Please Send Spring My Way!

Winter has finally arrived: it has snowed four weekends in a row, including today. After a snowless season last year, I'd been hoping and hoping for snow -- and itching to dust off our cross-country skis. After the first sizable snowfall, my older two boys and I took our skis to a local trail, where I shoveled out the parking spot at the trailhead (having lacked the foresight to consider that trailheads would not be plowed by the town, I had to drive back home to get a shovel the first time, but nevermind). The snow had just finished falling, and we were the first ones to make tracks. The woods were beautiful and peaceful under their new blanket of snow -- that is, until my older son's repeated meltdowns every time he fell disturbed the silence (note to self: make sure children have eaten sufficient lunch and have had sufficient sleep before allowing them to go skiing). My middle son did fine until we stopped for a snack, which he ate with his mittens off. It was a bitingly cold afternoon, and he never got his fingers warm again (the hand warmer my husband had given him seemed to be a dud). The entire trek back was marked by constant wailing: "I'm soooo cooooold! My hands are soooo coooold!" And don't think my oldest son's complaints had let up during all this. I ended up wishing I'd gone by myself.

You might therefore think I was crazy to try again, but I know that everyone has bad days, and my kids really do like skiing. So after the next blizzard I took my two younger sons (the older one had a cub scouts banquet) to a different trail -- one by the parking lot for a local church, so I didn't have to shovel. I am happy to report that this adventure was much more successful and a lot less noisy. It was my 3-year-old's first time on skis, and he did great. We again had to make our own tracks, and the snow was so deep that the wall left in the middle of the ski trail was as tall as his legs. He got a bit upset when he fell down; the deep snow often got in his sleeves, and once his boot -- which is a hand-me-down and is a bit too large -- came off. But he was a trooper, and when he wasn't falling down he was smiling and enjoying himself.

My two youngest sons and our snowman atop our picnic rock.

We've now been skiing several times, and we've gone sledding. The boys have used their ice skates and have built snowmen. We even built a snowman on top of our favorite picnic rock, which we had to reach by skis! (See photo.) I love snow -- really love it -- and I'm glad winter finally decided to arrive. Truly, I am. But couldn't this snow have all come a bit earlier, when winter was just getting started? You see, the trouble is that now I'm ready for spring.

I've been making my spring fever even worse lately by poring over my foraging books and studying new plants I hope to find this year. And when I'm not reading foraging books, I'm looking at gardening books and planning where I'll plant everything. Yesterday I started some seeds and let the boys each plant their own. We hit the local Agway for seed-starting mix, and the kids each picked out a packet of seeds. My only stipulation was that the seed packet had to say the plants would grow in partial shade or shade (which is what we have at our house). My middle son chose a packet of mixed columbine seeds. There was a drawing of the different flowers on the packet, but it was hard to tell what they really looked like. Still, the package said they'd grow in shade, so we bought them.

Wild columbine

At home I decided to Google columbine to see what the flowers looked like, and I soon realized I'd seen one before. In my May 23 post last year I posted a picture of a pretty, jewel-like flower that hung upside down. I didn't know what it was at the time and figured it wasn't edible, but it was delightful to look at. I'm now almost certain it was columbine, and it turns out it is edible! Although it's related to buttercups, which are mildly toxic, and although columbine's leaves are toxic, the flowers are said to taste slightly sweet and to make a nice addition to a salad. How fortuitous that my son picked that particular seed packet!

Besides planting seeds, playing in the snow, and dreaming about the day it all melts, I've also been making an effort to use up the last of my stored produce from last year. It would be silly to be cooking with, say, frozen pokeweed or Japanese knotweed when I could go pick it fresh outside.I have made several quiches, which were delicious with pokeweed and kielbasa. I made a stir-fry with my frozen milkweed pods, but they weren't as tasty as they had been fresh. It's possible I need to improve my freezing methods (which currently consist of parboiling and then placing the veggies in a ZipLock bag; I'd like to try vacuum sealing). All that's left of last year's foraging in my freezer now is a bag of milkweed shoots and a (rather large) bag of Japanese knotweed. I've been making muffins and coffeecakes with the knotweed from time to time, but it's easy to collect Japanese knotweed in quanity, so I did! We've been enjoying jar after jar of homemade grape, autumnberry, and beach-plum jam, and I gave several jars away around the holidays.

I've also been cracking my black walnuts (a laborious process) here and there and experimenting with them in the kitchen. Black walnuts have an extremely strong taste that overpowers anything they're a part of, and so far I haven't figured out how to use them in a way that really makes me glad I used black walnuts versus the ordinary kind one can buy in the supermarket. I tried some oatmeal cookies, which were good -- but would have been better with other walnuts. I tried some black-walnut fudge, which didn't set properly but would probably make a decent ice-cream topping. And I tried some black-walnut squares, which are sort of like bite-sized squares of pecan pie except with walnuts instead of pecans. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I tried that one: I don't care for the ooey sweetness of pecan pie, and I don't like the walnut squares much, either. My husband loves pecan pie but doesn't care for walnuts, and only one of my sons likes the walnut squares. Fortunately, a friend has been enjoying them for us. Next I plant to try a recipe for black-walnut baklava, which I enjoyed when local foraging expert Russ Cohen gave out samples on one of his guided walks. I thus have high hopes that I can finally find something tasty to do with my walnuts, which is good news because I still have a box full of them.


I used my hazelnuts in a white-chocolate blondie recipe, and the result was delicious except that apparently I got some shell mixed in with my nuts. Ouch. At less than a cup, the quantity of shelled hazelnuts I got from the large bucket of nuts we collected was severely disappointing, though. It probably won't stop me from collecting more hazelnuts next year, but I wish walnuts were as tasty as hazelnuts (or that I could as easily collect large quantities of hazelnuts! The problem is that a significant portion of hazelnuts are wormy and that the nuts themselves are much smaller than walnuts.)

And so the time passes, and sooner or later spring will arrive. I was just remembering that last year our Easter eggs were nestled among some chickweed and wood sorrel -- and Easter is coming right up.