Habitat: Wood sorrel prefers moist soil, and partial shade. Patches of wood sorrel are prevalent on forest floors, and are often found near wild violets, cleavers, and wild onions

Leaves – raw or cooked. A delicious lemony flavour, the leaves make a refreshing, thirst-quenching munch and are also added to salads, soups, sauces etc

It’s deliciously sour, but in a pleasant, non-bitter way. It reminds me of lemons

As a seasoning, it provides a lemony/vinegary taste to whatever it’s added to

Once you’ve tasted a sorrel, you’ll never be able to forget the flavor and therefore will have a VERY VERY hard time misidentifying it in the future

Wood Sorrel only feels at home in moist, semi-shady areas

A walk in the woods, especially in spring in shady areas, can bring a welcome glimpse of vivid, fresh green – Wood Sorrel

Common sorrel has been cultivated for centuries. The leaves may be puréed In soup and sauces or added t0 salads; they have a flavour that is similar to kiwifruit or sour wild strawberries The plant’s sharp taste is due to oxidic acid, which is mildly toxic

it grows in almost every country in the world and is widely used in cooking and medicine

Sorrel has been known as “cuckoo’s meate”, and it is thought that it got this name because people believed that the cuckoo used it to make its voice clear. It is also known as spinach dock. It grows wild as well as in gardens, and its leaves may turn to crimson, or the veins may become a purplish colour. It looks a lot like spinach and can be used in much the same way, although it complements eggs, chicken and other poultry as well as lamb, veal and goat’s cheese

Writing in 1720, John Evelyn says that sorrel “sharpens the appetite, assuages heat, cools the liver and strengthens the heart.”

If you visit Shiraz in Iran, sorrel soup, kardeh in Farsi, is sold by street vendors in winter, to ward off colds and flu. It is widely used in Russian cuisine and there it is believed that sorrel lowers blood pressure. In France it is also widely used in omelettes, soups and green sauce to accompany fish. The young leaves can be used in salads just as spinach and dandelion leaves can. These can be substituted for sorrel and vice versa. In Ireland they use sorrel in a dish that requires fish to be poached in milk

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foraging and growing my own

As a child I remember picking berries throughout the summer in a forest near my grandmothers house, and on into autumn when blackberries were in fruit. I also remember some of them being really sharp and others being really juicy and learning the difference between both so you always got the nice sweet juicy berries.

All of that really stopped for me as I grew up and became more active in sports and work, so forest visits became less and less frequent, until it became just another childhood memory. I still pick an occasional blackberry but not as much as I used to do. I suppose life and work got in the way. #cheflife

Then my Mom began growing her own a few years back and I began to pick berries again and eat away as I pleased, furthermore Mom also developed an interest in making jam, chutneys and relishes from her produce in the greenhouse with the addition of a small few ingredients from the supermarket. For which she became know for and I found myself going home to try the latest creation, cucumber relish still is the most unexpected surprise. (Taste was odd but really nice)

I now am growing my own strawberries but the birds are enjoying them more than I am at the moment,( natures bounty I suppose wild animals take preference over us humans). Instead of growing vegetables I am foraging for food and enjoying it immensely I hasten to add, whether it be in a forest, looking for herbs, a country road looking for berries  or the seashore looking for samphire or whatever takes my fancy. I now find myself picking up a few bits every time I go anywhere.

As my career develops I figure it will be handy to know and be able to show other people as time goes on. I am now just short of looking through fields for plants that I can eat, not quite comfortable with the idea just yet.

I feel that there are untapped ingredients to be played with by chefs in the forests and shores of this country, and they taste great to be honest about it. About a fortnight ago I discovered wood sorrel, and chervil growing rampant in a forest near home, adding to that the wild garlic just outside Tralee and wild leeks outside Listowel, that is on top of where I know certain berries are and keeping my eye on them like a woman looking for a bargain.

My next step is looking to preserve these ingredients long term. There are a few ways I know of but will they work for these new foraged ingredients as well as they did for my Mom.

 Only time will tell.

Follow my adventures on Instagram @chefpaulc and Twitter @chefpaulc

There are super foods and hyper super foods and then there is borage little used in cooking or anything else a traditional plant that grows wild or by gardeners for its flowers but there is so much more to it .

In the garden it aids plants it is interplanted with esp. Tomatos & strawberries. Strenghts them against rot

In cooking it can be used in salads,sauces, jellies, chutneys , soups desserts , tea , consumme , cocktails

The flower is great in salads can be candid for pastry

The blue dye is edible from the plant but goes pink in acid (vinegar)

It grows in wood lands and pastures

beach mustard really adds that spiciness you get from mustard. You’re better off blanching this and then you can make it into a kind of emulsion which has seriously radishy peppery flavours.

Wood Sorrel is a small creeping perennial. The flowers have five white petals with lilac veins. The leaflets, grown in threes, are heart-shaped; they sometimes fold up. Both flowers and leaves have long fragile stalks.
The plant grows in and at the edge of woods throughout Ireland; in the west it can be found on shady banks or among bracken. It is sometimes planted to naturalise in a shady part of the garden but must be treated with caution; it can become a rampant weed.
The flowers are out in April and May

Wood sorrel is actually a whole range of plants in the oxalis family, all edible, and with common traits that make it very easy to identify. In addition to the ease in identifying, wood sorrel is pretty widespread and grows on every continent (other than Antarctica, obviously), making it a terrific first foraged food for beginners

All the parts of the plant are edible, including leaves, stems, and flowers. Wood sorrel’s flowers each have 5 petals, and they can range in color from white to yellow to pink to purple (or some combinations of the above). Our local wood sorrel has yellow flowers.

Sea Beet grows in coastal places at tidelines, on shingle beaches, cliffs and sea-walls, and in saltmarshes. It is a close relative of some of our cultivated beets, such as Sugar-beet, Swiss Chard and Beetroot, and can also be cooked and eaten

myself chef noel , Paul and James wandered out Sunday evening to pick some it goes very well with fish of course, it goes all over the coasts of Ireland and is easily spotted

Over the centuries Wild Sea Beet has been cultivated into a multitude of domestic forms, some of which are the very staples of kitchen gardens and cupboards. This very

plant is the common ancestor of no less than

Perpetual Garden Spinach

• Sugar Beet (from which we farm sugar)
• The Chards (Swiss, Rainbow, etc.)
• Beetroot