Getting Wild in the Kitchen: Soup and Risotto

Thistle stalks: trimmed, peeled, and ready to be chopped up for soup.

Thistle plant with all its defenses.

In search of dinner one recent rainy day, I drove around to check out a few favorite foraging spots and a few I haven't thoroughly examined this year. Let me explain about the weather: on a rainy day, no one minds letting me go by myself. So, with rain jacket donned, I began at the end of my road, where I was hoping to harvest some pokeweed shoots I wanted to substitute in a green-bean dish. Unfortunately, the pokeweed was too tall and probably already getting toxic, so I snipped away at a few of the plants to encourage the root to send up new growth. I could then come back a week or so later.

The thistle plants had also gotten markedly bigger, but in this case bigger was better. Tall, thick flower stalks a couple of feet high had sprung up where only ground-level basal rosettes had been before. I'd previously tried the midribs of thistle leaves and found them to be like celery, only slightly more bitter. I had read that the flower stalks are the best part of the plant and so was excited to see such tall specimens.

Thistle flower stalks trimmed of leaves.
Grape leaves can be seen at the right.

All those thorns and prickers certainly did look intimidating, but I took out my scissors and carefully snipped away until just the flower stalk remained (it helps to start at the top of the plant so that one has increasingly more room to maneuver as the project unfolds). Then I snipped that too and held it cautiously at one end, where my fingers could take advantage of the prickerless hollow inside of the stalk. Gingerly, I carried the stalk to my car and used a knife to scrape off as much of the prickly hairs and thorns as I could while resting the stalk on the hood of the vehicle. Then I was back out snipping away at another stalk.

At home, I used a vegetable peeler to finish the pricker removal (see top photo), and then it was time for a taste. Even more celery-like than the leaf midribs, thistle would make a great addition to salads (I would like to try it in my chicken salad), stir fries, and soups. And in fact, the latter was where this thistle was destined, but I'll come back to the soup.

Milkweed flower buds. The buds turn pinkish
just before they open. I understand it's
best to collect the buds at about 2/3 the final
size, and probably not when they're pink, although
I did collect some pink ones and didn't notice any
difficulty in eating them (older buds are supposed
to be slightly tougher).

After collecting a few thistle stalks, I drove to my favorite parking lot to see whether the milkweed shoots I'd collected had grown back (I'm not sure whether milkweed sends up new shoots to replace harvested ones). I think perhaps new shoots are growing, but there were certainly a lot of tall plants -- many more plants than I'd noticed when they were only 6 inches tall and hiding in the weeds. Now the plants had green flower buds, slightly reminiscent of broccoli heads. These flower buds are edible, so I snapped off a small baggieful to add to the soup.

Next I was off to some local conservation land, where two of my boys and I had found a cattail pond back in February. Alas, the overgrowth was now so thick that I couldn't even see the pond, much less get to it without pushing through tall grasses and overgrown bushes, becoming soaking wet (remember, it was raining, and water would be clinging to the grasses), and probably getting covered in ticks. Although someone had mowed a path through some of the field, apparently the area with the pond is not maintained.

I thought this was a blackberry bush,
but now I'm not so sure.

I therefore settled for walking along the mowed path. I found what I thought were some blackberry bushes, although since then I've found some bushes that already had little green blackberries on them, and although the leaves are similar, they do look slightly different. There are so many blackberry relatives, and I can't keep them all straight, and now I'm not entirely sure that what I found that rainy day was any type of berry bush. The flowers did strongly resemble blackberry flowers, though.. Someday I'll have to spend time really studying the differences between blackberries, dewberries, raspberries, black raspberries, wineberries, and all the rest. I'll have to visit these bushes again later in the summer and get back to you.

Cattails in a soggy field.

As I was nearly at the end of the loop through the field, I came to a stand of cattails, which I remembered having seen the previous fall, when they had their brown, velvety spikes. They hadn't been there in February because someone had mowed the entire field, cattail stalks and all. They weren't growing in a pond but in soggy ground, so it would have been difficult to harvest the roots or lateral stalks (the horizontal stalks that grow underground before sending up a new above-ground stalk). But they were perfectly located for harvesting the "hearts," the tender core of a growing leaf stalk. I could walk right into the patch and pull up as many hearts as I liked: no rubber boots or wading through ponds required!

Cattail stalk resting on my backpack,
which is obscured by its rain cover.

To pull out each cattail heart, I tugged first gently, then with increasing force at the inner bunch of leaves until -- squeak! -- out slipped the heart. Easy! Fast! Fun! I pulled out several more in a matter of minutes. I then trimmed the green tops off the leaves to make it easier to carry the bundle back to my car.

After a relatively unsuccessful venture down the part of the trail across the street (no one had mowed the field at all there, and soon my pants were so soggy and the grasses so tall that I had to turn back short of the plum trees I wanted to investigate), I took my harvest home to the cutting board. I've already discussed my preparation of the thistle stalks and milkweed buds (both of which I chopped up) above. The cattail hearts were a bit trickier because I wasn't really sure how much of the leaf core was tender. It turns out that the leaves become fibrous on the outside of the stalk before they do on the inside, so the trick is to use only as much as you can easily puncture with a fingernail pressing horizontally to the direction of the fibers (I used too much of the leaf core the first time I tried this, so now I also apply the bite test -- it's fine to eat cattail raw, so I bite into a leaf from the outside just above where I plan to stop cutting, and if it's still tender, I use a bit more).

My collection of trimmed cattail hearts lying on top of the dark
greenery I discarded (only a small portion of each heart is
tender enough to eat, though, so the size of this pile is deceiving).

I also wasn't really sure how to cook it. I was modifying a recipe for potato-leek soup, so I first tried sauteing some of the cattail in a little butter, as I would leeks (afterall, the trimmed cattail looked a lot like leeks). That method produced tough and unchewable results, though. I then tried boiling some cattail hearts in a bit of water, and the result was soft and tasty, slightly reminiscent of corn and very mild. I then decided to throw the rest of the cattail hearts, along with the thistle and milkweed buds, in my soup during cooking. The results were yummy enough to warrant my sharing the recipe. Also see below for a recipe for chickweed risotto.

Milkweed flower-bud clusters on my cutting board. Milkweed
buds taste exactly like the stalks. The texture is just different.

Potato Soup with Leek, Cattail Hearts, Milkweed Flower-Bud Clusters, and Thistle

2 leeks
approximately 2 cups cattail hearts or laterals
several handfuls milkweed buds
1 to 2 cups thistle flower stalks, sliced
6 T unsalted butter
1 T flour
5 1/4 cup chicken broth (preferably homemade)
1 bay leaf
1 3/4 lb peeled, cubed red potatoes
2 ham steaks, diced into 1/4-inch cubes
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Bring water to a boil in a small pot and boil milkweed buds 15 min. Chop and set aside. (I am not clear on whether there is anything toxic in milkweed broth, so I took this precaution).

2. Chop the white and light-green portion of the leeks by slicing them lengthwise and then chopping into 1-inch pieces. Heat the butter in a Dutch oven over medium-low heat until foaming, then add the leeks and increase the heat to medium. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the leeks are tender but not mushy or browned. Sprinkle the flour over the leeks and stir to coat evenly. Cook until the flour dissolves, about 2 min.

3. Increase the heat to high and gradually add the broth while whisking constantly. Add the bay leaf, potatoes, cattails, milkweed, and thistle. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, until the potatoes are almost tender, 5 to 7 min. Remove pot from heat and let sit, covered, 10 to 15 min. Place a portion of the soup in a blender and puree, then stir the puree back into the soup. How much puree you use depends on how creamy or chunky you like your soup. Add diced ham and heat another few minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Parmesan Risotto with Chickweed

A lush patch of chickweed grows at my house.
I've been snipping off the tops and adding them to various dishes.

I also recently made this tasty risotto with the chickweed lushly growing under some pine trees at my house. I highly recommend it!

3 1/2 cups chicken broth
3 cups water
4 T unsalted butter
1 medium onion, finely diced
salt
2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
as much chickweed as you can collect, perhaps 1 to 2 cups loosely packed, then chopped

(optional) throw in some sheep sorrel or wood sorrel leaves if you find them, but not too many because they will overpower the more mild chickweed (a quarter cup chopped would be good)

1. Bring the broth and water to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Reduce the heat to the lowest possible setting and keep warm.

2. Melt the butter in a 4-quart saucepan over medium heat. Once the foaming subsides, add the onion and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and translucent but not brown, about 9 min. Add the rice and cook, while stirring constantly, until the edges of the grain are transparent, 2 to 4 min. Add the wine and cook while stirring constantly  until the wine is completely absorbed, about 2 min. Add the broth mixture, 1/2 cup at a time, and stir frequently until each portion is absorbed. Continue until rice is cooked through  but still slightly firm in the center (taste to test for doneness). You might not use all of the broth mixture, but cooking time should be approximately 20 to 25 min. Add the chopped chickweed (it's OK to use the flowers too) and cook an additional minute, or until chickweed is wilted. Remove from heat and stir in cheese, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

Far Away and Close to Home

My three boys on a recent trip to Missouri. Here they are at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. We found lots of edible plants there, but they were cultivated and labeled, so they don't really count. We did, however, find lots of edible wild plants elsewhere on our trip.

Autumn berry bushes line the driveway to our local high school.
I took this picture this past weekend; the leaves are just
coming out. The berries will be ripe in the fall.

It's amazing to me how often I have to travel far from home to identify something that is growing in abundance where I live. For example, last summer on a family hike in NH I spotted a large bush with interesting reddish-orange berries, which were about the size of a pea but more oblong. The berries were speckled with silver, as though an artist had splatter painted them. The artist must then have painted a sparkly glaze on the undersides of the leaves; they were silver, too. Fortunately, I had my favorite foraging books with me, and I spent probably 15 minutes first leafing through the books in search of a similar picture and then comparing the description of the possible match to the specimen at hand. Finally confident in my identification, I plucked a fruit and got my first taste of the pleasingly tart autumn berry.

Silvery underside of the leaves of an autumn berry bush.

Only after that first laborious identification did I realize that autumn berries are growing everywhere – at my local playground, at the high school behind my house, at a nearby Audubon sanctuary, and just about everywhere else. Apparently the federal government planted these attractive bushes alongside highways at some point, and the plants have effectively spread far and wide. The boys and I spent a pleasant afternoon picking berries at the high school last fall, and I made my first ever jelly from the juice (which I collected via my then new steam juicer, a truly marvelous invention). My two younger sons and I enjoyed the berries straight from the bush (although I'm pretty sure the youngest was enjoying the sizable seeds, too), but the flavor was too tart for my eldest son and my husband. Cooked with sugar into a jelly, though, autumn berries were an uncontested delight.

On another adventure away from home, I found my first black cherries alongside a road in the White Mountains region of NH, yet they grow at my local lake and elsewhere near my home. I first identified sumac in a front yard in Rye, NH (near the coast), but how I could have failed to notice its incredible abundance before that is beyond me (for a while after that first identification, I would scan the roadsides for sumac as we whizzed past at up to 60 miles per hour. Although my own excitement has waned, my kids still shout "Sumac!" every time they spot any from a car window – they have been a little slower to figure out that finding sumac isn't actually that difficult).

Common blue violet. The leaves are heart shaped. The flowers are
entirely purple; some just look white because I took this picture in the rain,
and the light is reflecting off the leaves.

Today I was hiking (in the rain, without kids -- two conditions I rarely encounter on a hike) and thought I saw some wood violets. When I bent down for a closer look at the leaves, I saw that they were in fact the same obnoxious "weed" I've been pulling up from my lawn and garden for years. When I got home, I checked the description of wood violet so I'll be better prepared to recognize it if I actually do see it sometime, and in the process I discovered that this plant I'd thought was a downright nuisance actually makes these pretty purple flowers (or it would, if I would just stop pulling it up) and that, furthermore, the flowers and young leaves are edible! It took a walk in the woods for me to get to know the common blue violet that grows all over my yard. The flowers and leaves are packed with vitamins A and C. One of my books mentions the intriguing possibility of making jelly from the flowers. (I haven't tasted the flowers because I didn't know what they were when I found them in the woods, and I don't think I've allowed any to bloom at my house; in any event, it's still pouring here, so I haven't had an opportunity to check.)

Honeysuckle blossoms.

The farthest I've ever traveled to identify a plant that grows near my house is Missouri. My family and I just got back from a trip to visit some friends there, and in the backyard of one set of friends a familiar scent brought back faint childhood memories of sucking out the sweet nectar of honeysuckle blossoms. I was probably about 8 the last time I did this, and I couldn't exactly remember what a honeysuckle blossom looked like. The smell, however, was unforgettable. I quickly located the flowers producing that delicious aroma and asked my friend whether the bushes were honeysuckle. She thought so, as did my husband, and so I plucked a blossom and sucked out the nectar by running my teeth along the thin tube at the base of the flower. Oh, to be the size of a bee and drink this sweet nectar in mouthfuls rather than drops!

My middle son and my friend's
four-year-old playing in the
honeysuckle bushes. They are
pretending to be bears. There is
also a grape vine growing on the left.

Back at home, the boys and I thought we discovered a honeysuckle bush growing right next to our favorite picnic rock. We've been there so many times before and yet never noticed the bush. Because spring is less advanced here in Massachusetts than in Missouri, the bush is just putting out its buds. It might not be long before we can have a second taste of that sweet honeysuckle nectar. And, if we turn out to be wrong, then I'm sure we'll spot honeysuckle somewhere close by soon -- now that we've traveled all the way to Missouri to learn what it looks like.

My friend's backyard had a number of other edible plants. There were grape vines, a peach tree (not originally wild, but I think it's fair to say it's wild now), chickweed (the common type, not the hairy mouse-ear variety that grows in our backyard), and wood sorrel. There might have even been an avocado tree: my friend reports that her four-year-old likes to throw his avocado pits into the ditch at the back of their property, and one of the plants growing there did look an awful lot like the two avocado trees I once grew from my own avocado pits (unfortunately, my poor gardening skills combined with insufficient light in our house killed the trees).

Garlic mustard in flower at my friend's house.

And, also growing in the ditch at the edge of my friend's property were some flowering plants that I thought looked familiar. I apparently took pictures of them but then completely forgot to investigate further. I came across the pictures just now as I was reviewing those I took on our trip, and I was surprised to see the same kind of plant I recently identified in the parking lot at our bank, then on our way to the picnic rock (where we found the honeysuckle), and subsequently on every roadside. It's a plant high up on the Most Wanted List: garlic mustard. Garlic mustard is

Garlic-mustard flowers in MA.

an invasive weed that, according to my sources, will out-compete just about every other plant if given the chance. One must take extreme care not to transport roots or seeds to places where it hasn't yet found a home. If you happen to like the taste of garlic mustard, then you can combine culinary pursuits with weed removal. One of my sources classified garlic mustard as a pungent green and described the taste as powerful and bitter, not for the faint of heart. I don't tend to like mustard or bitterness, so I was surprised to find that I liked the taste of the leaves (but small quantities are still recommended). Incidentally, my middle son claimed to like it as well, although I'm quite certain that this is further evidence that kids always enjoy food they've picked or prepared themselves more than food served at the table. I'd bet large sums of money that he wouldn't eat garlic mustard leaves if I served them in a salad at dinner.

We had brought along a picnic lunch, so I added a few garlic-mustard leaves to my roast-beef sandwich. The leaves vary in shape from rounded to pointed and have wavy, irregular margins. The rounded leaves at the bottom of the flowering stalks are reportedly less bitter, so I went for those (I have now experimentally compared the bottom leaves from a flowering stalk with the bottom leaves from a non-flowering stalk, and I can confirm that the former are tastier). The rapidly growing stem tips of non-flowering plants are also edible. In his book Edible Wild Plants: From Dirt to Plate, John Kallas gives a recipe for steamed garlic-mustard stem tips, but he says that cooking removes all of the garlic flavor and almost none of the bitterness, so I'm not in a hurry to try it. However, on the recommendation of Samual Thayer in Nature's Garden, I tried munching on a raw stalk. The flavor was much milder than the leaves and quite pleasant. I have high hopes for using this plant similarly to how I would use green onions, but the flavor will add a hint of garlic.

Garlic-mustard omelet garnished with two sprigs
of garlic-mustard tops.

John Kallas's recipe for a garlic-mustard omelet, on the other hand, uses the leaves and purports to retain the garlic flavor, so it seemed worth a test; I had enjoyed the leaves on my sandwich, afterall. For lunch today I mostly followed Kallas's recipe, which included red peppers, caramelized red onions, mushrooms, chopped fresh rosemary, and garlic-mustard leaves. I also added a little crumbled bacon and a sprinkling of asiago cheese. The result was delicious and was even a hit with my two youngest sons (the eldest elected to have yogurt, although he did try a bite of the omelet and said it was good).

 That's one more plant I first discovered far away and now can't stop finding close to home. I wonder what delicious treats I'll find the next time I travel!

The roots of garlic mustard have two characteristic bends. The first occurs just before the stem, so that in most cases the stem is at a right angle to the root. The second bend is a little farther down and not so sharp.

Cluster of baby grapes on a vine
in my friend's backyard.

Another garlic-mustard flower, this one in MO.

My six-year-old pulls while my four-year-old pushes my friend's son in a wagon. In the background is a peach tree (on the right). It already had miniature peaches on it.

I'm fairly certain this is an avocado tree
growing in the drainage ditch at my friend's house.

My six-year-old pretending he's going to fall off the swing. These friends (different from the ones with the honeysuckle and avocado) grow fresh garlic in their garden. I'm planning to give it a try (I've also heard it deters certain critters).

OK, let's see how well you paid attention to my Easter post. Can you find the wood sorrel in this picture of my friend's back yard? There are violet leaves as well, but no flowers yet.

Look, Don't Pick

Although it's probably impossible to see, there are

three turtles sunning on a stick that lies beyond

and between the two trees in the middle of this photo.

I recently learned of a national wildlife refuge near my home, and I've been excited to visit it because it includes wetlands, a habitat I haven't much explored for edible plants. Alas, my excitement burst when we pulled into the parking lot and saw that, although hunting and fishing were allowed, picking vegetation wasn't. It turned out that dogs also were not allowed, so we had to drive ours back home before starting on our hike (apparently this no-dogs rule did not apply to the two women who were just ending a walk with their dogs as we left the parking lot, but I digress.)

A better view of some different turtles.

After depositing our dog at home (and calming my middle son, who had become hysterically concerned that the police might arrest us for bringing our dog to the refuge, despite the fact that she had not left our vehicle and was certainly not disturbing any wildlife), we were on our way. I was sorely disappointed that I wouldn't be able to return to the refuge to collect anything I identified, but I reminded myself that just identifying plants is good practice. Plants in their natural habitat don't always look like the pictures in the guidebooks (although some do, especially when the guidebook is a good one); what's more, just as every person looks a little different from every other person, plants within the same species don't look exactly alike. It's also helpful to get a mental picture of the habitat in which a plant lives; if I could identify any plants in the wildlife refuge, it would help me to recognize those same plants in similar places where I might be allowed to forage.

Chickweed

Our trail started out hugging the side of a river, and all along the path I kept seeing patches of the same lush plant sprouting through the brown leaves. I thought I recognized it as chickweed, which supposedly is ubiquitous but which I had yet to find outside of my foraging books. I bent down and plucked a single leaflet (shh!). The two pairs of opposite leaves and the single line of hairs along the stem confirmed my suspicions. (I tried to keep the leaf for further confirmation against a picture in a guidebook at home, but it had wilted by the time I got there.) Given the restrictions on picking vegetation and my desire to compare my notes and the picture I took to the details in my books before consuming a new plant, I still haven't tasted chickweed, but it's supposed to be a mild-tasting and nutritious salad ingredient, so I hope to look for it in other wet places and find enough to make a good contribution to a meal. Last year the boys and I learned to identify sheep sorrel and wood sorrel, both of which grow all around our house and have a delectable lemony zing but are too strongly flavored to make a good salad all on their own. Until this weekend, I had only learned to identify one neutral green (wild spinach) to complement the sorrel, so this was an important and exciting step toward delicious all-wild salads.

This sign, reading "Shagbark Hickory," confirmed

my earlier identification of similar trees.

Although chickweed was the only new plant I found, I also came across a sign that positively confirmed my earlier identification of hickory trees (see photo). In addition, the boys (with help from their grandfather, who has been visiting us this week) got to touch a garter snake, catch a frog, and see a beaver lodge, several turtles, some ducks, and a large and gnarly wild apple tree. I also spotted some bushes with particularly red branches, which rang a bell and will require further investigation. We'll have to pay another visit to the refuge soon; as spring arrives in full force, we'll be sure to identify even more edible plants. And, if any happen to be considered invasive species, well, I just might see whether the ranger would bend the rules a little.

Catching frogs.