Sunday, the 11th of July, saw me teaming up once again with my two very lovely, generous, food passionate Italian friends, Maurizio & Cinzia of La Locanda. The first time we worked together, fusing traditional Italian foods with wild and local seasonal produce from Yorkshire & Lancashire, to create our unique style of multi-course dining, was in late November 2021. On that occasion, we served our unique food-fusion to 26 dinner guests at 'Convivio Selvaggio' which translates to 'Friendly, Lively & Social', an occasion much required after the never-before-experienced and lengthy lockdowns, the nations populace had endured. Our celebration of summer began with a breakfast of Italian style, sweet/savoury pastries, with a wild meadowsweet infused strawberry jam and choice of tea or coffee. We then began our 2.5 hour foraging adventure on the Lancashire coast, where I lovingly revealed the wild, edible delights of the saltmarsh, mudflats and green spaces fringi
I have very fond memories of gathering Dandelion leaves as a child in order to feed them to my pet rabbits, of picking the full flowers and racing around the local park, arms outstretched, imagining myself an airplane and using my thumbs to flick the flowerhead missiles clasped tightly in my hands. I remember picking the furry looking, globe-shaped seed heads, taking a deep breath and then exhaling fiercely in an attempt to magically synchronise the number of exhales with the time of day and of peeling the hollow stems, to see how many thin strips I could reduce it to while occasionally touching the very tip of my tongue to the white sap and then recoiling in humour-fuelled-horror at the extremely bitter flavour: happy days! I hope those of you reading this remember your early memories with dandelion? As I grew older, my attention turned to more pressing, age-related activities, mischief and social norms and I slowly began to forget those days of simple, innocent play and wonder but,