Wild Foods at the Seaside

Marsh Samphire (also known as glasswort)
Get your wellies on if you’re looking for this one. It’s a dirty job. Pick the young plants whole in July, ideally, but its edible well into August and sometimes into September. Wash them well, steam them lightly, toss in a little butter, and pick them up by the roots and bite off the soft growth. Eat it as fresh as you can and you won’t be disappointed.

Limpet
The poor old limpet isn’t rated as a food by most people, and I can see why. They’re tough, hard to pry off the rocks, and take some cooking to make them good, but on the flip side they’re plentiful, tasty, and very easy to identify!

The key to limpet hunting is stealth. You may laugh at this, but once a limpet knows you are there then there’s no shifting him. Don’t try a gentle tap to remove him, all you’ll achieve is that he will grip the rock more tightly, and unless you actually smash his shell (ruining the limpet for nothing) then he’s staying where he is. One firm strike at an unsuspecting limpet with the butt of a knife or a small rock is all that is needed. Don’t try to pry one off with a knife, I tried that once and the end broke off!

When you’ve got your limpets, you’ll see that they’re basically snails.

There are two good ways of cooking limpets. Either plunge them into boiling water for 5 minutes, extract them from their shells, and then fry with some garlic and herbs (I like alexanders and wild garlic for this), or put them on the rack of a warn barbecue, shell side down, and poach them in their own juices with just a drop of lemon juice. The latter produces a surprisingly tasty and tender morsel of food.

The limpets head is rather hard, so you might find limpets go down better if you cut the hard part off after the initial boiling.

Alexanders
Pick the young stems and steam them gently, perhaps coating in butter when they're done. Or chop them and add them with stock vegetables in a stew, and they'll impart a delicate, herby flavour unlike anything else.

Use them to flavour seafood dishes; try adding the chopped leaves to moules mariniere, or dressing crab salads with them. Pick it before it flowers if you can; if you miss it in Spring, go looking again in Autumn when it starts growing again to flower next Spring.


Just like with mushrooms learning the safe eatable ones!

Warning!!!!! Learn from someone in person who eats them !
Like any umbellifer, you could do yourself serious harm if you were to mistake one of the poisonous wild relatives of alexanders for the real thing. But don't let that worry you too much, once you get to know the texture and smell you'll have no trouble knowing the real thing.