The entertainments of London are many and varied, but I’d not previously considered a foraging party amid parks and wastelands of south London, followed by a cookup and fine lunch as one of the possibilities. (Thanks Darren!)

I now know better. Nettles – yes I knew about those – I’ve made nettle soup (a recipe roughly like this, from young sping nettles in France), although it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make nettle pakora (you could base it around a recipe like this – but really now I realise that you could use nettles in virtually any recipe that calls for cooked spinach.

And as we discussed – nettles are nutrient-packed and every bit as deserving of the title “superfood” as lots of expensively promoted, high cost foreign foods you see in supermarkets.

Now I wonder why it is that they aren’t so well promoted ….!

The only warning is that with mature nettles you should only take the top few leaves – the bottom ones can accumulate crystals not good for the liver.

The other really magic ingredient was elderflower blossom … we didn’t actually make elderflower champagne, but we had a very good taste of it – and very nice (and very alcoholic) it was too!

We did have elderflower blossom fritters (well unfortunately I couldn’t because they had a flour – hence gluten – batter – but these went down a treat with everyone else, and I’m reckoning on perhaps giving them a go with rice flour). Basically dip a spray of blossom on the batter, fry, cover with lemon juice and sprinkle with icing sugar.
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by Jonathan Grant

“When he is Federico is nor heat neither cold, For he is Federico” – That is the explanation chosen for this novel concatenation of Lorca’s works. For Hace Federico, Emily Lewis fuses extracts from across Lorca’s diverse body of poems, articles, plays, and song lyrics into a story of love and loss during the time of Franco’s nationalist uprising.

Featuring dramatic tales that were uncanny shadows almost predicting Lorca’s own untimely death, and written as they were during the ‘Silver Age’ of 1920s Spain alongside contemporaries Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, the production has a surrealist and revolutionary feel that will be sure to leave you yearning for tapas and the sun of the Costas in an age before mass tourism.
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