the Wild Meat Company.

We were even lucky enough to be given two truly Giant Puffballs to cook with.

Our foraging expeditions focussed on hedgerows and weeds on Saturday and woods and fungi on Sunday. We took almost 50 people in each group and added a couple of extra sessions to meet the demand!

As most people know the organisers of Harvest, Big Wheel, have recently gone into administration. I don’t know yet what this means for the future of Harvest at Jimmy’s. If rumour is correct, Jimmy and his team will be taking it in hand themselves to produce another great food and music festival in September 2012. If they do, Food Safari will definitely be there!

For a taste of Harvest at Jimmy’s watch this piece from the BBC Look East >