Some years ago my first German boss invited us to his home in Niederbayern. We were treated to good home cooking with lots of fresh ingredients. It was around this time of year and the elders were in flower and we were treated to elderflower pancakes and coffee. It seemed like a simple but neat idea.

A year ago I tried the same and also tried making elderflower fritters; I found the pancakes easier. Yesterday, after church a friend of one of my boys asked if I could do them again.

Method

1. Gather a number of elderflowers cut so that each head remains connected to a little bit of the main stalk.

 

2. Inspect each flower head for insects and remove any you find. The pancakes should be vegetarian!
3. Make up your favourite pancake batter.
4. Heat up a pan with a little vegetable oil.
5. Dunk the flower heads one at a time so that they are immersed in the batter then place the heads flowerside down in the pan. If the elderflowers are still exposed you might need to add a bit more pancake batter.

 

6. The original ones were served fried on one side once the batter had set. My family prefers them done on both sides so I snip the stems with scissors and flip them.
7. Fry on the other side and serve with a little icing sugar.
8. Repeat until the flower heads are used up.

Until 1997, I had never experienced fresh new season garlic. I had only every bought garlic from a supermarket or greengrocer. That May I went with a friend on a trip from Munich to the Camargue to see the wildlife and get a break away from our high tech jobs. As well as buying beautiful Provencal tablecloths for our wives in Arles we took back some fresh veg and Muscat wine from a countryside roadside stall.

I went for the garlic that looked like it was just out of the ground. What surprised me when I got home was that it was moister and milder than any garlic I had bought in a shop. Over the last few years I have grown garlic - in a huge variety of shapes and sizes but I have always enjoyed it when it was really fresh.

 

The head on the right is old garlic recently bought at a supermarket. The four heads on the right are fresh from my garden today; I read somewhere that they are ready to be lifted when 4-5 leaves have turned yellow.

 

Above you see the old garlic where each clove has a dried skin (OK they are not the same garlic variety!). The new season garlic below does not have dried skins, indeed there is no obvious skin on the cloves at all, they are just moist.

New season garlic is moist and milder than old garlic; but with a stronger taste than wild garlic. Apart from gardeners I wonder how many people in the UK are familiar with it; or am I naive? I have only ever seen it on sale at Waitrose in my town and then only very occasionally. I know that there are some recipes e.g. garlic soup that are suitable for the more subtle taste of fresh garlic.

Having extolled the virtues of eating wild garlic this spring, the season has not much longer to run. In my garden I can still harvest leaves, but they are looking less fresh and a bit tired.

 

However, the blooms are a vibrant white and have lasted longer than the bluebells. It should be noted that the blooms are edible. In my view their taste is stronger than those of the leaves. In today's Independent Mark Hix recommends deep frying them.

In my garden the lily of the valley came up about 3 weeks ago (a good two months after the wild garlic). It has been in flower about a week.

 

The leaves are a very similar colour to the wild garlic but a bit paler. The stems of lily of the valley are purple while wild garlic is green. Note that lily of the valley is not edible. The white flowers of lily of the valley are a distinctive bell shape. Chives are blooming well and have replaced wild garlic as the blog background.

So one season passing, there are more on the way. English asparagus and strawberries are appearing...

Well, I am back in Finland again. This time it is in Oulu which is the most northerly of the bigger Finnish cities; however if you look at the map you will realise it is roughly halfway up the country between NE and SW extremities... a lot of Finland is Lapland. Oulu has more than 100,000 inhabitants and is growing fast with a major technology park (reason for my business trip). It is up at the top of the Gulf of Bothnia but still a bit south of the Arctic Circle. I have only been here twice before. I am in a Sokos Hotel - a good chain in Finland - but they always have the same restaurants; Fransmanni (Frenchman), Amarillo (Tex-Mex), etc.

I decided to look outside and walked through the town centre towards the water. There were some old 19th century wooden buildings there most of which were bars and restaurants. All seemed to be piping out music but were dead. Yesterday it would doubtless have been different with 1st May being a big Finnish celebration.

 

Inside there was just one couple in the bar. I ate alone in the first floor dining room....boring!

I decided to try something I could not get at home. I chose braised reindeer with mashed potatoes, gherkin and "lingonberries"; the same berries are sold at Lidl as "wild cranberries" and are in my flower book as "cowberries"!

 

I have had reindeer steak a few times before in Stockholm and Helsinki. This though tasted rather dry and boring...however, I was hungry after a 4 o'clock start in the morning. Perhaps other things on the menu would have been a better choice; but I could not watch what other guests were eating and thereby guage the alternatives.

In May 2003, it was over 30 degrees and the whole town seemed to be sitting out in cafes and getting sunburnt! We took some customers out on a boat trip along a peaty river outside Oulu and had a barbeque later on the riverbank. On the boat there was a little bar and my Finnish colleagues said I should try the local tar liqueur.

 

I thought this sounded pretty dreadful! I had visions of people scraping tar off roads and feeding into a still. My colleagues patiently explained that there was a local tar industry making tar from birch logs. It sounded a bit like making charcoal but gathering the tar (resin-based) in a special vessel.

It actually tasted quite good. It was smoky like a Laphroig whisky and slightly sweeter. It's not something I would want to drink often but would be a handy thing to surprise guests with. Another unusual Finnish liqueur is salmiakki which looks and tastes like liquid liquorice. The tar liqueur tastes fine at room temperature but salmiakki tastes best if kept in the freezer.