Fantastic Foraging for Boxing Day

This morning I came home from a glorious Boxing Day walk with a hat full of lemons.

Yesterday I hopped across the back fence with 3kgs of new potatoes for the Christmas Day potato salad. (Chipotle and lime mayo dressing; 10 thumbs up.)

I've got a reputation as a trespasser and a thief. And it's true, I can often be found on other people's property, picking, snipping, or digging. I regularly head up to the town belt with my gardening gloves, plastic bags and a hammer, to get a load of pine cones for the fire, and pine needles for the blueberries. I snip and pick what's peeping through fences and hedges: cuttings, fruit, nuts, seeds and seedlings.

But I am not without a conscience. I honestly don't see foraging as stealing. It's rescuing what would otherwise go to waste. I wouldn't pull up carrots from another gardener's well tended plot. But if you let lemons fall off your tree, I'm going to come onto your land and take them!

To be clear about those spuds. I did dig them from the neighbours' garden, but I planted them there in the first place, and most of my recent trespassing in that direction was to tend them. The neighbours got to share the potato salad... I reckon that makes me more a community worker than a criminal.

There aren't many things in nature lovelier than a pine cone. There are thousands of them in the town belt, and I've only ever foraged them for the fire, not for food. Until last week, when I realised the cones stored in the hot shed were shedding...

Like one-winged moths, these seeds release from the cracks in the pine cones, and presumably fly down from the trees and attempt to grow new pine trees. In this case they fell all over the shed floor, and as I was sweeping them up I thought about pine nuts, and one thing led to another... and I ate one. Sure enough, those little black things have got pine nuts inside them.

Love the little flipper-like wing. The seed pops out really easily. But that's where the easy bit stops.

About the size and shape of apple seeds, the pine nut casings are rough, not very hard, but finicky to break apart without crushing the pine nut inside.

I thought about roasting them -- it works for some nuts -- but pine nuts are so fatty and delicate, it didn't seem like a great idea. So I soaked them in cold water, and slowly, surely, worked out an extraction method.

It was an awful lot of work. But it's Boxing Day, I'm not going shopping, and what better way to pass the time than in pursuit of free food?

Half a teaspoon of free food. I will never complain about the scandalous price of pine nuts again. And I'll be hard pressed to find a recipe that calls for a mere half teaspoon of pine nuts. I'll sprinkle them on something -- maybe the six green beans I'm planning to harvest for dinner -- from my own garden.

I'm blogging in the shed today -- Five Course Garden summer HQ. I figure if River Cottage can have an HQ, so can I.

Happy Boxing Day everyone. Here's to fruitful holiday foraging!