While the feint flavour and slippery yet crunchy texture of jelly ear isn’t particularly esteemed in western cultures, they work well eastern cuisine – especially miso soups, stir-fry etc.
Along with wood sorrel, wild garlic has been at the forefront of the renaissance in wild foods in recent years. It isn’t hard to work out why: it is easy to find, delicious, and fairly straightforward to identify. In most areas of the UK, there is absolutely no need for anyone who lives anywhere near a park, woodland or shady riverbank to spend a single penny on spring onions between February and July.
Prior to flowering, lesser celandine is one of the milder spring leaves, so good for bulking out salads of more pungent leaves like hairy bitter-cress and ramsons…
In bleak midwinter, when mycophogists start to look hungry and haunted by the paucity of pickings, velvet shank (flamunilla velutipes) can put a glint back in their eye. It grows between November and March, when, in Scotland, there are very few other mushrooms about.
Among the stellar array of colourful, sculpturesque and eccentric wild mushrooms, the waxcap family (hygrocybes) shine brightest. They are the rare, beautiful jewels of the fungi world, shining like rubies, emeralds and diamonds in late autumn meadows, lawns and graveyards.