Category Archives: foraging for wild edibles

Poached!

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IMG_2096Fall is the time to look for hen of the woods mushrooms. They are also known as maitake. They are be found under oak trees. A few weeks ago I was poking around the oak trees at one of the gardens I work in and saw this. It is the very beginning of one of these tasty mushrooms. You can even see the acorns in the lower corner. As much as I wanted to pick it right then and there, it just wasn’t ready. I asked for permission to come back in a week to get it. Only problem was that a week later someone else had beaten me to it. Grr. That is why mushroom hunters are so secretive about their spots. It is too frustrating to know there is a delicious mushroom there and then have someone else take it.

10686621_10204871179796121_5837764285071799126_nOur friends saw this sign over the weekend. I need to make one!

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Still here

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IMG_1854A lot has been going on with my volunteer gardening at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Besides working one day at the Osborne garden, I am now working one day in the Native Flora garden. It’s a nice mix of formal beds and action-packed nature. The Native Flora garden attracts all kinds of insects, birds and butterflies, that it’s almost as much a study of animals as plants when I’m there. Below is one of the many praying mantis I saw one morning.IMG_1842

IMG_1838Earlier in the summer, when I was in the Osborne garden, I noticed bright red fruit on one of the trees. The tree was a cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) tree, which is actually related to dogwoods and not cherries. As many of you know by now, my first question was, “Are they edible?” The answer is a hesitant yes, unless you are from Iran, in which case you get a hearty yes. I read that you could make jam with the berries, so I got permission to gather a bunch that had fallen to the ground. The ones on the trees aren’t quite ripe.IMG_1839I followed a recipe I found online for jam, which I can’t say was a complete success. The taste was wonderful. Cooking the fruit took out the mouth-puckering tannin feel that the raw fruit has. The recipe I used called for way too much water. My preference in making jams and preserves is to cook the fruit as little as possible. What I ended up with was a delicious fruit syrup. Perfect for pouring over yogurt or ice cream.

Next year, I will stick with a more traditional jam recipe. If you run across one of these trees, do give the fruit a try.

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Morels at last

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I have been watching for morels for weeks. I thought I had my hunting timed perfectly, but with the cold winter, the morels were slow to appear. We came up to the Berkshires 2 weeks ago, which was way too early.

But this weekend was perfect. We took three different hikes and found morels at two of them. Yesterday we went to a place where we found them last year. We found about a half a dozen. I was hoping for more. Today we went out and found over twenty! There were a few other people carrying bags with mushrooms, so we knew we weren’t the only ones out looking.

It was hard not to shout when we found one, so we shouted “pickle!” to let each other know when we found one, without alerting other mushroom hunters. Super sneaky, eh? Bet nobody could crack that code!

It was fun to spend so much time in the woods. Now we have to figure out what we’re going to make with them.

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Early Foraging

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5-3 foraging-3This past weekend Neil and I went out with the NYMS for a morel hunt. The spot is about an hour and change outside of the city. You have to be a member to get directions to this spot!

There wasn’t a morel in sight. It seems as though this hard winter we’ve had has pushed the morel season back a couple of weeks. Not wanting to go home empty handed, I collected a big bag of garlic mustard and some japanese knotweed.

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Garlic mustard is a terrible invasive plant, so you are doing everyone a favor by picking as much of it as you can. Forager’s etiquette (not over harvesting native plants) does NOT apply in this case. Garlic mustard leaves are at their tender best before the plant blooms. As with all foraging, please consult a guidebook for identification of plants!

I wanted to make pesto with the greens and followed a recipe I found on a fellow forager’s site. Against my better judgment I used walnuts instead of pine nuts. The whole batch came out too bitter. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s usable.

5-3 foraging-5Japanese knotweed is good right now. It is also terribly invasive. Large bamboo-like stands grow up on the side of streams, roads and in disturbed areas.

The shoots are quite tender at this time of year, so don’t require as much peeling as the older/larger stalks do. Knotweed can be substituted for rhubarb in recipes.

5-3 foraging-6I decided to wait on making the japanese knotweed into anything as I read it freezes well. And because my pesto was such a stellar failure. I washed it carefully as it seems to attract large numbers of ants.5-3 foraging-7

Strip off the leaves and chop into 1″ pieces. Then freeze.5-3 foraging-8

Although we didn’t find any mushrooms, there were still plenty of lovely natural things to look at. We saw crows chasing a great horned owl out of its tree. 5-3 foraging-1

Beautiful spring ephemerals were blooming. 5-3 foraging-2

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Chicken of the Woods Pot Pie

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Here’s a chicken pot pie in which no chickens were harmed in the making. The chicken used is a mushroom called chicken of the woods. It is a gorgeous bright orange, and when cooked has the flavor and texture of white meat chicken.

The recipe was adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s chicken pot pie. Instead of making individual pies, I put all of the ingredients into an oven-proof casserole dish and covered with the pastry. It was absolutely delicious and I would definitely make it again, although I would cut the quantity of butter down drastically.

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Sumac Juice Cocktail

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Okay, so now all of you have run out, picked sumac and made juice, right? Great. Here’s the recipe for a nice cocktail. It is based on a cosmopolitan, which if that sounds too 90s, you can just mention your foraged ingredients and get your street cred back.

2 shots vodka

3 shots sumac concentrated juice

1 shot elderflower liquor like St. Germaine

Mix together in a shaker with ice, shake and strain the ice out. Yum.

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How to Make Sumac Juice

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Berkshires-14I know what you are thinking… You are thinking Poison Sumac. Relax. There are other varieties, which are completely wonderful and harmless. Check your guides before you eat any wild edible, but a good rule of thumb with sumac is that if the flower stalk is red, it isn’t poisonous.

The juice you make from a sumac has a wonderfully tart lemonade-like flavor that is very refreshing in summer.

Berkshires-12 Berkshires-13We drove along the roadsides with garden clippers and a big shopping bag. I can’t tell you exactly how many we picked, but it felt like several pounds worth. It filled the bottom 1/3 of a large shopping bag. Here’s a photo of our haul.Berkshires-15

Okay, so once you have gathered a bunch of flower stalks, grab a big canning pot, or stock pot. Fill it halfway with room temperature water. DO NOT rinse the flowers off before you use them or all the flavor will wash away.

Drop a few stalks into the water. Grab and squeeze the flowers. The flowers will fall off the stalk and that’s fine. Just keep kneading and squeezing the flowers. You will notice that tiny red hairs from the flowers will start sticking to your hands. They will wash off.

Take the flower stalks out and add new ones. Keep doing this until you run out of flowers. The more flowers you have, the stronger the juice. Here’s a photo of our concentrated juice to give you an idea of the color it will be.Berkshires-18

 

The juice is really great, and lends itself well to many things. You could cook with it, but we just added seltzer to make spritzers. There will be a cocktail recipe coming up shortly!

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Camping in the Berkshires

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beartown camping-20This past weekend we went car camping in the Berkshires with friends. It was so beautiful and peaceful.beartown camping-16beartown camping-49

Lindsay was a great help cooking. We made the world’s best s’mores using Little Schoolboy cookies instead of chocolate bars and graham crackers. Lindsay learned how to make a box oven in Girl Scouts and we baked brownies. To make one, you just line a cardboard box with aluminum foil and punch some holes. You place charcoal briquettes in a pan on the bottom (it’s about 30 degrees per piece, so you need about 11-12 coals to bake a normal cake)beartown camping-51beartown camping-33

And we found loads and loads of choice edible mushrooms while hiking!

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Black trumpet mushrooms

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Oyster mushrooms

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Chicken of the woods mushrooms

 

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How to make Violet Syrup

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When the violets are out and blooming, make sure to gather some for your kitchen. These edible flowers can be used in many ways. You can sprinkle them in salads to add a splash of color, you can freeze them in ice cubes to put in fancy drinks, you can crystallize them (although I have never done that), and you can make violet syrup.

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I looked at various recipes for violet syrup and they were all various combinations of violets, water and sugar. I decided to wing it a bit and the results came out well.

First, gather as many violets as you can. It seems as though the flowers will be their sweetest before they are in full sun. So early day or early evening works best. You can use your hand like a rake to catch the flowers between your fingers. This makes it quicker. Recruiting small children works well. My daughter loved picking flowers with me.

Rinse off the flowers and pluck off the stems. I wasn’t clear whether I needed to remove the green bit on the end of the flower as well. The first batch (photo below) I went crazy OCD and removed them. My second batch, I didn’t. I couldn’t tell any difference, so save yourself a lot of work and leave the green ends on.

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My recipe based on how many flowers I gathered..

  • 1/2 quart of violet flowers in a heat-proof jar with lid
  • Add 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Let this sit 24 hours.
  • Strain the violets out of the water and press as much liquid as you can from them.
  • Combine 3 cups of sugar to the liquid and heat in a pan until the sugar dissolves.
  • Stand back and look at the gorgeous liquid and start planning how you are going to use it.

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We tried it in cocktails, but I thought the subtle violet flavor was lost and only tasted the sugar. We have made soda by adding some seltzer. It is like the European fruit syrups used to flavor fizzy water. And we have poured it over waffles. It’s really lovely.

Interestingly enough, violets were used as a kind of litmus paper. If you add an acid like lemon juice, the liquid will change to a magenta color. I believe it turns green with a base, although I’ve not tried that.

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