2013 in Pictures

Chive flowers from my garden last year.

I took my 6-year-old to the pediatrician for his annual exam recently, and the doctor was asking all the usual questions about his diet. What vegetables do you like? How about meat? What's your favorite food? Then she said, "Now, I remember that last year you said you ate some pretty interesting things that you and your mom found outside." And my six-year-old replied, a little nostalgically (if a six-year-old can suffer from nostalgia), "Yeah. We don't really do that anymore."

I tell you, my heart just broke. Nevermind that he was being a little unfair: we did it some. And it was winter now, afterall, and not really foraging season. And he'd started kindergarten, so he wasn't with me every time I went foraging anymore. Still, there was a lot of truth in what he'd said. You might have been thinking the same thing, if you're a regular follower of this blog, and it's not just because the "follow by email" function wasn't working properly for months (sorry about that! It's fixed now): in 2012 I published 25 posts. In 2013, I published seven.

She might look innocent, but she's an energy thief!

In my defense, I was pregnant with baby #4 (who turned out to be our long-hoped-for girl and who, with three older brothers, will not be dating until approximately her 40th birthday) for most of 2013, and my energy level was dangerously close to negative. What energy I did have for foraging mostly did not last long enough to result in a blog post, although occasionally it was sufficient for me to take some pictures I never got around to posting. I am happy to report, however, that the energy is back, just in time for the armchair foraging season. I've gotten out all my favorite wild-foods books and dipped into a few new ones (The Joy of Foraging by Gary Lincoff, Wild Edibles by Sergei Boutenko, Foraging & Feasting by Dina Falconi [this one's mostly a cookbook], and Backyard Foraging by Ellen Zachos [did you know you can eat hosta shoots???]), and I've been catching up on the online Wild Edible Notebook put out monthly by Wild Food Girl (who also longed to find a good use for the abundant yet bitter dock seeds but apparently had much more energy than I did this year because she actually did it, as she reports in her January issue). And, more to the point here, I decided I should finally post some of the pictures I took this year.

So, in lieu of all the more detailed reports I could have given about this year's foraging adventures, here are some snapshots.

Photo Journal

I think the highlight of the year was my finding these carrion flower (Smilax) shoots. They were much smaller than I thought they would be (in his book The Forager's Harvest, Sam Thayer writes that the shoots can be 1" thick, whereas mine were maybe 1/4" to 1/2" thick), and in fact I walked right past several of them on my first pass around the perimeter of the field where I'd seen the dried seed heads the previous year (this is how I knew where to look for the shoots). When I eventually spotted one, I initially thought I'd found wild asparagus, but a closer look (as you can see here) revealed my mistake. When I retraced my steps, I found many more shoots and snapped off a handful of them (carrion vines are long-lived perennials, and repeated harvesting in the same location can deplete the root stocks, so Thayer recommends modest harvesting; thus, I did not take every shoot I found).

My collection of carrion-flower shoots. Although these are edible raw, I took them home, cut them into perhaps 3" lengths, sautéed them in a little butter, then sprinkled some salt on top. I gave each of the kids a small sampling and tried a bite myself. Then I had another bite. And another. The kids each asked for seconds, and I dished out a few more pieces to everyone. "If Daddy doesn't get out of the shower soon," I told the boys, "I might have eaten all of his share. These are so good!" "I heard that!" came a shout from the bathroom. Needless to say, I'm hoping to find additional carrion-flower-foraging grounds this spring.

Another new discovery for me this year was black locust beans. I can't remember why I didn't pick any -- perhaps because I was leaving a company picnic (on the Massachusetts coast) and had tired kids already in the car. At any rate, I was pretty excited because it confirmed my previous identification of black locust trees, which had been perplexing me for years. They are considered invasive in Massachusetts, so you'd think I could find one pretty easily. Indeed, I had found trees whose leaves and bark (which is deeply furrowed, such that winter identification should be straightforward) met the description in my guide books, but I had never seen flowers or beans on the trees, and that gave me pause. Granted, the flowers are only out for a week or so in the spring, so perhaps it was understandable that this spring was the first time I had found even the remnants of flowers (see below), but surely it would have been harder to miss the beans, right? So when I finally found the same trees clearly sporting beans, I was a happy forager.

The last of the dying black locust flowers, obviously past the point at which one would eat them. The flowers are apparently the really exciting food product of the black locust tree. The beans are said to be tasty but quite difficult to collect in quantity because the pods are deceivingly large; the edible seeds inside are tiny and hardly worth the trouble of shelling the pod. Or so Sam Thayer writes in The Forager's Harvest. I'm still curious and hope to collect some beans (and flowers!) this year.

Another view of the black locust beans.

A black locust tree at the edge of the parking lot of my local train station.

I have long been searching for butternuts, and although occasionally I've found a tree, I've yet to find any nuts. I found this small tree growing alongside a trail I took to find some Concord grapes (that effort was unsuccessful, as you'll see below). The leaves were all afflicted with some kind of parasite or other pest. You can distinguish a butternut tree (or "white walnut") from a black walnut tree by the large terminal leaflet. Walnut trees have a diminished or entirely absent terminal leaflet.

A close-up view of the leaf damage. Butternut trees have been severely affected by butternut canker, which is why so few trees reach nut-bearing maturity. Although I've never seen a case of butternut canker, I understand that it affects the trunk, not the leaves. I've no idea what this affliction is.

Here's what the underside of the leaf looked like.

A butternut twig. The leaf scar (where a new leaf will come out) looks like a tiny monkey face, although it's a little difficult to discern in my picture.

I had hoped to pick Concord grapes on the other side of this field. Alas, last year someone had mowed the field, and I was expecting the same this year. My middle son and I (see! We did go foraging!) arrived in shorts and without bug spray, so we decided not to risk getting covered in ticks to reach the bush where the grape vines were growing. We got our grapes (although not nearly so many as last year) from a different location.

On the way back, we did spot these smaller grapes. I wasn't sure what kind they were, and unfortunately they were quite high up in the tree, and I couldn't collect very many. However, I did gather a few bunches, and consultation with literature at home made me think they were riverside grapes. At any rate, I tasted one, and they were definitely grapes of some kind. Apparently I hadn't paid enough attention to descriptions of wild grapes before; being familiar only with Concord grapes, which are as large as store-bought grapes (and in fact, stores do sell them), I didn't realize wild grapes could be so small, but these were more like large blueberries than like grapes in the stores.

Here's a comparison of the riverside grapes (left) with the Concord grapes (right). The leaves are in there so I could try to figure out what kind of grape I had when I got home.

Later in the fall, I went to my usual autumnberry (autumn olive) collecting ground and was astonished to notice incredible quantities of riverside grapes hanging over the fence where the autumnberry bushes grow. How had I never noticed these before? I probably had to move some out of the way to pick autumnberries. Am I completely oblivious??? (Yes, yes I am.)

The reddish leaves belong to a poisonous Virginia creeper vine. Note the five distinct leaflets. Grape leaves are lobed but simple (only one leaf). The grape leaves are green in this picture. Virginia creeper leaves are green before they start dying in the fall.

Comparison of grape (left) and Virginia creeper leaves. Again, note that Virginia creeper leaves are green earlier in the season.

The underside (left) of riverside grape leaves is a lighter shade of green than the upper side.

The empty bracts of the poisonous Virginia creeper vine, which some people confuse with grape vine. In addition to the leaf differences between the two, note the bright red, pipe-like bracts where the berries used to be on the Virginia creeper. A single berry used to sit at the end of each fork in the bracts, whereas grapes hang in true clusters.

You can see a couple of shriveled fruits on this Virgina creeper. Again, the berries are poisonous.

The grapes were a bit dried up at this point in the season, but I collected the least shriveled ones anyway and put them in my steam juicer at home. I crushed them a bit to speed the process (previous attempts at steam-juicing grapes had taken forever). Sam Thayer reports that riverside grapes and other small wild grapes have a lot of tartrate, which will precipitate out of the juice and form irritating gritty crystals. Apparently the crystals will sting one's hands such that it can be quite painful, and obviously drinking the juice straight would be a mistake. Thus, he recommends letting the juice sit in the refrigerator for a day or two. He says the tartrate will settle to the bottom, and one can pour the good juice (about 2/3 of the total volume) off the top. I let my juice sit in the refrigerator but saw barely any precipitate even after several days, and I thought maybe it was because I'd used a steam juicer. I proceeded with a jelly recipe after finding that drinking the juice (very tart!) didn't burn my throat. However, I couldn't get the jelly to the right consistency even after recooking my batch and adding more sugar and pectin. Eventually I decided to call it syrup. I thought the flavor was excellent (much better than that of Concord grapes), but I did detect small amounts of gritty things. It wasn't terribly bothersome. Then, after the syrup had sat in the refrigerator for a couple of months, thin sheets of hard, grayish stuff had formed. Were these the crystals? I'm still not sure what exactly went wrong, but I'll be experimenting further this year.

In addition to the riverside grapes, my family and I did collect a lot of autumnberries. For my youngest son's fourth birthday, I used some of the autumnberry puree to make this cake. I used the puree in the cake batter, as a filling, and in the buttercream icing. Then I topped the whole thing with shredded coconut. Yum! I used a recipe for strawberry cake as inspiration. Sorry; my food photography needs a little work, but the cake was attractive in real life.

We have a flowering dogwood tree in our front yard. Every spring it puts forth a shower of four-petaled white flowers, and apparently it produces copious amounts of spiny red fruit in the fall. Somehow, both my mother (who is usually considerably more observant than her daughter) and I failed to notice the fruits for years. I first registered how many red balls littered our lawn last fall, and this fall my mother commented on it and asked whether the tree always made those fruits. She then said it was too bad you couldn't eat them; they were so plentiful. Well, lo and behold, it turns out you can eat them! The flavor of berries from some trees is supposedly rather bland, whereas that of others is sweet and tasty, with hints of banana. I tried several fruits from our tree and thought the flavor was initially quite pleasant but a little less so at the finish. It was interesting but not necessarily worth much more than a conversation point. I have read that cooking diminishes the flavor and is not worth the effort, but I'm tempted to experiment a little more. The fruits look so enticing that I really want to turn them into something yummy.

Here's a closer view of the dogwood fruits.

Sage flowers in my garden.

OK, there, I don't feel so bad now -- the photo record shows that I didn't spend all of 2013 indoors!

January Thaw: Chicken of the Woods

Chicken of the woods mushroom, which I found on a blueberry-picking trip this past August. This is one of the easier-to-identify wild mushrooms. The sulfur-colored underside is sponge-like; there are no gills.

It's January, and it has been cold here in Massachusetts: soup weather. In need of a little warmth and facing somewhat limited refrigerator contents, I decided to pull a packet of vacuum-sealed chicken of the woods mushroom from my freezer and do a little experimental cooking.

This was attempt number two at eating the mushroom, which I found growing prolifically (as it usually does) on an old log by the side of a trail this past August. My husband, older two boys, and I were on our way up a mountain to pick some wild blueberries when I spotted the bright orange and yellow mushrooms just a little bit into the woods. The only chicken of the woods mushroom I had seen outside of a book was a specimen that was growing across the lake from a friend's house in Maine (we had to kayak across the water to get to it, and if it had not been past its prime, we would have had a somewhat challenging time harvesting it because it was growing on a tree along a steep bank). I was not entirely sure I had the same mushroom, but I remembered that no other mushroom looks like chicken of the woods, so I was confident enough to grab several large chunks of it (and to make one of my sons and my husband do the same) on our way back to the car.

Another view of chicken of the woods.

A consultation with my mushroom book and my friend, who had eaten chicken of the woods previously and lived to tell about it, confirmed my suspicions, and I prepared to cook my find. I had read that chicken of the woods can absorb liquid as well as any eggplant, so I sautéed the mushroom in a little oil and a little broth. And a little more oil and a little more broth. And a little more. Yep, definitely eggplant-like. I tasted the mushroom at several points during cooking, and although the flavor was good (reminiscent of chicken, as the name suggests), I found the results to be a bit dry. I added the mushroom to some risotto, and although everyone ate it, no one particularly liked it. I had collected a large quantity of mushroom, and it seemed a shame not to make use of so much free food (I hadn't even collected all of the mushroom, given that we had been prepared for blueberry picking but not for mushroom collecting; we had no good means of transporting our quarry, and I didn't want to find out we'd gone out of our way to carry something poisonous out of the woods), but I didn't know what to do with it, so I used my vacuum sealer to make little packets of sautéed mushroom and stashed the packets in the freezer.

And now we fast forward to January and the bitterly cold soup weather. I wondered whether cream of mushroom soup, in which the mushrooms would be pureed and the texture would be less noticeable, might be a good option. I chose a cookbook and looked for a cream-of-mushroom-soup recipe, but what I found instead was a recipe for beef, barley, and mushroom soup. Although it didn't involve pureeing the mushroom, I decided to base my creation on that recipe instead (see below for my recipe).

One recent sunny day, I took my sons and their new baby sister
(born in November!) on a new trail, where the boys found
this exposed branch that made quite a good motorcycle for three.
Although it's not prime foraging weather and certainly is not
mushroom season, we can still enjoy a bowl of hot soup with wild
mushrooms from the freezer when we get home from hiking.

I am pleased to report that the texture of the mushroom improved considerably after an hour or so of simmering (I did chop the mushroom into small pieces first). In fact, the results were good enough that I invited my mother to stay for dinner (she'd been over at the house anyway; we'd just gotten back from a day of painting walls at our new home, still under construction). My mother loves both soup and mushrooms, so perhaps a better indicator of how things turned out was that my middle son (who loves mushrooms but isn't usually a soup fan) kept raving about the dinner and wanted to make sure I had more mushroom in the freezer so I could make the soup again. My eldest son and my husband, who both like soup but usually detest mushrooms, enjoyed their meals as well (in the interest of a complete report, my youngest son and I also liked our soup).

That makes three wild mushrooms I have successfully identified and enjoyed eating (the others were chanterelles and hen of the woods). And come to think of it, the two supposed mushroom haters in my family liked both of the wild mushrooms they tried (I'm the only one who tried the chanterelles, but only because the others weren't there). At this rate, I just might turn us all into mushroom lovers. Stay tuned!

Chicken-of-the-Woods Soup with Beef and Barley

This is a rough recipe; I didn't measure all ingredients.

Brown beef (stew meat of your choice, cut into bite-sized chunks) in a little oil over medium-high heat. Add 2 carrots, 2 stalks of celery, and one onion, all chopped. Sauté over medium heat 5 min or until vegetables are tender. Add 1 can diced tomatoes, 2 quarts beef broth, 3 thyme sprigs, 1/2 cup pearl barley, and a large quantity of finely chopped chicken of the woods mushroom. Bring to a boil and simmer 45-60 minutes or until barley is cooked and beef is tender.