Hunger and Thirst

Fava Beans with Cow Parsnip Seed Powder

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 15:58:00 +0000

As a forager with access to large amounts of uniquely fragrant cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum), you may be at a loss with how to make use of this wild edible plant. I'll eat a batch or two of the greens when they are young, though they're not something I'd want to eat every day. I far prefer to use the seeds of cow parsnip. They are pungent with celery, citrus peel, rain, and tobacco flavors, and a quality that feels nearly electric on my tongue.

For many years, I tried to use two of our local angelica species (Angelica spp.) in place of the angelica (golpar) called for in many of my favorite Persian recipes. However, something was off. The flavor was a miss, not even coming up to the same level of flavor as dusty commercial golpar. I don't know what took me so long to look up which species of angelica actually grows in Iran. It was with excitement that I read it was Heracleum persica, a close relative of my own local cow parsnip, Heracleum maximum. Sure enough, cooking with cow parsnip seeds vielded that familiar golpar flavor I'd been missing. I excitedly told a few of my local Persian friends about my discovery, and they gave a collective, "well, duh!" Ha. Of course. I think this story demonstrates nicely why it important to know plants' botanical names, not just common names.

Cow parsnip belongs to the family Apiaceae. Although this plant family is generally not considered a good choice for novice foragers because it also contains some highly toxic plants like poison hemlock and water hemlock, cow parsnip has distinctive leaves. The leaves of cow parsnip are large and lobed, whereas the leaves of poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) resemble those of carrots, and those of water hemlock (Cicuta spp.) look more like marijuana. Carefully identifying a plant before consuming it is always the golden rule of foraging, even more so with an plant in the Apiacea family. Additional caution must be used because cow parsnip contains furocoumarins, which can cause a blistering rash in combination with sunlight. I have not had this happen to me personally, but as a precaution, I always pick cow parsnip with my hand and arm covered, or simply wait until the end of a hiking trip to harvest. I like to pick cow parsnip seeds just after they've peaked, but before they've significantly dried on the plant. In our mountains, this is usually around the same time as the end of porcini season in mid-August. Click here to see more pictures to help you with identification of cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum). My foraging buddy Wild Food Girl has also written about cow parsnip.

My favorite way to use cow parsnip seeds is to sprinkle their powder over freshly cooked fava beans, a preparation that is solidly Persian. I enjoy fava beans so much this way that if they're served any other way, it feels as if something is missing. Additionally, eating fava beans in this manner is best done as a social activity, everyone sharing a big bowl of beans, licking salt and "angelica" from their fingers.

Small fava beans can be eaten whole. Especially large pod can contain beans that will cook up to a mealy consistency. To my mind, the best fava beans are those that come from medium-sized pods. This means that the precious beans will still be squeaky tender, like a giant fresh pea. If you can't find fresh fava beans, they can sometimes be found in the freezer section of your grocery store, labeled either as fava or broad beans.

Here are a few more recipes in which you can use cow parsnip seeds.

Pomegranate and Golpar from Family Spice
Lentil Salad from My Persian Kitchen
Golpar Salt from My Perisan Feast

Fava Beans with Cow Parsnip Seed Powder

1 pound fresh fava beans
1 teaspoon ground dried cow parsnip seeds
kosher salt

1. Steam the whole fava beans from 5-7 minutes. Test one at 5 minutes to make sure it is cooked to your liking.

2. While the whole fava pods are still warm, sprinkle them with the cow parsnip seed powder and flakes of salt.

3. Share the steaming hot fava beans immediately, being sure to first open up the outer pod, then remove the thick skin from around the beans before enjoying them.

Wild Greens with Ham Hocks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Mar 2018 16:35:00 +0000

This isn't new math. Wild greens plus delicious smoky pork bits add up to a dish most everyone will eat with gusto. My crowd aren't picky eaters, and they certainly aren't strangers to the wild edible greens I serve on a regular basis. However, including ham hocks with cooked greens has made the difference between everyone eating a few forkfuls of greens and the same people slurping down bowls full of greens and asking for seconds.

In Soul Food: the Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time, Adrian Miller discusses the journey greens made to unite with ham hocks to become an iconic dish of soul cuisine. Traditionally, one thinks of greens and ham hocks being made with members of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) such as collards, turnip greens, mustard greens, cabbage, or kale. These cabbage cousins came to both Africa and North America from Europe. So, when enslaved people saw these same greens being grown in new America, they were already familiar with the plants. With produce grown in small garden plots, they began enriching greens with seasonings and bits of meat (from fish to pork) to make a hearty and nutritious supplement to the meager rations allotted by plantations. Eventually, the combination of greens with pork became a soul food staple, with pork being what set the dish apart from the West African preparation from which it originated.

Of course, stewed greens have never been confined by just garden produce. Throughout the history of the dish, folks have used whatever greens they had at hand. In Soul Food, Miller makes references to the dish being made with many seasonal foraged plants from milkweed to poke.

When late winter/early spring rolls around, I invariably find myself cleaning out the freezer of the previous year's foraged greens in anticipation of the new season. My chest freezer is a bit like a magician's hat in that I'm always delighted by the treasures found in its depths - dock, lambsquarter, orache, various mustards, and more. All work well in this recipe. In fact, of late, I've taken to combining several different greens when I cook up a pot of wild greens with ham hocks.

Whenever possible, I made this dish with a cut called ham shanks, not ham hocks. It is the next cut up the ankle, and has a bit more meat, in addition to all of the unctuous connective tissues and smoke that make ham hocks so wonderful. They are usually sold right next to the ham hocks where I shop. I adore what this cut of meat adds to the broth, though this recipe could certainly be made with bacon or salt pork. If you abstain from pork, Adrian Miller makes a convincing argument that smoked turkey bits can produce an equally flavorful pot of greens.

A second helping of pot likker

Don't get too caught up in the quantities given in this recipe. Instead, pay attention to the ingredients and ratios, and cook up a batch that works for you. The greens should be cooked for long enough to become silken rags; this isn't an occasion for briefly cooked leaves. And whatever you do, slurp up every drop of the liquid in this dish, know as pot likker. It is the best and most nutritious part of wild greens and ham hocks.

Wild Greens with Ham Hocks

2 ham hocks or ham shanks
water
6-8 cups blanched wild greens, any variety you enjoy, fresh or frozen
1 1/2 cups diced onions
4-6 cloves garlic, minced

1. Place the ham hocks in a pressure cooker and fill the pot with enough water to cover the hocks by an inch. Cook according to the manufacturer's instructions for one hour at sea level, or 75 minutes at altitude. Let the pot depressurize on its own. If you don't own a pressure cooker, you can cook the ham hocks in a slow cooker or stove top by gently boiling for several hours. You want the meat to fall of the bone and the connective tissues to have broken down into gel.

2. Remove the ham hocks from the broth. Pick the meat and soft connective tissue from the bones.

3. In a perfect world, one would probably saute the onions and garlic before adding them to the broth. However, this creates another dirty dish, so doesn't seem worth it in the end to me. Instead, add the onions, garlic, and greens to the broth. Bring the pot up to a gentle simmer, and let the greens cook for 30-45 minutes without a lid in order for the flavors to meld. There should be enough liquid in the pot for the greens to be bathing in broth, though this is not soup. Add more water, if necessary.

4. In the last five minutes of cooking, return the meat and soft connective tissues (hey, don't make that face! the squidgy bits are yummy and good for you!) to the pot, and stir lovingly. Adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper.

5. Serve warm in a bowl, preferably accompanied by a fat piece of corn bread and your favorite hot sauce.

Orange and Avocado Salad with Wood Ear Mushrooms

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 18:00:00 +0000

Wood ear mushrooms (Auricularia auricula) don't seem to be as popular in North America as other wild mushrooms, probably in no small part due to their lackluster flavor. However, wood ears do possess an interesting quality that makes them quite useful when cooking — they have an almost crunchy texture. If you've ever eat slices of raw clam, these mushrooms feel similarly between the teeth, somewhere between a rubbery quality and the crispness of fresh vegetables. I like to use them in tandem with more flavorful mushrooms, layering in different qualities to the resulting dishes. Or, like with this salad composed of oranges and avocados, they act as bread-less crouton, adding snap to a recipe needing an additional textural component.

Here, I am lucky enough to be able to forage these ephemeral mushrooms on downed conifers in the mountains in late summer monsoon season. They are always a delightful find because, as their name indicates, they indeed closely resemble ears, so much so that one can hardly resist the urge to hold one up to their head take zombie ear portraits. If you aren't fortunate enough to harvest your own wood ear mushrooms, they are fairly easy to find and inexpensive, both fresh and dried, in the Asian grocery store.

This is a specific salad. Every ingredient counts, and they come together in a nearly magical way. Salads are so easy in summertime, when one can effortlessly combine whatever fresh ingredients are around. In winter, I find myself struggling more to make salads that are aren't the same old, and feel relevant to the season, serving to lighten up long-cooked and heavy winter fare.

This salad is a mashup of two recipes — orange slices, onion, and cumin, served to me by a friend at a casual lunch, and the avocado, orange, and green onion salad from Around the World in 120 Salads. The addition of the wood ear mushrooms is my own. I recommend that you seek out the nigella seeds. You are most likely to find them at an Asian market. They have a flavor somewhat like a splice of oregano and onion, with the crunch of sesame seeds.

Learn more about identifying wood ear mushrooms here.

Orange and Avocado Salad with Wood Ear Mushrooms

1 large avocado
1 large orange
2 tsp. dried wood ear mushrooms
1 tbsp. slivered yellow onion, soaked in cold water, then drained
pinch of cumin
a sprinkling of nigella seeds
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp. olive oil

1. Begin by re-hydrating the wood ear mushrooms by placing them into a small bowl, covering them with boiling water, and letting them sit for 5 minutes. After they have plumped, drain the water.

2. Meanwhile, peel the orange and slice it into 1/2" rounds, reserving any fallen juices.

3. Peel and de-pit the avocado, then carefully slice it into 1/2" pieces, lengthwise.

4. Compose the salad by alternating slices of avocado and orange in the shape of a wheel. Sprinkle the slivered onions over the fruit, then place the wood ear mushrooms about.

5. Season the dish with the cumin, nigella seeds, salt, and pepper.

6. Finally, drizzle the salad with any remaining orange juice, and the olive oil. Serve immediately.

Feral Asparagus with Lazy Man's Hollandaise Sauce

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Jun 2017 22:00:00 +0000

The more time passes, the better I'm able to restrain myself from trying to cook overly elaborate dishes with my wild foods. There are certainly times that call for a unique foraged ingredient to be elevated with technique, and that can be fun in and of itself. However, given that foraged foods are are so flavorful and good, more of than not, the simplest preparation is best. That's to say nothing of how often we're short of time and energy.

I adore Hollandaise sauce on pretty much all foods. More so with an enormous pile of freshly picked feral asparagus and a poached egg. I'll make one batch of Hollandaise sauce per spring. You know what stops me from making it more often? Dishes. I'm not fond of cleaning up all of those goopy eggy dishes.

This year, I discovered that I could recreate the flavors of Hollandaise sauce with very little effort, and fewer dishes by simply stuffing a knob of butter, a squeeze of lemon juice, and some salt into the yolk of a soft-boiled egg. Not only is dipping asparagus into a faux Hollandaise-filled egg fun, it tastes similar enough to the real thing to push my happy buttons.

I won't even begin to try to tell you how long to cook your eggs to the soft-boiled stage. I live at altitude, which means cooking time is very different from sea level. Instead, I'll suggest you use this handy calculator. Apparently mountaineers take their eggs very seriously.

Feral Asparagus with Lazy Man's Hollandaise Sauce

asparagus spears, cleaned, trimmed, and left whole
eggs
butter
lemon juice
salt

1. Cook the eggs and asparagus in the same pot of boiling water to your desired level of cooking. Yay! Only one pot.

2. Briefly run the eggs and asparagus under cold water to halt the cooking process.

3. Nest you egg into an egg cup (what does one use without an egg cup? perhaps a ring of foil?), and slice off the top of the egg and shell with a paring knife.

4. For each egg, push 1/2 tablespoon of butter, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a sprinkling of salt into the yolk.

5. Dipping asparagus directly into the yolk serves to mix the sauce. Enjoy!

Potato Flake Gnocchi with Foraged Flavors

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 21:00:00 +0000

I'm that person who has always made heavy stodgy overworked gnocchi. I'm a pretty good cook, but they were a fail for me every time. Last month, I discovered that potato flakes made the perfect binder in my acorn "meatballs" recipe. I was a little surprised by that, to be honest. Afterward, I was left with an entire bag of potato flakes, so I needed to find another recipe to utilize them. All of the best internet searches led me to gnocchi made with potato flakes. I gave it a go. For the first time ever, I managed to pull off gnocchi that were light as air. Even better, they came together in minutes. I was sold, especially knowing gnocchi pair well with wild flavors, as my best foraging buddy Wild Food Girl has been doing for years.

Here's why the potato flakes work well in gnocchi. The little dumplings can get too heavy when they contain too much moisture, or when you try to correct that moisture level by adding too much flour. The flakes take some of the variability out of the moisture level in the recipe. Not only that, they take you halfway to the finish line with no work. I don't know about you, but after putting so many hours into obtaining foraged goods, sometimes I don't have the time or energy to spend an hour cooking dinner. Did you know that there are a few varieties of organic potato flakes now on the market?

You can make these basic gnocchi wild in two ways. You can either add foraged goods to the dumplings themselves, or include wild foods in the sauce. Or both! Just think of the fun possibilities. The lead picture above features gnocchi made with cattail pollen, porcini mushrooms, and dandelion greens, each added as a dried powder, rather than fresh. You can double the amount of cattail pollen or mushroom powder used in this recipe. However, using a greater amount of greens powder yielded gnocchi that I didn't enjoy because they were too strong.

Basic Potato Flake Gnocchi with Foraged Flavors

1 cup milk
2 Tbsp. butter
1 1/2 c. potato flakes
2 eggs
3/4 cup minus 1 Tbsp. flour (pre-mixed gluten-free flour works just fine here)
1 Tbsp. wild food powder or flour (such as cattail, porcini, or dandelion)
pinch of salt

1. Heat the milk and butter together until they are melted. Then add the potato flakes and stir until they are all well-combined. The mixture should be a little bit crumbly. Let it cool to room temperature.

2. Add the eggs, flour, salt, and wild food powder to the potato mixture. When you are measuring, add the tablespoon of wild powder to the measuring cup, then fill the rest of the way with flour. Stir all of the elements together just until they are combined.

3. Turn the flour out onto a lightly floured counter top, and knead it gently just until it comes together into a nice ball. Divide the ball into three pieces, which makes it easier to form the gnocchi, particularly if space is tight.

4. Roll the gnocchi dough until it forms a 1" diameter rope. Cut the rope into 1" pieces. The pieces can be slightly larger, just make certain they're all the same size so that they cook evenly.

5. Take each pillow of gnocchi dough and push it down the length of a fork until the back side is dimpled in with your fingerprint and the front has indentations from the fork. The pocket makes a nice place for sauce to land, and the ridges keep the gnocchi from being slippery in your mouth.

6. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a rolling boil. Add the gnocchi in 2 batches. At first they will sink. Give them a quick swirl to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Once the gnocchi float in the water, let them continue to cook for one additional minute. Fish the cooked gnocchi out with a slotted spoon or spider.

7. Cooked gnocchi can be served in any number of ways. I have a strong preference for slipping them into a skillet with brown butter and sage, and letting them sizzle and soak up the flavors for a few minutes before finishing them with a spoonful of the gnocchi cooking water and a shower of finely shredded hard cheese. Gnocchi take equally will to being served with any number of sauces, from a wild mushroom wine sauce, to marinara.

Acorn Meatballs of the World

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 17:26:00 +0000

Acorn “meatballs” may appear to be nothing more than bland brown rounds. Don’t be fooled by their unassuming appearance. Acorn meatballs are actually the shape-shifting superheroes of a forager’s kitchen. A blank canvas for flavor, acorn meatballs can be seasoned in hundreds of ways, then served up in sauces, soups, sandwiches, salads and more.

Dehydrated acorn meal or crumbles.

Acorns might seem like an unusual food source to the uninitiated. However, they are perfectly edible once ground and leached of the tannins that give them an unpalatable astringency. To discover more about the process I use to prepare acorns to use in cooking, click through here. To learn pretty much anything you would ever want to know about harvesting acorns for food, I can think of no finer resource than Sam Thayer's chapter on acorns in Nature's Garden.

Once I became comfortable with processing acorns, I was able to stock my pantry with them in good quantity. The trick thereafter was to find meaningful ways to make acorn a staple in my kitchen. One of the common way to use acorn is to substitute it for part (1/4 - 1/3) of the flour in baked goods. This trick works for everything from quick breads to cookies. I've used acorn meal to make blini, pie crusts, brownies, and even sticky toffee pudding. Still, my ultimate acorn recipe would be one that uses acorn as the major ingredient, and is a savory main dish, not a side or dessert.

For years, my favorite way to use acorn has been to make falafel, combining dried acorn meal with seasonings and eggs, and frying up patties to serve with yogurt sauce. It occurred to me that if I could manipulate my falafel recipe to come up with a formula for making acorn meatballs, I'd have my Holy Grail acorn dish. Further, that recipe could be a template for global flavors, for acorn "meatballs" of the world.

I started out testing my acorn meatball recipe with several different binders, with everything from bread crumbs to oatmeal to amaranth flour. All yielded acorn meatballs that were too dry. Five or six test batches in, it finally occurred to me that potato would both bind the acorn crumbles and keep them tender.

For ease of testing small batches in a hurry, I started out by borrowing potato flakes from my neighbor. I'd always intended to switch the recipe back over to real potatoes once I got the ratios of the other ingredients sussed. In the end, I was pretty surprised to find that I preferred the control that potato flakes provide in a recipe that already has variable moisture content due to irregularity in how acorn dries post-leaching. I’ve never before had potato flakes in my kitchen, but I've gotta tell you I'm now a fan. They are inexpensive, shelf-stable, and there are even a few organic varieties on the market. Potato flakes also make excellent light gnocchi, another wonderful dish for showcasing wild ingredients, that can go from mixing bowl to your plate in 15 minutes. Stay tuned for that recipe, which I'll have ready to share with you shortly.

I think you'll be won over by these acorn meatballs. They're filling, inexpensive, and downright satisfying. Once you have mastered the basic acorn meatball recipe, you can flavor them in an infinite variety of ways. They take particularly well to sauces, soaking up flavors like a sponge. However, they hold their shape in soup and are also outstanding in sandwiches. There’s hardly a country or culture in the world that doesn’t have a beloved meatball dish, so one could potentially eat a new acorn meatball recipe every night and still not run out of new recipes. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Italian-style: Add garlic, onion, oregano, basil, and fennel seeds and a little bit of finely shredded hard cheese to the meatballs. The cheese is especially nice in acorn meatballs. Serve them in a marinara sauce, either atop pasta or tucked into a crusty roll.

Lion’s head meatball soup: Season the meatballs with a touch of sugar, some Saoxing wine, soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, ginger, and green onions. Add the acorn meatballs to soup made from broth and cabbage.

Meatballs in coconut gravy: Take inspiration from your favorite region of India. Add fenugreek and onion to the acorn meatballs, then warm them in a thick coconut milk gravy spiced ginger, garlic, a pinch of turmeric, and garam masala.

Albondigas: Add parsley, mint, and garlic to the acorn meatballs and serve them in a broth made with onion, garlic, tomato, and stock.

Arancini-style cheese-stuffed nuggets: Carefully squeeze a nugget of cheese into the center of your acorn meatballs as they are formed.

Syrian meatballs in cherry sauce: Add cinnamon, chopped dried cherries, and Aleppo pepper to the meatballs and serve them glazed with a reduced sauce of cherry juice, cinnamon, and onion.

Persian: Add chopped fresh dill, tarragon, parsley, green onion, garlic, turmeric, and advieh so that the acorn meatballs are vibrantly green.

Acorn meatball sliders: If you've got tiny rolls and burger toppings sitting around, slightly flattened acorn meatballs make pretty terrific mini-sliders.

Greek: Season the acorn meatballs with oregano, mint, parsley, garlic and bit of tomato paste. Serve them with feta or tzatziki sauce.

Thai: Put a little fish sauce in the meatballs. Then serve them with a crunchy slaw dressed with more fish sauce, garlic, and ginger.

Israeli: Form the basic acorn meatball along with onion, garlic, parsley, cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, ginger, and paprika, then simmer them in a thin tahina sauce.

Universal Acorn Meatballs

makes 16 1" meatballs, approximately 4 servings

1 cup acorn crumbles*
4 tablespoons plain dehydrated potato flakes
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 eggs
2 tablespoons boiling water*

1. In a bowl, stir together the acorn crumbles, potato flakes, baking powder, salt, and your chosen spices and flavorings.

2. Add the oil and eggs, and stir them until the mixture looks like wet sand.

3. Add the hot water and combine well. Press the acorn meatball mix into one piece, cover the bowl, and let it sit for 30 minutes. Do not skip this rest period, as it is necessary for the acorn crumbles to fully hydrate.

4. Form the acorn meatball mix into 1” balls. This works best if you first give the lump a firm squeeze, then proceed to roll it into a ball.

5. In a pan over medium heat, cook the meatballs in a little oil until they are brown on most sides, about 10 minutes. The acorn meatballs are already quite brown raw, so keep an eye on them as they cook to make certain they aren’t burning.

6. Once they've been browned, acorn meatballs can go directly into the recipe of your choice. They also refrigerate and freeze well. Pre-cooked frozen meatballs make for speedy weeknight dinners.

*The acorn crumbles I use in this recipe are very specific to the way that I process them (the process is linked in the text above). I live in an arid climate and dehydrate my crumbles in the dehydrator, thus ending up with an extremely dry product. Your acorn crumbles may have a significantly different water content, and you may need to adjust the liquid used in this recipe accordingly. Additionally, if you are seasoning your meatballs with liquid ingredients like soy sauce or wine, you may need to adjust the amount of water used.

Chocolate Truffles Rolled in Porcini Powder

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 21:00:00 +0000

Ever since I started collecting porcini mushrooms in quantities great enough to store, opening up jars of dried porcini has always reminded me of the scent of chocolate. Years ago, that was the reason I started putting large quantities of porcini powder into my hot chocolate . I've since started using porcini powder, which has been ground finely in a spice mill, in a number of different applications, from porcini bouillon cubes to porcini instant gravy. Grinding porcini mushrooms into a powder is a wonderful way to broaden how they are used in the kitchen, as well as stretching a valuable ingredient.

I experimented with several versions of porcini truffles. I tried adding both chunks of mushroom to the interior of the truffle, as well as some of the powder. Both resulted in unsatisfying textures. If you've got the mushrooms to spare, you can bump up the porcini flavor by letting pieces of porcini gently heat in the cream for 15 minutes before straining them out. I also think it's nice to add a pinch of salt to the porcini as they are ground to a powder, but I know that won't appeal to everyone's taste.

I need to include a note of caution here. Collecting and eating wild mushrooms is never a topic to be taken lightly. Mushrooms contain a substance called chitin, also contained in the shells of shrimp, that is indigestible to humans when consumed raw, and may cause gastric upset. Chitin is best rendered safe by cooking. You can read more on the topic here. The porcini I use are Boletus rubriceps (recently reclassified after formerly being known as B. edulis), local to the Rocky Mountains and known for their distinctive rust-colored caps. Dried porcini purchased from a store may be of unknown origin. Even cooked porcini are known to cause digestive problems in some follks. If you are a sensitive individual, it may be unwise to consume these chocolates. For all others, eat these, a luxury dessert item, in moderation.

Chocolate Truffles Rolled in Porcini Powder

Makes 12-15 truffles

4 oz. bittersweet chocolate
1/4 c. cream
1/2 tsp. bourbon (or vanilla)
2 Tbsp. porcini powder

1. Heat the cream in a small saucepan until it is gently bubbling.

2. Meanwhile, chop the chocolate and place it in a bowl.

3. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate. Let it sit for 2-3 minutes, then stir it until it becomes smooth and glossy.

4. Stir in the bourbon.

5. Let the chocolate cool to room temperature, then refrigerate it for an hour.

6. Roll the chocolate into balls. I think smaller balls work better here because they allow for a higher ratio of porcini powder to truffle. This works best if your hands aren't hot, so you don't melt the chocolate with body heat.

7. Roll each truffle ball in porcini powder. Serve immediately, or store them in a sealed container in the refrigerator.

Acorn Tapenade

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Oct 2016 22:00:00 +0000

I came up with idea for acorn tapenade while trying to put together my pizza-themed autumn foraging class at the Laughing Coyote Project. By the time the end of October rolled around, even though the weather had been favorable, there wasn't much left to forage. I like the way coming up with a menu under tight restrictions forces me to be creative. After all, conceiving recipes that utilize foraged foods is my favorite activity.

Acorn certainly isn't a logical fit for tapenade, though you can certainly find recipes that use other nuts like piñon or almonds. Here, they carry the bulk of the recipe, soaking up flavor from the other strong ingredients. If you have the acorns already on hand, this cuts the cost of making tapenade, which is usually made primarily of pricier ingredients like capers, anchovies, and olives.

Here, I've used "acorn crumbles," a coarser grind of acorns which have been leached and dried using the method described in my recipe for acorn falafel. Because I dry my acorn crumbles in the dehydrator in an already dry climate, so they end up very dry. Your acorn crumbles may be holding more moisture to begin with, so add the water called for in this recipe one tablespoon at a time.

If you don't have homemade wild capers, you can use 100% regular capers in the recipe. If you have leftover oil from your olives or anchovies, that can be used in place of the olive oil. If you'd like to make the recipe vegetarian, throw in a few extra capers and olives to replace the anchovies.

Acorn Tapenade

1 c. acorn crumbles
6 Tbsp. water
20 olives, any variety
2 Tbsp. homemade wild capers such as nasturtium, dandelion, or mallow cheese wheels
2 Tbsp. capers
8 anchovy strips
pinch of red pepper flakes
1 tsp. lemon juice
3 Tbsp. olive oil

1. In a medium bowl, add water to the acorn crumbles one tablespoon at a time until they seem to have the same moisture content you'd expect of almonds or peanuts.

2. In a small food processor, blend together the remaining ingredients until the form a paste. It needn't be completely smooth.

3. Dump the paste into the hydrated acorn crumbles, and stir them together until the tapenade is evenly combined. If it isn't shiny and loose enough, add another tablespoon of oil.

4. Stored in a mason jar in the refrigerator, this tapenade will keep for several weeks.

Thank you to Gelsey Malferrari, both for making her wonderful pizzas for the class, and for taking this picture.

Cinnamon-Dusted Dried Pears

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 01:23:00 +0000

I've spent the last two months pouring over pear recipes, trying to decide how best to preserve the crop. You see, two out of the last three years, there's been no fruit to harvest in autumn thanks to our erratic spring weather. I always think that I don't much care for fruit until we go a year without. This year, I could see early on that we would have a decent amount of both apples and pears. Fearful of going another year without fruit, I knew that I'd put up as much as time would allow. But how? Especially given that sweet sauces, jams, and jellies languish on my pantry shelf because I'm missing a sweet tooth. I briefly tinkered with the idea of doing a juniper-spiked pear sauce to serve with meat. It was so-so, but I wouldn't want to preserve more than a few half pints that way. I scoured the internet for delicious-sounding recipes like Mrs. Wheelbarrow's caramelized pear jam. Weeks and weeks passed, and I tired myself out from running around in circles in my head.

Push came to shove last week after I harvest four different pear trees and was faced with a garage filled with flats upon flats of pears. I already knew that I wanted to put up most of my apples as simple dried apple rings. After years of fiddling with apple recipes, I found out two years ago (the last fruit year), that dried apples were the slam dunk hit of my household, guaranteed to be eaten by everyone. Really, I only came to that conclusion after I ran out of gas for preserving apples, but refused to put any into the compost. So, the lowest-energy solution was to leave their skins on, send a corer through their bellies, and slices them into fat pieces to dry. Why did it take me so long to figure out that's our favorite way to eat preserved apples? I supposed my sense glazed over with visions of all the applesauce, apple pie filling, and jelly I remembered on my Gran's pantry shelves.

It begs the next question - why have I never before dried pear slices? I guess I thought they'd be grainy. Who knows? Knowing I had a boat-load of pears in the garage, I tried an experimental batch of dried pears over the weekend, slicing up just eight of them, and putting them into the dehydrator overnight. Fearing they'd be bland, on a whim, I sprinkled 2/3 of them with cinnamon sugar before sending them to bed to dry. I didn't have high hopes. I simply thought it would be a satisfactory way to put up part of the crop, for the sake of variety.

My bad. Dried pears are fantastic, particularly the ones dusted with cinnamon. I gave a few to my buddy yesterday, and she remarked, "These are like pie!" So, my conundrum of how to preserve pears is solved. I will be saving all of them in this manner. Sometimes the simplest recipes are the best.

For this recipe, try to select pears that are starting to ripen, but are still firm. This will make both peeling and slicing easier. I think these dried pears are just fine with the skins still on, but the rest of my clan prefers them with skin off. The choice is yours.

Cinnamon-Dusted Dried Pears

pears
lemon juice
cinnamon sugar

1. Prepare a bowl of cool water that has been acidulated with lemon juice. I won't lie to you. For jobs like this, I use the kind of lemon juice that comes in the squeezie bottle. The goal here is to have enough lemon juice in the water to keep the pears from turning brown.

2. Peel your pears using a vegetable peeler. Cut out the core and any brown spots. Slice your pears into pieces 3/8" thick. I like cutting them to this thickness, as there is still some substance to them once they are dried. If you choose to cut them thinner, they'll turn out more like chips.

3. Place the pear slices into the acidulated water, and let them hang out there for 15 minutes.

4. Pour the pears into a strainer so that they aren't totally dripping wet.

5. Arrange your pear slices on dehydrator trays. You can pack them in fairly closely, just make certain they aren't touching.

6. While the surface of the pear slices is still damp, but before you stick them into the dehydrator, sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar. To avoid making a mess, do this over the kitchen sink or outside. Use whatever ratio of cinnamon to sugar you enjoy. I used about 1 tsp. of cinnamon to 2 Tbsp. of sugar. A light dusting will do.

7. Dehydrate the cinnamon-dusted pear slices for 12-18 hours at 135˚ (F). I live in an arid climate, so most of mine are done after 11-12 hours. If you need to use an oven to dry your slices, check out this recipe from my fellow forager, Leda.

8. Let the slices cool completely, and give them a quick check to make certain the fattest slices are thoroughly dried, before storing them in an air-tight container.

Milkweed Pod Golumpkis

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 01:29:00 +0000

A few months ago, I watched a fellow forager make a post about milkweed on Facebook. All they intended to say was that they had picked and enjoyed some for lunch. But the post was preceded by an elaborate explanation of all the care they'd taken to harvest sustainably. I had to laugh to myself because I understood well that without doing so, there would be a least one furious comment or email about how having a single meal of milkweed would spell the end of monarch butterflies. I've gotten those comments and emails, too. I'm guessing most people who speak of eating milkweed have faced the same, no matter how careful their harvest practices.

For foraging instructors, talking about eating milkweed is a subject that must be skirted with care. It's a topic that touches one of our biggest fears - are we harming the environment in any way by foraging? We want to get others excited about eating wild foods, but at the same time always need to make certain we've got an eye toward the best and most sustainable harvest practices. Here's milkweed, a delicious and easily recognized plant that is a natural for getting aspiring foragers truly enthusiastic about eating plants. However, because milkweed appears to be the sole food for the larvae of monarch butterflies, it forces us to look carefully at our relationship with it. This makes it a bit of a hot button topic, and begs the greater question - how do we lead people to embrace wild foods while at the same time ensuring that we aren't a menace to any of the delicate puzzle piece of the ecosystem from which we harvest?

Last year, a freakishly wet spring meant that my local milkweed spots didn't grow well. The plants had a late start, looked sickly and sparse throughout the growing season, and hardly made but a few pods. As a consequence, I didn't eat any milkweed all year, not shoots, nor buds, nor pods. In contrast, the weather this year has favored milkweed booming. I've enjoyed a good harvest of it at all growing stages, and feel confident I've not harmed the milkweed population, nor any of the other critters that depend upon it. As a forager, I have a years-long relationship with this place, having been outside nearly every day of every year with my eyes on the plants. As such, I know well when a population of plants doesn't look healthy, I can tell if an area has been sprayed, and I also know when plants are abundant enough to harvest. This requires the same sort of deep listening and kinship required to maintain a healthy friendship, and reflects the same give and take needed to work in harmony. Being a mindful forager has less to do with dominance over the environment/plants/animals/fungi/forage, and more to do with a deep, trusting relationship. Primum non nocere.

With the popularity of foraging on the rise over the last few years, we've seen plenty of examples of people pillaging ecosystems in pursuit of wild foods, perhaps most visibly in the case of ramps (Allium tricoccum). We need only look to the problem of ramps being over-harvested to see an example of how quickly human hands can impact wild food populations.

Not only people who have an interest in wild foods can harm plant populations. I live in the only small region where a medicinal plant called osha (Ligusticum porteri) grows. Osha's roots are used to heal lung ailments. Its popularity caught on like wildfire among herbalists a while back, and now it is possible to see places in the local mountains where entire areas of the plant have been dug up to the point where only overturned dirt remains.

These examples of greed are driven by profit. It seems that wildcrafting is most likely to edge into crimes against nature when money enters the picture. If milkweed were to catch on as a food in restaurants and becomes a product of commerce, things could potentially get ugly for the plant in a hurry.

My guess is that without any financial incentive, very few people have the time or desire to forage on a personal scale in a quantity great enough to cause large-scale or lasting destruction, though that should not keep any of us from considering our impact thoughtfully at each turn. Think of the damage one set of hands could do compared to entire fields being plowed for a monocrop and bathed in herbicide, or all roadside dishes being mowed, or wild lands disappearing in favor of McMansions and strip malls. In fact, the greatest threats to milkweed appears to be elimination through agriculture and urban sprawl.

Interestingly, while trying to find a reference for that last sentence, I came across a study, referred to in this article, which states that the the most urgent threat to monarchs is coming from loss of habitat during their fall migration, with the destruction of milkweed being a smaller part of the equation. Let's not use that as an excuse to act carelessly toward milkweed, however, as its populations are indeed declining.

Especially in a divisive political climate, it's wonderful to see great passion for saving monarchs, a subject we can all get behind. Clearly those passions are the root of angry comments foragers receive when speaking of eating milkweed, and I appreciate the intent every time. But, as Anurag Agrawal states in above article, "Given the intense interest in monarch conservation, the blame being put on herbicide use and the national dialog about potentially listing monarchs under the endangered species act, we have to get the science right."

Over years of teaching foraging, I've observed that the people who actually eat milkweed are the ones most likely to feel strongly about the plight of monarchs. This seems to be particularly true of the kids I've taught. There is something essential about touching, picking, processing, and eating milkweed that forms meaningful ties to the plant. It forms a personal connection that solidifies the importance of the plant and its place, along with humans, in a role as real-life members of a functioning ecosystem where the vibration of each footstep is felt by every member of the community, flora and fauna alike, not just a story scrolled through on a phone. It makes an abstract concept something real, and personal.

Research actually bears this concept out. Children who are allowed to make tree forts, splash in the mud, and catch frogs are more likely than those who receive classroom education on the subject to become adults with involvement in behaviors that actively protect the environment, as is referred to in this article featured in Orion Magazine. "Wild nature play, both unstructured or structured by parents but with the element of unpredictability in hunting and fishing and riding, were the experiences that seemed to incline the individual toward adult stewardship. In other words, it looks like activities that involve taking and eating (as opposed to just looking and learning), in conjunction with parents who model thoughtful use, are precursors to environmental behavior. "

I'm proposing that if we could put milkweed pod golumpkis onto the plates of more people, eventually there would be greater protection of milkweed, not further destruction of its populations. People who become foragers develop a lasting relationship with the land around them, both because they spend a lot of time physically outside and interacting with it, and also because they want to continue to eat their favorite wild foods from year to year. Foragers have their eyes on the situation, literally. I will always champion each forager placing the greatest time and interest in plants that are weedy and abundant in their neighborhood, over foods which could be considered in any way fragile. Of course, there will be great variability in what falls into the category of weedy and abundant from place to place. I've been jokingly called the Queen of Dock. I work with dock frequently because one can hardly take a step without nudging their foot against a dock plant (Rumex crispus) where I live.

As foragers, it is non-negotiable that we should have these sensitivities toward all the things we choose to pick, and always practice sustainable harvesting. We must take a deep examination of our impact upon our favorite wild foods and the greater environment. We need to be considerate and make good decisions, knowing they will have consequences. Equally important, as responsible foragers, it is essential that we do our research. We need to check multiple sources. We need to keep up with the science. We must ask questions and push boundaries. Harvesting and eating milkweed gives us the opportunity as foragers to put into practice the values we hold most sacred. It's a complicated subject which cannot be reduced to a meme.

Now, on to the food.

Milkweed pods are special among wild foods because they offer the rare combination of a something that is both a solid bite of food and contains a pocket that is begging to be stuffed. For anyone who thinks wild foods are only "twigs and berries," milkweed pods can be a revelation.

My local species is Ascelpias speciosa, or showy milkweed, and is eaten in a similar manner to the other frequently eaten species, common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). The pods seem to grow fairly quickly after the starburst of flowers fade in mid-summer. Young pods, as small as 1-2" can be harvested and eaten whole, or cut up and sliced like okra. For stuffing milkweed pods, you need to strike a perfect balance between maximum growth of the pod, and when it starts to mature and get too tough to eat. I tend to aim for pods that are about 3" in length. When given a brief squeeze, they feel more softer than mature pods. Learning how to distinguish by eye which milkweed pods will be tender comes with experience. I usually only take one pod from each plant. Still, in a good stand of milkweed, it's easy to get a harvest large enough to pull off this golumpki recipe.

Because milkweed contains some toxins, all parts of milkweed should be boiled until tender and the water discarded before you consume it. For the golumpkis, whole pods are boiled briefly. Then, they are split along an existing seam and their silk and seeds, or "guts" as I call them, are removed. If they are still young and tender, the guts can be eaten as a separate dish.

I particularly enjoy milkweed pods served (cooked and) cold, stuffed with an herbed soft cheese. I also like putting some cheese and a jalapeno inside to make milkweed pod "jalapeno poppers." I've stuffed milkweed pods with sausage before, but it was only this summer that it occurred to me that they might make a fun wild translation of traditional Polish cabbage rolls. The recipe came out perfectly the very first time.

Milkweed pod golumpkis are irresistibly homey and satisfying, the kind of dish you want to come home to after a long day, like a good meatloaf. This recipe is taken from one written by a friend's mom in one of my notebooks years ago. She died a few years back, and the sight of her handwriting makes a smile catch on my lips. The only change I've made is to include a panade - a starchy goo made from bread and milk that helps long-cooked meats to remain juice. Of course, stuffing the meat mixture into milkweed pods rather than forming packages with leaves of cabbage is a departure from the original. I've found that slightly older pods can be used here because of the long cook time.

Milkweed Pods Golumpkis

50-60 milkweed pods
1 slice bread, crusts removed
2-4 Tbsp. milk
1 lb. ground meat, any kind (I used lamb)
1 cup cooked white rice
1/4 c. chopped onion
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 egg
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper

2 pints tomato sauce
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. worcestershire sauce

1. Begin by par-boiling the whole milkweed pods. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. In 3-4 batches, add milkweed pods to the boiling water and let them cook for 4-5 minutes before fishing them out to drain. Be aware that as the air escapes the pods, they can sputter and pop. I don't think safety goggles are necessary here, but mind yourself.

2. Let the cooked milkweed pods cool to the touch, then open them along their natural seam, and take out the seeds. If it isn't obvious where the seam is, inspect the stem end of the pod, which will curve slightly. The seam is on the convex side of this curve. While you are taking out the seeds, you be able to feel whether or not the pod is too old to eat. Old seed pods will have seeds that are rigid and crumble away easily. Also, the coating inside of old pods starts to take on stiff plastic-y feeling. Discard the old seeds and pods.

3. In a large mixing bowl, tear up the piece of bread and add the milk, one tablespoon at a time, mashing them with a fork until they take on the texture of thick goo.

4. Add the meat, rice, onion, garlic, salt, pepper, and egg. Use your hands to evenly combine all the ingredients.

5. Use the meat and rice mixture to stuff the milkweed pods. The stuffing goes a long way, so try to fill each pods well.

6. In a medium-sized mixing bowl, combine the tomato sauce, brown sugar, worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and another teaspoon of salt, as well as some cracked black pepper. Stir the ingredients together.

7. Arrange the stuffed milkweed pods in a large pot. I don't see any reason why you couldn't also cook these for several hours on low heat inside a slow cooker, but I've only done it stovetop. Pour the sauce over top the stuffed milkweed. Bring the pot up to medium heat, until the sauce starts to bubble.

8. Turn the heat down to medium-low, and let the milkweed pod golumpkis cook with a cover on for 20 minutes. Remove the cover, and let them continue to cook for an additional 20-25 minutes.

9. Serve each golumpki with a drizzle of the sweet and sour sauce. This recipe makes enough for a crowd. If you aren't feeding a football team, it's good to know that these freeze quite well.

Wildcrafted Agua Fresca

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 01:00:00 +0000

I created the menu for my July workshop around the theme of a taco party. Creating agua fresca out of wild ingredients seemed like a natural fit, and they were particularly welcome on that 100˚ day. For the class, I made three varieties - rose/cherry, linden/pineapple, and pineapple weed/coconut water.

These three flavor combinations are simply a jumping off point. This is a concept you could take in a million directions. Use whatever wildcrafted goods you have on hand and enjoy. The basic concept is to make a strong infusion of the wild component from either fresh or dried materials. I usually fill a quart jar about 1/3 of the way (loosely) with the wild materials, then top it off with boiling water, and let it infuse until it comes back to room temperature. From there, I strain out the solids and combine the infusion with an approximately equal amount of the second element, generally a fruit juice. Chill thoroughly, and enjoy wild aguas frescas over ice. For the purpose of creating these recipes, I used the pineapple juice and coconut water in the sizes commonly found in the stores. There's a lot of wiggle room in amounts you can use in these recipes, however. Make them to taste. The important thing is that the wild portion has a strong flavor, so that they stand up to the second element.

Rose and Sour Cherry Agua Fresca

32 oz. wild rose infusion
8 oz. sour cherry juice
sweetener to taste

Linden Flower and Pineapple Juice Agua Fresca

32 oz. linden flower infusion
46 oz. pineapple juie

Pineapple Weed and Coconut Water Agua Fresca*

32 oz. pineapple weed infusion
33.8 oz. coconut water

*Inspired by Ellen Zachos pineapple weed cordial and coconut water cocktail, which you will be able to see in her book the Wildcrafted Cocktail, Spring 2017.

Yucca Flower Quesadillas

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:16:00 +0000

I've gotten out of the habit of posting here regularly. It's not because I'm no longer foraging or cooking with wild foods. On the contrary, I'm more consumed by these topics than ever. Part of the problem is that when a plant comes out, I want to make my old standbys recipes. Purslane just got big enough to eat, and the first thing I want to make with it is purslane potato salad because I've been craving and eating it for years. The other part of the equation is that I only want to post recipes here these days if they are truly something to get excited about, the kind of dish that I want to eat every single day until the season runs out.

On that note, I present to you the utterly crave-able yucca flower quesadillas.

Something clicked for me last week, and I finally figured out how to best make use of yucca flowers. I pick waxy non-fragrant Yucca gluaca here and have in the past, found them to be best used as an oil pickle in the style of marinated artichoke hearts. Otherwise, I never managed to use yucca flowers in a way that wowed me. While lounging in the shade last weekend, I read a brief sentence regarding yucca in Dolores Latorre's Cooking and Curing with Mexican Herbs that got my wheels turning, "A bit of flour can be added to the drained (steamed) petals, patted into small cakes, sauteed, and served with tomato sauce."

As instructed, I sprinkled some flour into steamed yucca petals. This made a gluey mess, as you might expect. But I continued on and attempted to make something like a patty and careful put it into a hot pan with oil to saute it. I quickly discovered that cake had no interest in holding its form, so I smashed it down with my spatula in order to maximize surface area for browning on both sides. Out of the pan, I tasted my flattened yucca pile. It still had a gluey quality, but the added flour made it so the yucca picked up a bit more flavor from browning than would happen by sauteing it sole. The result was savory and good, with some pleasant bitterness, not unlike one would taste with artichoke. But it wasn't quite right on it's own. To salvage my meal, I stuck it between two tortillas with some quesillo and made a quesadilla. Holy moly, some magic happened with the browned yucca with the cheese, and the quesadilla was one of the best I've ever had.

I returned to the recipe the next night, and instead of using pastey flour with the steamed yucca, I tried mixing it with dried bread crumbs, as well as adding some onion powder, salt, and pepper. It quickly became obvious that this version wouldn't hold as a patty, but I didn't really think it needed to, as I intended to put it into quesdillas once again. Once sauteed to a medium brown, the yucca was exquisite. Tender yucca petals were enhanced by the crispy browned bread crumbs and seasonings. I served these yucca flower quesadillas with dinner, and everyone preferred them to the tacos I also served.

The crispy sauteed breadcrumby yucca flowers are so good on their own that I'd serve them as a side dish, or atop pasta to preserve the crunch. You might think it goofy that I'd put all of that crunch into a quesadilla that turns it all soft again. As I mentioned before, however, the browned breadcrumbs add an additional layer of flavor inside the quesadillas.

It's traditional to remove yucca petals from their reproductive parts before eating. I always thought this had to do with bitterness, and detected no additional bitterness from consuming them cooked, nor any ill effects. Wild Food Girl pointed out, though, that the reason some avoid the pistils and stamen may possibly be due to their high saponin content. Good to be aware of. Proceed with good judgment and while listening to how your body responds to yucca flowers, as is the case with all wild foods.

Yucca Flower Quesadillas

yucca petals
dry breadcrumbs
onion powder
salt
pepper
tortillas (I like corn, but use flour if you prefer)
queso Oaxaca*

1. Steam the yucca petals just until they turn to a translucent shade of pale green. Let them cool to a lukewarm temperature.

2. In a bowl, sprinkle the steamed yucca petals with salt, pepper, and onion powder. Pick up a few and taste them to make sure they're seasoned to your liking.

3. Toss the seasoned yucca flowers with some breadcrumbs. You want to use enough breadcrumbs to absorb the excess moisture in the yucca, without the dish being taken over by bread. Eyeballing it, I'd say no more than one part breadcrumbs to every four parts yucca petals.

4. Add a spoonful of oil to a saute pan, and heat it to medium.

5. Add the yucca and breadcrumb mixture to the pan, spread it out, and cook it, stirring occasionally, until most of the breadcrumbs take on a medium brown color. Pour the mixture into a bowl.

6. In the same pan, still over medium heat, construct a quesadilla by layering a tortilla with the yucca flower mixture, and some cheese. Put a lid on the pan, and cook the tortilla (whether you fold, or top it with a second) on both sides until the cheese is oozy. Serve immediately.

*If you can't find this particular cheese, substitute mozzarella. The mild milkiness of these cheeses is beautiful when paired with the pleasant bitterness of the yucca. Monteray jack or cheddar aren't nearly as nice here, but use what you have.

Dock in Yogurt (Borani)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 04:10:00 +0000

Dock (Rumex crispus) is almost always the first plant up here in great enough quantities to more than nibble. This year was no exception. In fact, I wandered into a particularly fine patch of dock while looking for cottonwood buds, and have been harvesting that spot with delight for nearly two weeks. I have a theory that shady spots are best for picking dock, especially this time of year. Shade both keeps the dock from getting too tough, and keeps the bugs too cold to nibble it.

While dock has always been one of my favorite wild foods based upon its lemony-spinach flavor and abundance, it tends to suffer a bit upon cooking, turning a dull army green. I fear it turns people off from enjoying dock.

I was trying to cook up a bit of dock in a hurry a few weeks ago, and stumbled upon a new technique that keeps dock a vibrant green. This method involved plunging chopped dock leaves into rapidly boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then immediately draining them and running them under cold water. This method offers the other advantage of giving you cooked and ready to go dock in just a few minutes without an oily saute pan to clean. Also, I'm not yet certain if it's due to the cooking technique or my fine new patch of dock, but I've not gotten that oxalic-acid fuzzy teeth feeling from eating dock this year.

This dish has been a staple in my home for a few years. It's so simple that I'm a little embarrassed to even call it a recipe. It's a traditional accompaniment to meals that hails from Iran. I think the tang of the dock gives it an extra level of complexity. For anyone scared off by either the dock or the word borani, this recipe is pretty much a wild foods version of spinach dip, so fear not. Dock borani will sing when served with stew, or lamb, and a steaming bowl of fragrant basmati. However, it's a versatile dish that can also serve as a veggie dip, a sandwich schmear, a sauce to all manner of meats, and it also loves to snuggle up to Mediterranean foods.

You can guild the lily when making dock borani by topping it with a sprinkling of dried mint (I don't care for mint, so usually use Monarda fistulosa), some toasted walnuts, and a drizzle of olive oil. But none of that is necessary. I usually keep this recipe bare bones and simple.

If you have fresh young garlic greens, they are really delicious in place of or in addition to the fresh clove or dried garlic here.

To learn more about identifying dock, check out these articles.
http://foraging.about.com/od/Foraged-Greens/fl/Everything-You-Always-Wanted-to-Know-About-Dock-Rumex-species.htm
http://hungerandthirstforlife.blogspot.com/2012/03/wild-things-in-march-dock.html

You can see more dock recipes in this round up.
http://hungerandthirstforlife.blogspot.com/2012/03/wild-things-round-up.html#!/2012/03/wild-things-round-up.html

Dock Borani

2 c. thick whole-milk yogurt, seriously now, no low-fat
3-5 c. loosely packed dock leaves
1 clove garlic very finely minced, or 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
salt
pepper

1. If your dock is dirty, wash it. I'll admit that since I'm usually picking brand new growth from pristine places, and intend to plunge it into hot water anyhow, I rarely do this. Use your judgment. Sometimes washing is necessary. Don't do anything to make yourself or anyone you love sick.

2. Bring a medium to large pot of water to a rapid boil. From my experience, if you want to keep your dock bright green, it's important to achieve a rapid boil, not just barely bubbling water.

3. Gather your dock into one bunch on a cutting board, and coarsely chop it into 3/4" pieces.

4. Plunge the chopped dock into the boiling water. Use a spoon to stir it for 20-30 seconds, no more.

5. Immediately drain the dock into a sieve and start chilling it off with cold running water, stirring it with the spoon as necessary. Leave it to drain.

6. Gather the whole lot of dock into a ball and squeeze out as much water as possible. Grrrr, muscles!

7. Place the dock back onto your cutting board, and chop through it in both directions one more time, just to make sure there will be bite-sized pieces in the yogurt.

8. In a large bowl, combine the yogurt, along with the cooked and chopped dock, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. I'll tell you that I enjoy quite a bit of both salt and pepper in this dish.

9. Refrigerate the dock borani for at least 3 hours before serving, overnight is better. This allows time for the garlic to penetrate the yogurt. Otherwise, you'll be tempted to dump more garlic into it, and you'll knock peoples' socks off.

Acorn Sticky Toffee Pudding

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 01:00:00 +0000

The idea for making acorn sticky toffee pudding has been floating around in my head for years. This fall, I finally set to work testing the recipe. This turned out to be quite challenging, as the traditional sticky toffee pudding desserts I tried were fiddly, requiring multiple steps and individual ramekins and water baths. All this made for a big complicated mess when trying to also substitute in acorn flour for regular flour. Five separate tries came out too dry and hard.

Enter Nigella Lawson. I should have known that someone who has always embraced butter and simplifying cooking would have a wonderful recipe for sticky toffee pudding. Nigella's version is an all-in-one bowl affair, which didn't require soaking the dates or cooking the sauce stovetop. Here's the unusual bit. Her recipe is baked with boiling water poured over the top. I'll admit that it took a leap off faith to pour water over the batter that first time. The result is spectacular, completely squidgy and sticky, and with the sauce magically formed around the cake. In fact, it came out so well that I was able to eventually switch the recipe to 100% acorn flour. I truly believe that this is one of the very best wild food dishes I've ever made.

Acorn Sticky Toffee Pudding

3 Tbsp. melted butter
1/4 c. milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 c. brown sugar (not packed)
1/2 c. acorn flour (see this post for to learn more about processing acorns for flour)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
100 g. very sticky dates, pitted and chopped

1/2 c. brown sugar
1 Tbsp butter, cut into tiny knobs
1 c. boiling water

1. Whisk together the 3 Tbsp. melted butter, milk, egg, and vanilla.

2. Stir in the first 1/4 c. brown sugar, salt, baking soda, and most, but not all of the acorn flour. The reason for this is you want to see how the wet ingredients are absorbed by the acorn flour. You want the batter to be closer to the consistency of a normal cake batter than a brownie batter, or it will come out too dense and dry. I usually let it sit while I'm chopping the dates, then decide whether to add more acorn flour. My acorn flour is dried in the dehydrator and I live in an arid climate, so it is quite dry.

3. Stir in the chopped dates, then pour the batter into a buttered 1-quart baking dish. In case it should boil over, place the baking dish on a cookie sheet covered in aluminum foil.

4. Sprinkle the additional 1/2 c. of brown sugar over the top of the cake, then dot it with the small pieces of butter. Just before sticking it into the oven, pour the cup of boiling water over the top. Try to control that little voice in your head that is saying, "this is wrong, this is so wrong!"

5. Bake the cake at 375˚ for 40 minutes. This is a very wet cake, but it still passes the toothpick test when it's finished baking.

6. Let the cake sit 60-90 minutes before serving, because it's just too molten and soggy straight away. Acorn sticky toffee pudding is best eaten slightly warm with a drizzle of cream.

Dock Crackers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Dock crackers are a recipe I've been monkeying with for years. In the beginning, every batch I made was capable of breaking teeth. Last year, I went through a phase where they were always crumbly. At last, I've settled upon a recipe that strikes the right balance of being strong enough to dip or be swiped with cheese, with just the right amount of crispy crunch.

This recipe is gluten-free. Of course, you could make them with regular all-purpose flour. But here's the interesting part about making dock crackers that have great texture without gluten - it opens the door to making crackers out of 100% wild flours. I find that to be an exciting possibility.

You can go to the trouble to winnow your dock seeds before making flour. I always used to do this. I've found it works best if you first lightly toast them in a pan before rubbing them with your hands, then winnow. For the most part these days, I don't bother, and simply buzz up dock fruit complete with their papery valves. I understand this isn't much different from using school paper as an ingredient, but it saves some trouble and works out just fine. Fiber!

The psyllium husks called for in this recipe are the same that are used in popular laxative powders, though they can easily and cheaply be obtained at a health food store, if you're embarrassed by having a jar of Metamucil in your spice rack. I've been playing with using plantain seeds in place of psyllium with some luck, since the two are related. Though, I don't yet have enough control over the process to recommend you do the same. Either the psyllium or xanthan gum can be omitted here, just bump up the amount of the one you are using.

Dock Crackers

1/2 dock flour
1/2 c. gluten-free flour (I've been using 1 part brown rice:1 part sorghum:1 part arrowroot)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. onion powder
1 Tbsp. psyllium husk
1 tsp. xanthan gum
2 tsp. vinegar
water

1. Evenly mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl.

2. Add the vinegar and enough water so that the cracker dough just starts to stick together in a ball. If you add too much water, they'll be a bear to roll out, and take longer to bake.

3. Let the dough sit, covered, for 10 minutes. This gives the flours a chance to suck in the moisture.

4. Lightly flour the outside of the dough, then roll it between two sheets of parchment paper. Roll the dough as thinly as you can manage, lifting up the top sheet of paper periodically if it seems to be wrinkling or getting stuck to the crackers. Once you've finished rolling, remove the top sheet of parchment.

5. At this point, you can choose to sprinkle salt or seeds onto the crackers. Use you hands to lightly press them into the dough.

6. Use a pizza wheel to cut the dock cracker dough into squares or diamonds.

7. Gently transfer the cracker dough, still resting on the bottom piece of parchment paper, onto a baking sheet.

8. Bake the crackers at 375˚ for approximately 10 minutes. I wish I could tell you these are magically done in exactly 10 minutes. The truth is that you are going to have to watch the batch, and likely remove some of the outer crackers before the inner ones are fully cooked. They should be dried out and crispy, though not burnt. It's a little hard to tell because dock crackers are brown.

9. Leave the finished crackers on a cooling rack for at least an hour before storing them, to make certain they stay crunchy.

How to Pop Amaranth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Oct 2015 18:15:00 +0000

It turns out that popping tiny wild amaranth seeds (Amaranthus spp.) is not as simple as throwing them into a pan and treating them like popcorn. The general principle is the same. Without more specific guidelines, however, I can assure you of failure.

The problem is that amaranth seeds are ridiculously small compared to popcorn. Without treating them very carefully, you can take any number of paths of burnt amaranth. And if you've spent hours collecting, stripping, and winnowing the little buggers, that's tantamount to heartbreak.

How to Identify Amaranth

Often called by the common name, pigweed, amaranth loves disturbed ground at lower-altitudes (Rocky Mountain Region). It has oval leaves, from 1-3 inches in length. The whole plant can grow to be taller than a person, though it usually hits stomach to shoulder-height. The stem, and sometimes the entire plant can turn red to magenta at maturita, though it oftentimes remains green throughout its life cycle. The seed heads are densely custered like a fox tail, and are not easily mistaken for other plants. The seeds of amaranth are very small and have an oily appearance which makes them gleam a little more than most other wild seeds I've observed.

Harvesting Amaranth

To procure amaranth seeds, I believe it is ideal to collect them when the seed heads are 3/4 of the way dried out. However, amaranth seems to cling to its seeds better than other wild edibles once they are completely dried, and I've harvested mid-winter for fun. Since our local species makes a prickly seed head, I like to snip them directly into a large paper bag. I should note that ornamental purple amaranth is edible, and from my experience, has more abundant seeds than our local wild one. If you've got access to a patch you're certain haven't been sprayed, they're a great source of seeds to eat.

Processing Amaranth for Seeds

Because of the prickle-factor, I also tend to wear heavy gloves when stripping the seeds, rubbing the seed heads vigorously between my thumb and forefinger, or between my palms, to coax the seeds out. Once all the seeds have been stripped, I pour them and all their surrounding chaff into a pie plate and winnow. You can use the wind, your strong lungs, or a box fan plugged in outside (my favorite method!) to winnow any wild seeds. The process uses moving air to blow away all the lightweight plant bits that aren't seed. Since the seeds are heavier, they fall back to the pie plate. With a little effort, you'll end up with a clean dish full of glossy amaranth seeds. I find them to be beautiful. Be careful where you winnow. A few seeds are likely to escape during the process, and they will have a good chance of sprouting next year. If that happened to me, I'd wait until they were a few inches tall, then eat the tender young plant.

Once you have a clean batch of seeds, they are ready to eat. In the past, I've used them much like poppy seeds in baking. They can also be cooked with oatmeal, quinoa, or a batch of rice. Feeling really ambitious? You could grind amaranth seeds into flour. In theory, you could also sprout them, though I've had no success doing so. By a long shot, my favorite way to eat amaranth is popped. Those oily seeds that are nearly rock-hard when raw become light and crunchy when popped.

Popping Amaranth Seeds

The most important piece of equipment when popping amaranth is a heavy-bottomed pot with a lid. It is also helpful to have a brush, either silicone or natural-bristled (nothing that can melt!), though you could probably get away with using a heat-proof spatula.

Heat your pot thoroughly over medium. It's better to start out with the burner set a little too low than it is to start out too hot and try to cool it back down after burning several batches of amaranth. The important thing here is to let the pot heat up for a good long time, maybe 4-5 minutes. If you splash a bit of water into the pan, and it sizzles, rather than shooting around like balls, the pot isn't hot enough. You don't need oil to pop amaranth.

Here's the part that's going to be frustrating. You're going to have to work in very small batches. The amaranth pops better that way. Additionally, since the risk of burning the seeds is so high, you don't want to burn an entire batch. Nobody wants to see you cry after that happens. So, you'll be working with about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon at a time. Don't be tempted to put your amaranth into the pot before it is fully heated. It is guaranteed to burn. If your first few batches don't pop right away, wait until they do, for it will tell you how to adjust the heat, then throw them away. You will be able to smell right away if a batch has burned. If in doubt, though, taste some. Do not keep any batch that has burnt.

Once your pan is hot enough, sprinkle in a small amount of amaranth. Immediately cover the pot, and start vigorously shaking it back and forth. Continue to shake the pot the entire time. After just a few seconds, you should hear the amaranth start to pop. After 10-15 seconds, there will be a whole flurry of it. Keep it over the heat, shaking still, until you hear the popping start to taper off. Immediately remove the pan from the heat, and pour the popped amaranth into a bowl. This is where you'll use your brush to make certain every last bit has been swept from the bottom of the pot. Any little bit left behind will burn, and will add a burnt taste to your whole batch.

Keep working in small batches until you've got enough popped amaranth. Yes, it's a process. But no batch takes longer than 20-30 seconds. Amaranth pops to 3-4 times it's original size.

Popped amaranth is pretty good on its own. You can use it with your cereal, or as an addition to granola. I've tried it as a coating for fried fish and thought it delightful. You can sprinkle it on just about anything, though it gets soggy on any food that is more wet than oily.

I most enjoy eating popped amaranth as a candy similar to Mexican alegria or Indian ladoo. It reminds me of caramel popcorn. I use Carolyn Niethammer's recipe for alegria from The Tumbleweed Gourmet, with the amount of popped amaranth reduced from 1 cup down to 3/4. The popped amaranth candy is only lightly sweet. You can taste amaranth and an undertone of honey. They're crunchy and good, though they may have you running for a toothbrush afterward to eliminate your amaranth-studded smile.

Popped Amaranth Candy

1 Tbsp. butter
2 tsp. molasses
4 tsp. honey
3/4 c. popped amaranth

1. In a small pan, melt the butter over low heat, then add both the honey and molasses.

2. Bring the heat up to medium-high and let the syrup bubble vigorously. You are looking for it to change consistency from being very runny to being much more viscous. It's easy to observe the change in consistency by scooping up a spoonful and watching how the syrup pours off the spoon. For such a small amount of syrup, this usually takes me about 3 minutes. Watch it careful, as it can burn.

3. Remove the syrup from the heat, and stir in all of the popped amaranth until it looks like wet sand.

4. Pour the amaranth candy onto a greased plate. Be careful not to burn yourself on the hot syrup. As soon as the candy is cool enough to touch, you can start to compact it. This works best with lightly greased hands. You can either form it into a brick, and cut it into pieces after it's cooled, or roll the amaranth candy into balls. Forming balls takes a delicate touch and is a bit of a challenge, though the finished product looks quiet pleasing.

Elderflower Lassi

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:08:00 +0000

Meals lately have revolved around one theme - refreshment. Most of the last two months have been consumed by mushroom hunting. Though my love of mushrooming exceeds that of most every other activity, it's left me a tad worn out, a feeling that is intensified by returning home to the heat of the city. Nearing the end of summer, it's that time when even a forager is tempted to survive on cherry tomatoes and slices of cucumber alone. If I had the spare time and ice cream maker, I know I'd also make many of my meals entirely of elderflower buttermilk sherbet. Even without the ice cream maker and free time, I've managed to satisfy my craving for that collision of sourness and delicate elderflower cordial by making a lassi.

Before attempting this recipe, I checked in with my Indian friend to make certain I knew exactly what makes a drink a lassi. She enlightened me, "It's simply water and yogurt, either made sweet or salty. The additions are to your fancy." Easy enough, and so many more possibilities than the cloying mango lassi that appears in American Indian restaurants. I'm really quite fond of the elderflower lassi, and find it to be the perfect snack upon returning from a long day of mushrooming. As the days start to fade and my foraging becomes less demanding, I know I'll still have an occasional lassi to call to mind the gauzy incandescence of early summer, the time of elderflowers.

Elderflower Lassi

1/2 c. full-fat yogurt
1/4 c. very cold water
2 Tbsp. elderflower cordial
a few grain of salt

Combine all of the ingredients in a tall glass, and vigorously swirl them together with a spoon. One could surely achieve a nicer texture by using a blender, but I find that dirtying another tool detracts from my pleasure of the drink. Enjoy straight away.

Have You Tried Salsify Buds?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 12:39:00 +0000

The story of how I came to eat salsify (Tragopogon spp.) buds is nearly identical to that of how I learned to eat burdock stalks. Like burdock, salsify is a plant best known for having an edible root. For years, I extracted spindly little salsify roots from our hard clay soil and was reluctant to admit that I didn't much enjoy them. It wasn't until rereading Sam Thayer's Nature's Garden that it clicked that all parts of salsify are edible so long as they are tender, and that the flower buds offer a nice bite of food that is no trouble to harvest.

How to Identify and Harvest Salsify Buds

Salsify root is best picked early in the year, while all of the plant's energy is still stored in the root. However, for the novice, identifying the new spring growth of salsify can be a difficult task as it looks much like tufts of grass. (If you can identify them, take advantage of early growth). On the other hand, salsify buds are picked when the plant is showing its easily recognized yellow (or sometimes purple) flowers and/or globe-like seed heads that call to mind giant dandelions. Another identifying characteristic of salsify is its latex, which appears white like school glue, and can leave a brown stain on your hands.

Full of seeds, too late to eat.

There are three things to look for when harvesting salsify buds. First, make sure you have a flower which has yet to open. Once the plant has flowered, but before the full seed head emerges, the closed flower can look similar to a bud but be filled with papus and achenes. If in doubt, you can peek inside to see if you spot petals or dry fluff.

Secondly, select tender salsify buds. As with most things, I use my thumbnail to test for tenderness. If I can easily pinch off the bud with my thumbnail, I know it will be tender enough to eat. If my nail meets resistance when I try to pop off the bud, it's best left behind.

Finally, make certain your salsify buds haven't been bugged out. Around here, salsify buds can be infested with a small black bug, and those are ones I choose not to eat. I tried to on one occasion, but soaking them in vinegar water and cleaning them of bugs was more work than it was worth.

Aside from ease of harvest, one of the other great advantages of salsify buds is that they can be found later into the growing season than one might expect. If you discover a big patch of salsify, it never hurts to look lower down on the plant for newly emerging buds. Even now, at the end of July, I can still get at least a handful every time I go out. Wild Food Girl reports salsify buds are prime in the mountains at the moment, though you may face competition for them from deer.

To harvest salsify buds, simply cut the entire bud, along with its accompanying leaves and peduncle from the main plant stem. All of these parts are edible. From the outside, I think salsify buds resemble tiny ears of corn.

Cooking with Salsify Buds

Salsify buds need only a brief boiling of 2-5 minutes in water before they are cooked-through and ready to be used in any number of ways. Their mild faintly sweet green flavor makes them a natural in just about anything you'd want to cook. I'm particularly fond of eating them simply as a side dish, or tucked into an omelet.

Chanterelle Skillet Toast

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 13:25:00 +0000

Chanterelle mushrooms - exquisite to behold, ambosial on the tastebuds. When you are in possession of one of the most heavenly foods on the planet, the directive is clear, keep it simple. In the past, I've been guilty of ignoring this advice. Yep, I made a chanterelle cake. I'll tell you, though, these golden girls are officially my favorite food. I'm done messing around with them, doing things that mask or dull their flavor.

I believe this is ultimate recipe for serving chanterelles, even better than the classics like pasta and risotto. More a technique than an actual recipe, it yields a final dish that lets chanterelles stand alone on a pedestal. On my last day, if someone could please slip a plate of chanterelle skillet toast into my hands, I'd die with a smile arching my lips.

Chanterelle Skillet Toast

chanterelles, cleaned and torn into bite-sized pieces
butter
salt
day-old sourdough bread, cut into thick slices

1. Using a heavy-bottomed dry skillet, heat a single layer of chanterelles over medium heat until they begin to exude their juices.

2. Add a sprinkling of salt, and a fat knob of butter to the pan.

3. As soon as the butter has melted, scoot the mushrooms to the edges of the skillet, and place the bread slices into the warm buttery juices, making certain there are no mushrooms underneath.

4. Let the bread brown on both sides, then dump the whole mess out onto a plate. It ain't pretty, but it sure is good.

Eat This Now: Cattail Flower Breakfast Tacos

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Jun 2015 22:30:00 +0000

Over the years, I've cooked cattail flowers (Typha spp.) every which way. I've even made cattail flower ice cream. This season, one recipe stood out as my favorite, and I made it nearly every other day for as long as the crop would allow, cattail flower breakfast tacos.

To learn more about collecting and preparing cattail flowers, click through to this older post. Cooked, stripped cattail flowers keep in the fridge for a solid week, which makes this an quick and easy recipe to prepare if you've already got them on hand.

You can omit the bacon in this recipe, or substitute the crumbling cheese with melting cheese. Whatever you do, don't switch out the corn tortillas. The flavor of cattail flowers is echoed in the corn tortillas, and that harmony is what makes this dish truly special. If you don't have access to pliable and tender fresh corn tortillas, older ones can be heated for a 30 seconds each on the stovetop burner (gas or electric) then wrapped in a kitchen towel until they are ready to be filled.

Cattail Flower Breakfast Tacos

prepared and stripped cattail flowers
eggs
milk
salt
pepper
bacon grease
your favorite allium (onion or garlic, wild or not), chopped
cooked bacon strips
queso fresco
corn tortillas

1. In a small bowl, whisk up your eggs, along with a splash of milk and some salt and pepper with a fork. Stir in approximately an equal volume of prepared and stripped cattail flowers. No need to be fussy, just eyeball it. I've found that two small farm eggs make three good-sized tacos.

2. Heat a skillet to medium and add enough bacon grease to cook the eggs. Add the allium and let it cook until it is fragrant and translucent.

3. Dump the egg and cattail flower mixture into the skillet, and cook it just like you would scrambled eggs, stirring and fluffing until the eggs are cooked to your liking.

4. Immediately divide the eggy cattails into your tortillas. Top each taco with a slice of bacon, a bit of crumbled cheese, and a slice of avocado if you have it. Serve right away.

Burdock Stalks: the Best Vegetable You're Not Eating

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 00:14:00 +0000

Wild Food Girl jokes that whenever we ponder digging up burdock (Arctium spp.) roots, I hand the shovel to her. This is because I find digging burdock roots from our hard clay soil to be an unpleasant, if not nearly impossible task. Worse, the burdock roots harvested from here are not long and fat. They are gnarled and spindly. For the most part, I've given up burdock roots as a food not worth the effort. I realize I probably get bad forager points for saying that out loud.

It's such a typical story in foraging. Just when you've given up on something, you find greater success. This happens to me all the time when mushrooming. It's not until I'm about to call it a day that I stumble into glittering jackpots of fungi. So, too, with burdock. Just when I'd written off the plant, I was awakened to a new way to enjoy it. Thanks in large part to Leda Meredith, who is very enthusiastic about it, my eyes were opened to the great potential of another part of burdock - its flowering stalks.

The plant has been staring in the face the whole time, an abundant source of really good food. I half want to smack myself in the head. Sam Thayer mentioned eating burdock stalks in the Forager's Harvest (2006), which is a book I've read many times over, but the pieces didn't connect for me. I ate burdock stalks for the first time last year and for some reason, wasn't dumbstruck with love for them like I am this year. This may well be my new favorite vegetable. It's that good. I have to smile at how foraging always gives me something new to be excited about.

How to Harvest Burdock Stalks

While you may not immediate recognize the burdock plant, if you spend any length of time outside, you will likely know the prickly spherical burs of burdock because you've had them stuck into your clothes or your pet's fur at some point. Rumor has it that burdock burs were the inspiration for velcro. As someone who has had a fair share of the tenacious burs lodged into my pants, socks, shirtsleeves, bags, and more, I can see how that story came about.

When seeking burdock in the spring and early summer, you will almost always see its burs on the ground, which will help your ID if you are unsure. Many think that the leaves of burdock call to mind those of rhubarb. They are indeed large and grow on long petioles, though the leaves of burdock tend to be slightly more elongated than those of rhubarb, and they are white and felt-like underneath. Additionally, the leaf petioles of burdock are strongly grooved, calling to mind celery, not the glossy smooth petioles of rhubarb.

Some report having eaten both leaves and leaf petioles. I've found neither to be worth the effort to overcome their bitterness and texture. For my time, the best value in burdock is in its central flowering stalk. The trick is to catch the burdock stalk when it's grown tall, but hasn't yet started to make flowers. The ideal burdock stalk will have leaves originating all along it, and some new leaves emerging from the top, but no flowers. Burdock stalks are deeply grooved, green, occasionally with bits of pink, and are usually at least partially covered with a light layer of white fuzz that can be rubbed off with your finger. I've picked them anywhere from 1-2.5' long (topmost leaves and leaf petioles not included), and all were agreeable in flavor. So long as they've not yet sent out flower buds, the top few feet of even taller stalks may be harvested. You'll know immediately upon cutting a burdock stalk if it's too tough to eat. If it feels like you are trying to cut into a tree branch, not a sturdy vegetable, move on. The larger burdock stalks are easier to peel and give a bigger bite of food, so it is a bit of a game to strike the balance between getting the biggest stalks you can find while keeping an eye out for tenderness.

To harvest burdock stalks. use a pair of snips with a curved blade or a knife and cut the stalk as close to the ground as you can manage. Burdock stalks can be quite thick at the base. While still in the field, cut all leaves from the stalk. Burdock rarely grows in isolation. You are likely to find a fine big patch of it, and harvest many stalks with just a few minutes.

How to Prepare Burdock Stalks

Turn your burdock stalk and look at the thick cut end. You will see a clear division between the darker green stringy outer layer, and its creamy pale green interior. Your goal in preparing burdock to eat is to remove all of the stringy green layer because it is bitter. I believe this is best done with a paring knife. Use your paring knife and thumb to grab and strip off chunks of the bitter green lengthwise. If the burdock is freshly cut, this process is quite easy. For some reason, if the burdock has been in the fridge for a day or longer, this process is harder. You may need to use your knife to further cut off any of the stringy bits. If you hold your burdock stalk up to the light, and see any grooves on the outside, keep stripping away the stringy layer. The last little stringy bits aren't as bitter as the outside, but they do turn brown more quickly than the interior of the burdock stalk. You are looking to have just the perfect pale interior remaining. Don't make yourself crazy cleaning the burdock, however. This should be a fairly quick task. If you are processing a large amount of burdock stalks, or want to leave them sitting for a bit before you cook them, place your cleaned burdock in a bowl of water to which a heavy squeeze of lemon has been added. This will keep the burdock from oxidizing, which turns the outside brown.

One thing to watch out for when preparing burdock stalks is the center of the stalk. If there is a hole in the center, the stalk will likely be unpleasantly tough. Keep cutting up the stalk until you reach the point where there is no longer a hole in the center, and you will have reached the tender portion.

Once they've been cleaned, burdock stalks can be kept whole or cut into chunks, depending upon how you want to use them in a recipe. Either way, I prefer to prepare them for recipes by boiling them in salted water (salt the water somewhat heavily, the way you would for cooking pasta). When I was researching, some sites said the salted water helped to tame the bitterness of burdock. I've boiled them in both salted and unsalted water, and have found no difference in the bitterness. In fact, I've not found that there's any bitterness that I'd want to remove in the burdock that I've cleaned it properly. It does have a faint bitterness, though I find it to be pleasant, just like the vegetable to which it is often compared, artichoke.

Raw burdock stalks taste faintly starchy. Burdock stalks, if boiled for just 2 minutes in salted water, retain a nice crunch. Boiled 8-10 minutes, burdock stalks get tender, but not mushy. Boiled burdock stalks can be used immediately, keep in the fridge for several days, or be put into the freezer to be enjoyed later.

Using Burdock Stalks in Recipes

The flavor of burdock stalks has been widely compared to artichokes and cardoons. Use that as a jumping off point when choosing how you'd like to enjoy your burdock stalks. Your first time eating them, enjoy burdock stalks simply, dressed only with butter (or olive oil), salt and pepper. Next up, try dipping cooked burdock stalks in bagna cauda (this is a strong contender for my favorite way to eat burdock) or tossing chopped pieces with a homemade vinaigrette.

From there, the sky is the limit when it comes to cooking with burdock stalk. Look up recipes for artichokes or cardroons, and substitute burdock. Use them where you'd normally use broccoli or potatoes. Serve burdock as a simple side, warm or cold. Throw burdock stalks into any old salad, soup, or egg dish you are making. Here are the ways I've tried eating burdock stalk thus far, all of which were good.

-battered and shallow fried
-layered with béchamel sauce and cheese, topped with breadcrumbs, and baked
-finished in tomato sauce with a dusting of hard cheese
-cream of burdock soup
-mashed together with potatoes
-in a Persian-inspired stew with lamb and potatoes
-chopped into a tapenade with capers and lemon zest
-burdock barigoule
-with a pecorino vinaigrette
-dipped into parmesan black pepper yogurt
- cooked in a mock beef and broccoli stir-fry
-as a warm salad with caramelized onions, pine nuts, and a squeeze of lemon
-Leda Meredith's marinated burdock pickles

Crème de Violette

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 13:44:00 +0000

I got inspired to make crème de violette by a friend who aspires to try one classic cocktail per week. While sitting on the bank of a ditch after foraging together, she told me about the Aviation, a cocktail that combines gin, maraschino liqueur, and lemon with crème de violette. At once, I knew that crème de violette would be my big violet recipe for season, and went home and started infusing violet petals in vodka.

Here's the thing, though. I had no clue what crème de violette was. In my head, I thought, "yum, I like cream and I like violets." It wasn't until a few days later that I did my research and discovered that the crème of crème de violet comes not from cream, but from a high sugar content which lends a velvety texture to the finished liqueur. So, crème de violette is basically an alcoholic syrup.

Aside from separating the violet petals from the calyx (do not skip this step, or your final product will taste like cooked vegetables), this recipe is very simple and straightforward. I used the highly fragrant Viola odorata, which many consider to be a yard pest. I tested this recipe twice, and both batches were fantastic. The crème de violette turns out faintly purple and with an almost grape-candy flavor which is fragrant but, to my surprise, not perfume-y. This recipe is a keeper, and I will no longer bother trying to eek out tedious candied violets or a jelly that I'll never eat.

So far, I've just been sharing small sips of straight crème de violette with friends. It's also nice with soda water. Soon, I'll get brave and make an Aviation.

I will mention that the color of the crème de violette seems to be fading, even though it is being kept in a cool dark place. If anyone has advice of a way to preserve the color without altering the delicate flavor, I'd love to hear it. Cheers!

Crème de Violette

1/2 c. violet petals (calyx and all green parts removed)
1 c. vodka
1 c. white sugar
1/2 c. water
1/2 tsp. lemon juice

1. Place 1/4 c. of the violet petals and the vodka in a pint jar, and lid it tightly. Shake the jar to make certain that all of the petals are soaking in the alcohol.

2. In another pint jar, layer the remaining violet petals with the sugar, and cover it with a lid. Do not be tempted to use anything but white sugar here, or you'll lose the flavor of the violets.

3. Leave both the vodka and the sugar to infuse with violet for at least 3 day, or up to a week.

4. Empty the violets and sugar into a small saucepan (are you surprised at how fragrant that violet sugar is?), add the water, and stir them so that all the sugar is moistened. Bring the heat up to medium low, and let the violet syrup bubble for 2-3 minutes. Set it aside overnight so that the violets can further infuse.

5. Bring the violet syrup back up to medium-low heat, and once again let it bubble gently for 2-3 minutes. Remove the syrup from the heat, and let it cool to room temperature.

6. Strain the violet petals out of both the vodka and the syrup, and discard the spent petals.

7. Combine the infused vodka and syrup, then add the lemon juice. You will need to stir or shake the crème de violette liqueur, otherwise, the vodka and syrup stay in separate layers.

Lacto-Fermented Knotweed Dill Pickles

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 14:48:00 +0000

Even though knotweed is a List A invasive species, and clearly has a presence in Colorado, I'd not worked with it before last year. You know how it goes with plants, you read about a particular plant all the time, but it isn't until you see it with your own eyes and learn to recognize its pattern that you start seeing it everywhere.

That's precisely what happened with knotweed. At one point last spring, without even being at the location, something just clicked and I realized the plant with the largest leaves I'd ever seen in the state, the one that I'd observed for years in one of my asparagus spots, was giant knotweed. Once I put the pieces together, it only took one look at the plant to confirm the ID.

Spring is the time to take advantage of knotweed as a food because the stalks are most tender. Look for dense thickets of last year's tall brown stalks. The new shoots will be pushing up at the base of those stalks. Before the leaves unfurl, those new shoots look somewhat like giant asparagus, with clearly visible joints. In the areas I've seen, giant knotweed shoots are purely green on the outside, and Japanese knotweed shoots are speckled with pink. If you snap one off, you'll see that it's hollow inside. To learn more about knotweed (Fallopia spp.) and how to identify it, read Green Deane's account of it, or look to the 3 Foragers, who have a lot of great recipes using this plant. The April 2015 edition of Wild Food Girl's Wild Edible Notebook explores knotweed as well. Also good to know, Ellen Zachos says that you can freeze knotweed.

Because it is considered invasive in most places, you can pick a lot of knotweed to eat without breaking anyone's heart. Do be careful though, as its status as an invasive species means that patches are more likely to be sprayed. Knotweed is pleasantly crisp and has a sour flavor that some say is lemony and others more like green apples. You can get a lot of mileage by using it in recipes in place of rhubarb.

Last year, I made knotweed quick pickles. I wasn't happy with the way they tasted because of the vinegar brine, but knotweed showed itself to be excellent pickling material, staying crunchy and absorbing flavor well. This year, as soon as I nabbed my first knotweed shoots, I wasted no time in taking another shot at pickles, this time lacto-fermented. The resulting pickles are outstanding - crisp, full of flavor, and bathed in a perfectly salty-sour brine. For this recipe, I use the basic method outlined by Sandor Katz in Wild Fermentation.

Lacto-Fermented Knotweed Dill Pickles

6 c. sliced knotweed rings (older shoots may need to be peeled)
4 sprigs dill
2 cloves garlic, sliced
4 T. sea salt
6 c. warm water (non-chlorinated)

1. Dissolve the salt into the warm water, and let it cool to room temperature.
2. Sterilize two quart jars, then divide the garlic and dill between them.
3. Now divide the knotweed between the two jars.
4. Add enough of the salt water to cover the knotweed by an inch or two.
5. Sink something (again, sterilzed) into the top of the jar to keep any of the knotweed from floating up to the surface. I have some drinking glasses that fit into the tops of my jars that do the job well. You could also use river rocks, or any other object that will fit. Some people use a plastic bag filled with more brine.
6. Let the knotweed pickles ferment in a cool place for 4-7 days, until they are as sour as you please. Store them in the fridge afterward.

How a Forager Reads a Food Magazine or Cookbook

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 15:04:00 +0000

As a forager, I never look at food magazines or cookbooks for what they are. Instead, I see how the recipes contained in those publications can be transformed with my favorite wild foods. I don't see straightforward dishes. Rather, I envision ways to tweak almost every recipe so that it can use my beloved local wild foods. For the purpose of this post, I'll walk you through the process of reading recipes with the eyes of a forager using the April 2015 issue of Bon Appétit magazine and one of my favorite cookbooks, Bar Tartine.

Spotting High-End Ingredients You Can Forage Yourself

The first way to look at food magazines and cookbooks as a forager is to ask, "what are the ingredients that would be a high-end grocery store purchase for this publication, but might be something I can forage myself?" In the spring, magazines and cookbooks love to feature recipes for ramps, watercress, and morels. Those are all things you can forage in the correct environment. Hooray! As a forager, with an eye toward a good, clean, sustainable harvest, you can have the same ingredients food freaks cherish for free. You win.

Take, for example, the recipe for Pork Shoulder Cutlets with Fennel and Asparagus Salad in Bon Ap. The salad calls for fennel, shaved asparagus, onion, and parsley dressed in lemon juice and olive oil. The recipe uncomplicated and bright, definitely a salad I would make when I have a bag of newly harvested feral asparagus. I might even triple the amount of asparagus in the recipe if my spots were having a good year.

Now, diving into Bar Tartine, I see a recipe for Farmer's Cheese Dumplings with Mushroom Broth. The broth in this recipe calls for two pounds of wild mushrooms. That would be one heck of an expensive recipe if I were to purchase the mushrooms. However, as a mushroom hunter, I have access to mushrooms most of the year, whether it's fresh morels, porcini, or chanterelles during the growing season, or my dried supply the rest of the year. As a forager, it's fun to have access to the ingredients that are coveted by chefs and be able to make luxurious recipes that might otherwise be out of reach.

Learn to Make Wild Food Substitutions for Conventional Ingredients

Next, think about flavor profiles of key ingredients, and how you can substitute a similar wild plant. Does a recipe call for sorrel? Think of the lemon-y wild greens that you know, like dock and wood sorrel. Does a recipe suggest a peppery green like arugula? That's where you can use a tender wild mustard or dandelions. Think beyond the greens, too. See a recipe for peaches? Use your local wild plums. Look, one that calls for almond meal! That's your chance to substitute in leached acorn flour. Always consider corresponding flavors and how they can be substituted. If you can do that, you will be a wild foods cooking master.

This month's Bon Appétit has a recipe for a Rhubarb-Almond Cake. Right away, my brain makes the switch-out of knotweed for rhubarb. I could also use dock petioles in place of the rhubarb. Both knotweed and dock petioles have a similar tart flavor to rhubarb, and could be directly substituted into the recipe. Knotweed and almond cake, anyone? I'd eat that.

Thumbing through Bar Tartine, a recipe for Chilled Buttermilk and Cucumber Soup catches my eye. I know that the tender hearts of cattail shoots taste very much like cucumber and be substituted into this recipe which also uses a little fennel and onion. Come to think of it, I've got buttermilk in the fridge, and the cattails just started up last week.

Reading with a "Forager's Eye"

Learning to read with a forager's eyes is a skill that anyone with even a casual interest in wild foods can use to their advantage. Once you know how to spot high-end ingredients that can be foraged and how to swap wild food for conventional ingredients, a whole new world of cooking opens up. You can look at any cooking publication from any era, and instantly imagine how to rock out the recipes with foraged foods you have at hand. Knowing how to incorporate local wild plants into recipes can be a great way to learn to love those plants and make them a staple in the kitchen.

Acorn Mole

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:30:00 +0000

I seem to have developed a pattern for the foraging off-season. Each winter, partly out of a deep love of cooking, and partly to satisfy the urge to interact with wild foods even when few are growing, there is a theme ingredient that I experiment with over and again. Two years ago, without a doubt, my winter cooking experiments consisted of all things porcini. Last year, I got good mileage from prickly pears. This year has been crowned the year of the acorn.

I've always known that acorns have great potential in recipes, but I've faced two problems. The first problem is in finding enough raw materials with which to work, as oaks are mostly an ornamental tree in the immediate area. The second problem, of course, is finding enough time to come up with recipes. The long days of winter offer the luxury of extra time to test new ideas in the kitchen.

When I first started working with acorns years ago, I saw ground acorn meal as a rather neutral starchy thing to be used mostly like a flour in things like breads and pasta. I also made a lot of acorn sweets, everything from cakes to cookies to acorn-infused buttercream frosting. This winter, my mind has been seeing acorn in a new light, seeing it for the sophisticated ingredient that it is, and I've been trying to both bring out its nearly chocolaty sweet flavor, as well as push it further into the direction of savory recipes, like acorn falafel, which I still consider to be my favorite.

The interesting thing is that I'm beginning to see that acorn can fit into some nifty corners that I'd never before imagined. Sometimes it can behave like corn masa, sometimes it can stand in for beans, and it also works in a lot of recipes where nuts are traditionally used (that one should have been a no-brainer, but it took a while to occur to me). This is how I arrived at the idea for a mole sauce thickened and flavored with acorn meal.

This following recipe is based very loosely upon mole rojo, though it abides no authentic recipe and looks a lot more like the red chile sauce I make in my kitchen at least once a month. The acorns make this sauce dark and add hints of chocolate that most associate with mole negro. Acorns also lend a mild sweetness to the mole which balances beautifully with the slight bitterness of the chiles. Acorn mole is a really interesting sauce. It pairs incredibly well with pork, chicken, and game birds. But I've also enjoyed eating it with roast vegetables, particularly roasted potatoes. I've also used it as a spread on a sandwich.

When selecting dried chiles, try to find ones that are pliable and fragrant.

Acorn Mole

10-12 ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded
10-12 pasilla chiles, stemmed and seeded
2 tomatoes
1 medium white onion, cut into quarters
3 "heads" of Allium bulbils (substitute 6 cloves of garlic)
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground allspice
12 leaves Monarda fistulosa (substitute 1/4 tsp. dried oregano)
1/2 tsp. ground black pepper
1 tsp. salt
1/2 c. acorn flour
4 Tbsp. lard
3-4(+) c. water

1. On two sheet pans (or in two batches), lay the chiles as flat as possible, tearing them if necessary. Stick them under the broiler just until you can begin to smell them, then pull them out right away. It's incredibly easy to burn them, and that's undesirable. You're going more for a light toasting.
2. Place the toasted chiles into a large bowl and cover them with just-boiled water. Leave them to cool to room temperature.
3. Meanwhile, load the tomatoes, onion, and whole allium bulbil heads onto the same sheetpan, and put them under the broiler until they char. You may have to flip each individual ingredient, or pull them out of the oven at different times. In this case, you are looking for darker spots of brown.
4. Place the charred tomatoes, onion, and allium into the blender (remove any paper that will easily slide off the allium, but don't fuss over it), along with the herbs, spices and salt. Puree the ingredient until they are smooth, add a splash of water if necessary to get them to blend. Pour into a bowl and set it aside, but don't worry about cleaning the blender jar.
5. Add the drained chiles to the blender, going in batches, and puree them as well. Again, you can use a little water to help the process along. You don't want to add too much water, though, as it will take time to reduce it down later when the sauce is cooking.
6. Pass both the tomato mixture and the pureed chiles through a sieve to get out any seeds and skin. I think this step is a total pain in the butt, but it's a necessary evil as the texture of the sauce won't be right without it. For now, keep the tomato mixture and the chiles separate.
7. I toast my acorns prior to leaching (my method is explained in great detail here). But if you've not toasted your acorns, do so now. You can spread the acorn flour onto a sheetpan, and pop it into the oven at 400˚ (F) for a few minutes, watching it like a hawk, and only letting it toast until it is fragrant and slightly browner.
8. Heat up the lard over medium in a large skillet. Add the tomato mixture and let it cook down for 5-10 minutes.
9. Stir in the chiles, and cook for an additional 15 minutes.
10. Whisk in the acorn meal and the 3-4 cups water, reduce the head to medium-low, and continue to cook the sauce for another 15-20 minutes, or until it has thickened considerably, to the consistency of a runny ketchup. Keep whisking it throughout this step, as it is more likely to stick and burn with the acorns in it. If your sauce seems to be getting too thick, you can add more water so that it can continue to cook for the full time.
11. Taste the sauce and adjust the salt to your liking. Acorn mole can be kept in the fridge for 3-4 days, but it doesn't freeze very well.