Getting Wild in the Kitchen

My middle son helped to make a pasta primavera that included four types of wild vegetables.

Searching for, and eventually finding, new edible plants is great fun, but the ultimate goal, of course, is a tasty meal. Although I'm not ready to write a cookbook yet, my recent forays into actually cooking with the plants I've been finding have left me almost giddy with excitement about the culinary possibilities.

Curly dock in flower (the spiky pink things in the center) next to a thistle,
which is spiky in a different way. We've eaten both plants in recent dinners.

My most successful cooking project of late has been knotweed streusel muffins, which I have now baked four times (and all but the first time I doubled the batch because otherwise the muffins would have disappeared almost as soon as they were out of the oven). Taking advantage of the similarities between knotweed and rhubarb, I modified a recipe for rhubarb muffins and got spectacularly tasty results. I've shared my recipe at the end of this post. I also baked another knotweed-strawberry pie, given that my first attempt turned out a bit soupy. This time I used a recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie from Cook's Illustrated's Best Recipes collection (of course, I substituted knotweed for the rhubarb). The addition of arrowroot instead of flour as a thickening agent definitely helped, although further experimentation is still in order.

I recently attended an excellent foraging walk with wild-foods expert and author Russ Cohen (more on this later), and he mentioned that raw knotweed tastes much like Granny Smith apple. I tried a piece of knotweed raw when I got home and found that he's absolutely correct (I don't know why I'd only cooked the plant previously). I'm now thinking of trying knotweed as a replacement for green apples in a variety of recipes, not only for baked goods but also for salads. The knotweed season is about over (once knotweed gets beyond the shoot stage, the stalks become woody and fibrous and are not suitable for eating), but fortunately I blanched some and stashed it in my freezer. Someone also seems to have cleared the knotweed that was taking over at the end of my street, and I'm wondering whether new shoots will come up

Two curly-dock rosettes. The newer leaves
don't have such wavy margins.

Other plants with which I've been experimenting have been newer discoveries. I finally decided to get serious about identifying curly-dock greens, and I'm glad I did: they're tasty! The dead stalks sporting the dried seeds are easy to find; as I mentioned in a previous post, last fall I gathered a bunch of seeds and have now planted them in my garden. The little sprouts are just coming up but aren't even recognizable as curly dock yet (at least not to me). However, I kept seeing all these rosettes with curly leaves all over the place, and I began wondering whether they were curly dock. I admit that I'm a little intimidated by all the basal rosettes (many plants spend their first year as a group of leaves emanating from a single root in a circular, flat pattern and then send up a flower stalk in their second year), which just seem to look so similar. There's dandelion, mustards, docks, sow thistle, shepherd's purse, and cat's ear, to name just a few.

Young curly-dock leaves. One isn't completely
unfurled yet

Nonetheless, I got out a couple of identification guides and set down to the task of examining these curly-leaved rosettes. Sure enough, they seemed to be curly dock. My books advised picking only the young leaves, preferably before they opened up, but certainly while they were still slightly elastic (if you stretch the leaf gently in opposite directions between two fingers, it should not break) and a little slimy at the base of the petiole. I found such a young leaf and tasted it. The flavor was mild and pleasantly lemony! Sauteed in a little olive oil and the water still clinging to the just-washed leaves, then sprinkled with a bit of salt and pepper, these greens made a fine addition to dinner all by themselves, and I've now added them to two other dishes (see below).

Milkweed shoots before being stripped of their leaves and peeled.

We also found milkweed shoots growing in the parking lot of a nearby music school (this is the same lot where we already knew we could find autumnberry, evening primrose, wild carrots, and Japanese knotweed; see my April 2 post). Milkweed shoots (although not the mature plant) can be easily confused with dogbane, which is toxic. In his book The Forager's Harvest, Samuel Thayer provides an excellent account of the confusion surrounding these two plants in the literature. Many books recommend boiling milkweed in multiple changes of water to rid them of bitterness, but in fact (and I can now confirm this from personal experience), milkweed is not at all bitter and need only be boiled in one pot of water. It tastes something like green beans, only better. There are many ways to tell dogbane and milkweed shoots apart, but one is that milkweed stalks are hollow and exude copious latex (a whitish, goopy substance), whereas dogbane stalks are solid and only exude a little latex. Milkweed shoots are also somewhat squared, whereas dogbane stalks are completely round. Thayer also says that milkweed shoots have a fine pubescence (tiny 

Milkweed shoots are hollow and exude
copious latex (which is the white stuff oozing
out of the cut end of the stalk).

hairs) on the underside of the leaves and on the stalk and that dogbane is completely hairless. Although the milkweed we found did have fuzzy leaf bottoms, I couldn't find any hairs on the stalks. Nonetheless, because all the other characteristics fit and because I have seen mature milkweed in this particular location, I felt confident I had the right plant.

For our first taste test, I simply boiled the milkweed and seasoned it with a little butter, salt, and pepper, but now that I know its basic flavor, I plan to experiment with it in more exciting dishes (as a general rule, I find eating boiled vegetables seasoned with nothing other than salt and pepper a disservice to the vegetables and my taste buds). I've already tried a pasta primavera in which I substituted a mixture of milkweed and pokeweed for the green beans specified in the recipe.

Which brings me to pokeweed. You might recall the highly toxic nature of almost all parts of the pokeweed plant from my previous post. Apparently the purple color of the root, mature stalk, and berries owes to the phytolaxin that makes this plant so dangerous, and so one of my books recommended avoiding any shoots that have already started to develop a purplish hue. When I went to collect my first pokeweed shoots at the end of my street, however, I found that even the smallest emerging stalks, which were too tiny to even be worth harvesting, already had a few reddish streaks. I could definitely see that the older shoots were more clearly purple, and I assumed that the author of my book meant that readers should avoid pervasive purple coloring, not faint red streaks. But, given the seriousness of making a mistake, I didn't want to take any chances. It just so happened that I had signed up for a foraging walk and lunch with the author, Russ Cohen, the next day (I came across his website over the winter and had been waiting excitedly for an opportunity to go on one of his walks in my area). I thus brought along a few of my pokeweed shoots to ask him about at lunch. The verdict? The shoots I'd collected were perfectly fine.

Pasta primavera with homemade egg fettuccine, pokeweed,
milkweed, curly dock, mallow leaves, and store-bought
mushrooms, tomatoes, basil, zucchini, asparagus, and peas.

Thus reassured, that evening I stripped the leaves off the pokeweed and boiled it for 10 minutes according to Russ's directions. I seasoned it with a bit of salt and pepper and ended up with a vegetable tasting somewhat like a cross between asparagus and green beans. The take-home point, though, is that everyone liked it. My middle son even asked for seconds! We only ate a couple of stalks each just in case there were any adverse effects, but when we were all alive and feeling fine the next day, I decided to use the pokeweed in that pasta primavera dish. Because I also had a little leftover curly dock and some mallow leaves I hadn't used up, I chopped those up and added them to the sauce as well. The result was tasty, and two of us (my eldest son and my mother) went back for seconds!

Other recent culinary exploits have included violet syrup, which smells delicious but hasn't had any noticeable effect on anything I've baked with it yet (I tried shortbread cookies and cream biscuits). I'm still experimenting, so stay tuned for more news on that front. I also made a frittata with red potatoes, onions, curly dock, and thistle midribs. I think the frittata would have been a greater success if I hadn't undercooked the potatoes, but the results were still not bad, and any flaws could certainly not be attributed to the wild additions.

Thistle. Prickly but tasty!

By the way, if you're thinking that thistles seem a bit too thorny to eat, you're both right and wrong. Although I certainly would not eat the spines, these can be removed. The first few times I tried to do this, I could be heard chirping "Ow!" numerous times as I accidentally pricked myself (my kids thought this was funny, and my 2-year-old helpfully began echoing me), but I understand that the trick is to grab the leafy portion adjacent to the central leaf vein and strip it off all in one piece. I haven't managed to get it all in one go yet, but I'm making progress. The midrib is juicy and crisp, a bit like celery. I understand that the portion of the thistle plant that is really worth the time and effort involved in removing the spines is the flower stalk, but it isn't time for that quite yet.

Mint

The first thistle I tried was at the edge of the field where my kids play soccer on Saturdays, but we subsequently picked some near our favorite train station. While I was busy collecting mallow, curly dock, and thistle, my eldest son was using his nose. "I smell mint," he told me, then followed his olfactory senses to a nearby velvety plant and plucked a leaf. Sure enough, it was mint, although not a variety that looked that much like the few types I've grown in my garden. The plants were so plentiful, though, that I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed them before. Although we didn't collect any that day, I made a point to include a minty dish in my recipe planning this week.

As a reminder, here's garlic mustard again.
You can also read my April 22 post.

I'm also hoping to do a little more experimenting with garlic mustard, which Russ mentioned had been featured in a cookbook called From Pest to Pesto, published by the Kalamazoo Nature Center in Michigan in an effort to interest people in controlling the spread of this invasive weed. I plan to order the book, but in the meantime I've found a recipe for garlic-mustard pesto online. I'll report on more cooking adventures soon, but for now you can check out the recipe for these yummy knotweed muffins (and see a few more pictures from our foraging efforts this past week) below.

P.S. To purchase Russ Cohen's book, Wild Plants I Have Known ... and Eaten, visit the website of the Essex County Greenbelt Association. All sales benefit the association, which generously allows foraging on all of its properties. The book is interesting and covers some plants (such as pokeweed) not extensively covered in my more thorough foraging guides, although the pictures are grayscale and not detailed enough to allow definitive identification. I've used the book as a way of learning about some of the edible plants that grow near me in Massachusetts, but I've gone to other sources for additional help with identification. The book does include several recipes, although unfortunately not the recipe for the delicious sour-cream knotweed coffee cake Russ shared with those of us who attended his walk this week (he also shared some autumnberry fruit leather, shagbark hickory nuts, and black walnuts, which do taste better than the kind one can buy in the store).

Knotweed Streusel Muffins

Streusel
1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 c. white whole-wheat flour
1 T. sugar
3 T. light- or dark-brown sugar
1/4 t. ground cinamon
pinch each nutmeg and salt
3 T. unsalted butter, melted

Muffins
1 large egg
1/4 c. light- or dark-brown sugar
3 T. sugar
5 T. unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
3/4 c. plain Greek yogurt
1 c. white whole-wheat flour
1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt
Generous 1 cup diced, peeled knotweed (slice the knotweed lengthwise and then dice into 1/4-inch pieces)

Heat oven to 375 degrees.

Make streusel. In a small dish, stir together all streusel ingredients until you can press them together into a ball or disc that sort of stays together. Refrigerate until needed.

Make muffins. Whisk egg in the bottom of a large bowl with both sugars. Whisk in yogurt, then cooled butter. Add both flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and mix until combined. Add knotweed and approximately 1/3 of the streusel mixture (this should not be thoroughly mixed in).

Divide the batter among 10 muffin cups and sprinkle each muffin with streusel (you'll need to break the chilled streusel apart a little, but it's better if the streusel is in mostly large chunks rather than looking like fine grains of sand). Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

We found marsh mallow in two different locations this week. As its name suggests, it grows in marshes. Unfortunately, it's past time to eat the greens because the flowers have already opened, but we'll know where to look next year.

My two older boys insisted on navigating the marsh with me so that we could get a closer look at the marsh mallow. Fortunately, nobody got wet!

Marsh mallow is in the center, and the larger plants are skunk cabbage, which I have been seeing everywhere lately (for example, around my church and on a hiking trail that starts from my kids' soccer fields). I've been wondering what it is and finally got the answer on the foraging walk with Russ Cohen. (No, you can't eat it.)

I've been hoping to find some fiddleheads (ostrich fern), but all I've been able to find are interrupted fern and these woolly cinnamon ferns, which aren't the kind you can eat. Supposedly, fiddleheads grow all over New England, but I guess I need to learn where to look for them!

A closer look at cinnamon fern. Notice all the light-brown fuzzy stuff clinging to the entire plant. Ostrich fern, the edible fern whose fiddleheads are so prized in culinary circles, has a smooth, fuzz-less stalk with a deep groove reminiscent of the groove on celery.