When you’re one of the nation’s top chefs and work at the sixth-best hotel on the planet, you might be forgiven for letting fame get the better of you. But while she’s known as the wild cook, diva antics aren’t Stephanie Moon’s style at all.

She’s someone with both feet firmly on the ground, well, in a pair of wellies to be precise, and while Rudding Park’s guests are luxuriating in their early-morning Jacuzzis, Steph can be found busy foraging around the hotel grounds, searching out ingredients for dinner.

If she’s lucky, retro classics like Surprise of Pigeon and Mumble of Rabbits will get a new lift from wild herbs, and her discoveries will figure not only on the menu but also the internet.

Because Wild Cook is Rudding Park’s new blog idea and Steph, the consultant chef, has taken on the persona because she is passionate about putting locally-sourced and foraged food at the top of the bill by only using the freshest produce within a 75-mile radius of Harrogate.

Take the Yorkshire Heroes menu, on offer in the Clocktower restaurant. Interestingly, the number of food miles each dish has travelled is printed alongside, and much of it is very local indeed.

Like the sublime wild garlic soup; Steph picks the leaves just a couple of hundred metres away from the kitchen and when I visited her earlier this summer she was on her way to eke out some more of the free ingredients from the woodland surrounding the hotel’s golf course.

While most people on the fairways were concentrating on missing the fiendish bunkers, Steph’s attention was drawn to a little clump of blue flowers just by the seventh tee.

“Look, chef,” she says, either talking to herself or paying me an unmerited compliment. “Ground ivy, it’s a great alternative to mint sauce. And here is some wood sorrel, it’s got a sweet-sharp flavour and makes a wonderful garnish, especially with fish.”

She also uses it to make a creamy sauce and even custard.

Then she spots some burdock plants. Steph has been experimenting with them as a green way to keep fish moist while it is in the oven. Burdock leaves are like nature’s tin foil really and the idea of Wild Cook is going back to basics, she says. It’s about finding the finest ingredients which are readily available in our hedgerows, rivers and moorlands and she wants to share everything she knows about foraging.

Hence the blog; hunting out food from the countryside is the hallmark of wild cooking and with Steph’s help you can do it yourself. Wild Cook also shares the secrets of dishes like North York Moors Wild Duck Salad, Hot Jasmine Tea Smoked Kilnsey Trout and Flambéed Local Apples with Blackberries and Ampleforth Brandy Sabayon.

Away from the manicured greens, the woods here are alive with free food and much of it is a real surprise. Who’d have thought the gardeners scourge, goose grass, would make a tasty dish? But the sticky weed, which forms dense tangled mats in our prize shrubberies, doesn’t cause Steph to curse. She steams the leaves and adds them to soups.

And Steph’s even picking stinging nettles; only the heads mind you, and the shady part of a wood is the place to gather them because they will be more tender; more succulent. Add boiling water to a pot of leaves, infuse for ten minutes and hey presto, nettle tea.

Further along, the banks of a tiny stream are awash with the white star-like flowers of wild garlic. Steph doesn’t just use it to make soup. She has a delicious pesto recipe for it and the flower heads now lying in her trug will be deep fried in batter and used to garnish dishes like Roast Whitby Halibut with Wood Sorrel Risotto.

“I’ve been cooking for 20 years now and you’re always looking for new things,” she says. “I’ve been foraging for almost a year and it has revitalised me as a chef because it’s about getting into the wild and seeing what’s around you. That has given me a new interest in how to work these flavours into food. It’s a fresh thing to do, something really different.”

Steph was brought up on a farm at Tosside, near Settle, and learned to cook at an early age. Many of the family recipes she used back then still figure on the menu, but they’ve been updated to become what she calls retro classics. Others have come her way over time.

“The big thing for me is that we’ve done the Yorkshire Food Heroes menu, trying to find as much locally as we can here at the Clocktower restaurant and this is about taking it a step further, to see what’s literally on our doorstep. If you look at what is available in Yorkshire it is almost criminal not to use it.”

Steph uses plants mainly as garnishes and flavours to enhance meat or fish. Some really pack a punch so it’s often the case that less is more.

“The thing I find interesting is sourcing something delicious from a field or wood. My favourite recent find is wood sorrel; a tiny plant and unlike garden sorrel which is quite sour, this is delicate, it looks gorgeous and has all the finesse of the pea-shoots and micro-herbs you see chefs using all the time these days.”

Foraging is becoming a popular way to source delicious, free food, but Steph warns that you need to know what you are doing, especially with mushrooms. She still goes out armed with reference books and her advice is don’t pick unless you are absolutely sure or there’s someone with you who is.

And while the plants may be free, you need to check that the land you’re rummaging on has a thoroughfare, or you might be trespassing.

The Food Heroes menu in the Clocktower at Rudding Park is all about foraging and includes some fantastic finds from the local countryside. But foraging is only one of the star attractions at the hotel. Steph has 28 chefs in four kitchens and while the Yorkshire influence figures heavily, she recognises that not everything is available locally for an a la carte menu which is firmly in the modern English idiom.

Then there is the hotel’s Regency façade, its state rooms with high ceilings and full-length windows which open on to terraces and give a feeling of grandeur to any wedding reception. And business there is brisk, so much so that the builders are busy creating a major extension which is due to open in December.

But they’re not the only ones hard at work. Steph has finished the day’s blog and with a beautiful evening in store, she’s making her way back to the woods with a trug in one hand and that all-important reference book in the other. Who knows what she'll find next?

Stephanie Moon is the current deliciouslyorkshire champion chef and in March this year she won the bronze medal in the British Culinary Federation Chef of the Year competition.

To follow her foraging exploits, visit www.thewildcooks.co.uk