School’s food and bushcraft day

A group of Year 10s (14/15 year olds) enjoyed a day of wild food foraging, sausage making and bushcraft at Food Safari HQ last Thursday.

The children from Ipswich School minced some of our rare-breed pork.

Invented their own sausage fillings – some conservative just a bit of pepper – others more adventurous garlic, chile and ginger.

They worked in pairs to stuff and link their sausages, as one person pushes through the meat and the other holds the growing sausage, finding just the right grip to get a nice even sausage! It’s fair to say that many of the sausages where a bit wonky – fat at one end, skinny at the other – but they tasted great when we barbecued them for lunch later.

With our wild food expert, Jon Tyler, the group explored the fields and hedgerows on our small holding and were intrigued to hear you can eat so many things from the wild.

Someone found a mushroom, but far from being edible, Jon told us it was one of the most poisonous mushrooms in Europe! We enjoyed the gory details of how the Sulphar Tuft will make you ill to start with as your stomach tries to get rid of the toxins, you’ll then start to feel better – for a day or two – before the toxins reach your kidneys and it kills you! 

We gathered lots of delicate elderflowers to make elderflower doughnuts or fritters.

Lunch was, thankfully, better that better than a normal school lunch! Our own sausages, salads and locally made bread were followed by meringues and ice cream from our neighbours, Marybelle Dairy.

The afternoon was about learning some bushcraft skills.

We whittled sticks. And Jon lit a friction fire. “One strike and your Bear Grylls” he joked, “one hundred strikes and it’s time to look for a new job!”  Jon did it in two strikes – most of the group took a hundred!

Jon showed us how to make a nest using some hay, a tiny bit of birch bark and some thistle down.

The trick was a gentle blow to get the spark to take.

Once the fire was properly alight, we mixed a simple bread dough we’d made earlier with some blueberries. It was the wrong time of year to find wild berries but in September you might add blackberries. We rolled out the dough in our hands and twisted it around the whittled sticks.

Then cooked them in the embers of the fire.

One cooked the Berry Twists were swiftly eaten and the boys, as boys will, turned their whittled sticks into javelins!

The day had been packed full of new experiences and lots of delicious food!