Foraged Flowers

The only problem with foraging - my new hobby - is that it's not the easiest activity when you're time poor! I suppose the exciting thing about it is that waiting for your ingredients to come into season requires a lot of excited waiting and once they are you a real sense of urgency! In May I couldn't wait for the elder to come into flower so I could try some recipes out then once they did I rarely had time on a sunny day to go and collect some! I collected a batch with my boyfriend very early on to make elderflower champagne whilst there were still only a few sprays on each tree and then again just before all the flowers disappeared to make cordial - it would have taken about half the time to collect the flowers for my recipe if I'd had a few more sunny days off or evenings. The elderflower recipes weren't quite right and will have to wait till next year before I can do some tweaking (elderberries later in the year though!), but the rose petal syrup I made is really fantastic! I live close to the very beautiful Scarcroft Allotment in York which have paths running through so that even people who don't have a plot  can wander through and enjoy them (I've got a lot of love for these allotments - maybe I'll write a post about them). The hedge along the path is intertwined with wild roses, so once again with my boyfriend in tow, we went out collecting petals. I'd heard the tip that if you only take the petals rather than the whole head, you still get hips later in the year (I'll be back for those!). Using a generic "wildflower syrup" recipe from River Cottage Hedgerow by John Wright, I layered the petals (we collected a litre icecream tub full) with 1k of sugar and left it for 24 hours. After a day when I came back to my mixture, I emptied the tub into a saucepan and added 550ml of boiling water (55ml for every 100g of sugar) and gently heated the mixture until the sugar had dissolved. At this point, the recipe says to strain and bottle the syrup. After tasting the syrup, I could faintly detect the rose flavour but it wasn't really strong enough. I tried one of the petals and it was delicious - sugary and full of flavour - so I decided to leave the petals in the sugar syrup for a little longer... So I went to Latitude festival and when I got back my syrup was full of rose flavour! I've decided to just leave the petals in because they look pretty and they still taste nice. The roses are still going up where I am so you've still got time to try this recipe before next year!