Berries to Butternuts

Sumac bushes with red berry clusters. These look beautiful, but it turns out they weren't ripe yet.

I hoped to find a thicket of plum trees that afternoon. I'd found the trees in flower on a rainy-day hike in the spring, and I wanted to see whether they were now bearing fruit. Although my expedition wasn't successful in the way I'd hoped, it turned out to be successful in ways I would never have imagined.

Red, ripe raspberries. A treat!

Mystery nuts.

My good luck began with a ripe raspberry here and there along the trail. I also spied many green, unripe blackberries and filed the information away for later. I even found three blueberries (I don't think of collecting blueberries until closer to August). When I got to the knoll where I'd seen the putative plum trees, alas, I didn't find any fruit hanging from their branches. I did notice some green nuts scattered about the ground. I couldn't find the tree they'd come from, and I'm not entirely sure what kind of nut they were. My best guess at the moment is some kind of hickory nut (I didn't see any shagbark hickories, whose peeling bark is quite distinctive, and I don't think I'd be able to recognize any other kinds).

Unripe blackberries.

 I turned back down the trail after the plumless knoll and the mystery nuts, and after at time I came to a spot where a variety of berries were growing in the middle of the trail, so that the trail split like a momentarily divided highway. Somehow, I hadn't noticed the berries on my hike in. Some were unripe blackberries, some were ripe red raspberries, and the rest resembled blackberries except that they had a significant white bloom and were fuzzier, like raspberries.

These look moldy, but they aren't! This is the
handful of bloom-covered berries I brought home
for my kids. These have even been rinsed.

I had just seen the same type of berry on a different trail, where the white bloom made me think the first berry I'd seen was moldy. Then I'd noticed that all the black berries (although not the unripe red ones) had this bloom and that the stems were coated in white as well. So it probably wasn't mold. I next wondered whether someone had sprayed a pesticide here (which seemed unlikely, given that I was on conservation land), but when I picked a berry, I found that the inside (which of course would not have been exposed during any chemical spraying) was also coated in fuzzy whiteness. When I now found the same berries on a different trail, I concluded that the white bloom must be a natural feature of the berry. Because all the raspberry- and blackberry-like berries are edible, I tasted one. It was delicious -- significantly sweeter than a blackberry or raspberry. I collected a handful (I only had a small snack cup that hadn't made it back inside from my car) to share with my kids when I got home and decided to take the kids berry picking the next day.

I took my two youngest boys back
to pick black raspberries the next day.
We even found a few ripe blackberries!

Incidentally, I've now decided that these bloom-covered berries are most likely black raspberries. At first I thought they might be dewberries, but the stems were green, not red. When I read a description of the black raspberry plant, I learned that, although stems on older plants are red, those of newer plants are green with a white bloom. The book didn't mention a bloom on the berries, but I'm guessing black raspberries nonetheless. My source mentioned that many people think black raspberries are the tastiest of all the berries in the blackberry-raspberry family, and I am definitely throwing my vote in the same direction.

These nuts were hanging right into the trail.

After several minutes of berry picking, it caught my attention that some branches were practically hitting me in the face (no, I am not the world's most observant person, mainly because I can become completely absorbed in a single activity to the point that I can hear or see nothing outside of that activity). I then noticed some strange fruits hanging from the branches, which were bent significantly over the trail. Actually, the branch was so much of an obstacle that I must have had to duck to get by on my hike in; the top of the tree had been practically severed and was hanging upside down across the path. How I had managed to pass this spot on my way in without noticing the fruits was beyond me. In fact, I began to wonder whether I had somehow taken a wrong turn on the way back, but a short amount of backtracking confirmed that I'd come the right way (I saw a pair of striking orange mushrooms that I was sure I'd seen before). I went back to examine the tree and fruits, which I now decided were nuts (I took one home and cracked it open, and although it clearly wasn't ripe yet, I was able to confirm this identification).

Nuts in hand.

Most plant-identification guides show pictures of flowers and ripe fruit, not unripe fruit, and I didn't recognize this small nut. But, as I looked at the leaves, I saw that they resembled walnut leaves except that the terminal leaflet was well developed. The leaves were a little straggly looking, probably because most of the trunk was severed (it was amazing that the tree was producing fruit at all), but I glanced up at the branches stemming from the intact portion of the trunk and still thought the leaves looked similar to walnut leaves. I looked at the bark, which had interesting, textured grooves. A possibility began to dawn on me. Could this be butternut? I hardly dared to hope as I looked back at the nuts. They were the shape of small footballs. Very small footballs, but footballs nonetheless. They had four lightly discernible ridges running lengthwise. I imagined the nuts getting bigger, darkening a bit ... and looking pretty much exactly like a butternut.

Bark of the nut tree.

I was beginning to believe that I might really have found this nut, which has been evading me for a year now. The first time I found a walnut tree (at our town playground), I thought it was a butternut, even after I'd tasted it. I had not managed to get the nut out of its shell intact, so its walnut shape was lost. Additionally, walnuts apparently need to age to develop their flavor, so a newly picked or fallen nut tastes considerably different -- and worse -- than an older nut. I could not reconcile the taste of this supposed butternut with Samuel Thayer's description in The Forager's Harvest (see my list of recommended reading). He writes: "Butternuts that have had the hulls peeled while green are a delicacy. Their sweet flavor hints at bananas and vanilla ice cream, and they are very soft."

The nut tree had been practically severed
at the top.

When I finally figured out that I'd found a walnut tree rather than a butternut tree, I was sorely disappointed. Afterall, I can buy walnuts in the store, and I'm not even a big walnut fan (as a side note, I have now tried properly aged wild walnuts, and they do taste significantly better than the cultivated kind available for purchase). I have been searching for the butternut tree ever since. So to think that I might finally have found one (nevermind that it had to practically hit me in the face before I noticed it) -- well, I was so excited that I began talking to myself. (Should I admit this? I talk to myself. My mother does it too; I used to think she was crazy, but now that such a belief would require me to admit that I'm crazy, too, I've dropped the charge).

Walnuts high up in the tree.

I pocketed a nut and headed back to my car. On my way home, I stopped by the playground to see how the walnut trees were doing. The nuts were considerably larger than the possible butternuts were. That gave me pause. The two trees are relatives; do their nuts develop at the same time and pace? The playground trees have ample sunlight, whereas the maybe-butternut tree was in the shady woods. Could that make a difference? Well, I'll keep an eye on my tree and let you know how it turns out. I'm still cautiously excited. (Post-publication note: it wasn't a butternut tree; see my next post.)

Sumac flowers.

After hitting the playground, I stopped by my favorite parking lot to check on the sumac and milkweed. The sumac is still in flower and hasn't made berries yet. Most of the sumac I've seen is still in flower, but last week I did find some bushes with bright red berries. The color looked perfect, but when I sucked on a berry (you can't eat them -- they're too hard to chew), it didn't have any flavor. I'm not sure why -- I guess it was just wishful thinking -- but I collected eight berry heads anyway and tried to make some sumac-ade with them. We made many pitchers of this refreshing, tart

Sumac berries.

drink last summer. Unsurprisingly, the flavor wasn't good; my husband described it as kind of like treebark-flavored water. Next time I'll be sure to put more stock in the taste test (I'm not sure why I conducted a taste test if I wasn't going to take its results into account).

Milkweed plant with small, immature pods
(look in the center of the photograph).

Although it will be a while yet before I'm collecting sumac from that parking lot, several of the milkweed plants had small, immature pods, at the perfect stage for collecting. I'd never tried a milkweed pod before, but I have enjoyed milkweed shoots and flower-bud clusters, and so I was looking forward to trying the pods. Interestingly, although there are a lot of milkweed plants around this parking lot, only those plants in one particular place had pods yet. I collected enough for everyone to have a small serving at dinner. Then I picked a bagful of day lilies and headed home to try a recipe for salmon-stuffed day lilies. The flowers, stuffing, and boiled milkweed pods (which tasted like the other milkweed parts except for the soft pre-silk inside, which was creamy and vaguely cheesy) were enjoyed by everyone except my oldest son, who didn't like much of anything that day and whose opinions should therefore be discounted.

Black locust leaves?

A few other recent adventures are worth sharing. Back in May I found some trees with deeply furrowed bark -- so unusually furrowed that I wanted to know what kind of trees they were (see my May 23 post). I passed the same trees on my way to the black raspberries, and now that the leaves are out, I'm thinking these might be black locusts. Black locust trees are considered invasive in Massachusetts, so it should be easy to find one -- except that it hasn't been. I've been looking for them because their flowers are supposed to be beautiful, delightfully scented, and delicious (one book recommends black-locust fritters). Although black locusts might ordinarily blossom in early July, all the rain and warm weather has accelerated things this year, so I'm guessing the flowers have come and gone. I'll keep an eye on these trees next year to see whether my identification is correct.

Unripe serviceberries?

Another tentative identification this week was what I'm hoping turns out to be a serviceberry bush (also known as shadbush or juneberry). The fruits reportedly have a delicious pear-like flavor. They resemble blueberries or miniature apples and, like those two fruits, have a crown on the bottom. The ripe berries range from reddish purple to blue, purple, and black. I saw the berries and took a picture, then made this tentative identification at home, so I'll have to go back to the bush with my plant guides to be sure.

Unripe riverside grapes.

One final discovery I'll mention from the past week are riverside grapes. A friend used to have trees covered in grape vines, and she always lamented how the animals seemed to take all the grapes before the people could get any. So I'm only tentatively excited to see the developing grapes, but I do hope some will still be around for picking in the fall. I've noticed a number of grape vines in various places during my explorations.

So, no plum trees, but plenty of other exciting discoveries this week!

Photo Gallery

Here are some more pictures from the week.

I think this is false Solomon's seal, but I didn't dig up the root to find out. The roots are edible, but they don't sound very tasty. The best thing Samuel Thayer has to say about them is that "Solomon's seal rhizomes would at least be a good source of calories for someone lost in the woods." The shoots, on the other hand, reportedly make a good vegetable. The berries, which turn bright red when they ripen in the fall, are sweet like molasses but have a strong acrid aftertaste. Thayer says the berries are edible, but I should note that another author, Teresa Marrone in Wild Berries & Fruits, says they are inedible. I tend to thoroughly trust Thayer, however. The level of detail and personal verification of facts in his books is convincing.

Milkweed pods boiling for dinner.

The underside of riverside grape leaves is considerably lighter than the top. The young leaves (when shiny and a bit reddish) make a good wrap for rice stuffing, and a friend of mine recently sauteed the leaves to reportedly delicious effect.

The terminal leaflet in this walnut leaf is missing; a butternut leaf would have a well-developed terminal leaflet.

Close-up picture of two walnuts from one of the many walnut trees surrounding our local playground.

Indian cucumber with unripe, green berries. There are two berries, so this plant is two years old. The berries are inedible, but they turn blue when they are ripe. (The root is edible and tasty; see my February 21 and May 31 posts for more about Indian cucumbers.)

The deeply furrowed bark of what I hope is a black locust tree.

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.

Loose Ends

Two geese and their seven goslings entertained us during a recent picnic.

This is what happens when I don't post for a couple of weeks: I look through my pictures and have no idea what I'm looking at. Even though I feel like I've been finding and eating lots of interesting plants since my last post, apparently what I took pictures of were the plants I couldn't identify. I started this post with a picture of two geese and their seven goslings because at least I can definitely tell you what's in that picture and where I was when I took it!

This past weekend we took a family bike ride along a nearby rail trail. The trail goes through some marshland before cutting through a pond in a wildlife-protection area. The waterfoul there are pretty civilized; they know that if they swim over to the picnic spots along the bike trail, people will toss bread into the water. When we first arrived a mother and daughter were feeding a goose with a split web on one of its feet; the bird was holding its hurt foot in the air and hopping about on the other to get the bread crumbs. After a while the family of nine pictured above came swimming over to get in on the action, and the loner flew off with a big splash. My boys had a great time feeding the geese a bit of bread from their salami sandwiches. The little goslings weren't one bit shy; they came right up to my two-year-old if he wasn't quick enough about getting his bread out. We were careful not to approach the babies unless they approached us, though -- and a sharp hissing from the mom or dad kept us in line if we weren't on good behavior.

A mother duck and her four ducklings swam alongside
our trail.

Because my 2-year-old was riding his own glide bike (which lacks peddles and so teaches balance more quickly than training wheels), he and my husband were quite a bit behind the rest of us. While we were waiting for them to catch up, we had the good fortune to have a mother duck and her four ducklings entertain us as they swam about the algae-infested marsh waters along the trail. They, too, were obviously quite used to people, and they often swam close enough that we could have touched them with a stick.

A field of milkweed. This was not alongside our trail
but at the edge of a local farm (see below).

I hadn't brought any foraging tools along on the bike ride, but after we finished our picnic and so made more room in our bike bags, I cut off a few milkweed shoots to add to my slowly growing freezer collection. I'm not sure whether the milkweed will send up a new stalk once I snap off the existing one, so I'm careful not to take all the milkweed I find. In this case, that was definitely a good thing because, unfortunately, these particular stalks were still a bit tough after cooking, so I think they were too tall and beyond the "shoot" stage. I thought they'd be fine because they were still pretty flexible, but apparently one needs to be able to snap the stalk, whereas I had to use my fingernail to sever it. Because I only collected a few stalks, there should be plenty of plants to make seedpods later this summer; the young, firm pods are supposed to make excellent stir-fry fare.

Not jewelweed.

I also saw some dazzling flowers hanging delicately from their stems alongside the trail. I took a picture because I thought they might be jewelweed, which I remembered having read about but the specific details of which I could not recall. Now that I've looked up jewelweed, I've determined that the flowers I found are not it. They probably aren't even edible -- but they are definitely beautiful, so I'm including their picture anyway. If you know what flower this is, send me a note!

Notice the unusual bark of this tree. I've no
idea what kind of tree it is, but I'd like to find out.

Other plants I've failed to identify recently include bushes and trees. On a hike with my two youngest boys, several trees with distinctively grooved bark also caught my attention. Before I became seriously interested in foraging, trees fit into two categories for me: pine trees and not pine trees. OK, so maybe if pressed I could identify a maple or oak tree by the leaf, but I definitely never paid attention to things like bark patterns, tree size, or the shape of the crown (whether the tree looks narrower at the top than at the bottom and so forms a dome shape, for example). I never paid attention to whether leaf margins were smooth or notched, whether stems were alternate or opposite one another, or whether leaves grew singly or in groups (if several leaves grow together on the same stem, the leaf is said to be compound). Now I am paying attention to all of these things, and I'm kind of excited to think that I could theoretically identify a tree other than a birch tree by its bark alone. The bark of these trees was so distinctive that I'm sure I could do just that. Although I can certainly continue to identify them as "those trees with the really deep grooves" (or maybe "groovy trees"), it would be nice to put a more commonly used name to them.

This bush was making many little green flower buds
in the center of the leaf clusters.

On the same hike I came across a bush with some interesting flower-bud clusters. The bush had many thin trunks emanating from a central location. I'll have to go back in a week or two to catch the flowers in bloom and see whether that offers me the necessary clues I need to determine whether the bush is in any of my books.

I did find some plants I could identify, though. The trail has only a small parking area off the side of the road, and it can uncomfortably fit two vehicles. When we arrived, there was a truck and trailer taking up the entire space, so we had to park at a nearby school and walk down the road to the trailhead. This turned out

Grape vines climbing over a guard rail.

to be fortunate for several reasons. First of all, we passed a small farm on the way, and at the edge of the farm next to the road we found wild grapes trailing over the guard rail. In the background was a field of milkweed, and we even saw our first wild asparagus! The lonesome stalk stood several feet high but otherwise looked exactly like what one might buy at the supermarket. The second piece of good fortune was that, as we approached the trailhead, the owner of the truck and trailer was loading up his tractor mower. He'd just finished mowing the trail for us!

Stinging nettle.

Once on the trail, which crosses some open field before entering the woods and traversing a stream, we found lots of stinging nettles, which apparently make a great cooked vegetable (I have a recipe for cream of stinging nettle soup). They lose their sting when subjected to heat, so there's no need to worry about all the stingers. The plants we found were too big to harvest this year, but I've got my collecting grounds lined up for 2013.

Evening primrose flower stalk.

In a previous post I mentioned trying and not particularly enjoying the spicy roots of evening primrose. I recently came across some primrose flower stalks, which are supposed to be milder, and so I gave these a try in a stir fry. I liked them better than the roots, but I would have preferred the dish without the primrose. I'm now thinking of mincing the stalks and using them like grated ginger in a stir fry. After all, I wouldn't like eating big chunks of ginger, either, but I appreciate it in small, minced quantities. I had collected a bunch of primrose stalks, so I blanched some and put them in the freezer for future experimentation.

Milkweed shoot.

Over the past couple of weeks I've also been gathering, blanching, and freezing milkweed, pokeweed, and wild spinach as new "crops" become available or as I find new supplies. Even though I can't collect enough to make a sizable meal all at once (well, with the exception of pokeweed), I can slowly accumulate enough for later. Pokeweed roots can sustain repeated harvesting, and wild spinach will grow more leaves after one snaps off the top portion, so I've been back to my collecting grounds several times already. I've been harvesting wild spinach from two locations: a friend's yard and the end of my street, where it grows both along the edge of the road and at the edge of a parking lot undergoing construction (wild spinach loves disturbed sites, which is also probably why it grows abundantly where my friends burn brush every year).

Finally, I'll leave you with an update of my most successful recent experiments with wild plants in the kitchen. In my last post I mentioned that I'd made violet syrup by pouring boiling water over some violet leaves, letting the flavors infuse for 24 hr, then boiling the water and flowers for 15 minutes with some sugar and straining the syrup. The result smelled and tasted wonderful, but my few attempts to bake with it had been disappointing; the syrup had no significant effect on either biscuits or cookies, at least in the recipes I tried. This week I tried replacing the vanilla in a white-cake recipe with the violet syrup (but I used more syrup than the amount of vanilla called for). I then made a violet buttercream by replacing the corn starch with violet syrup. The result was a batch of light, slightly floral cupcakes that the whole family enjoyed.

Tortellini salad with basil pesto, wild spinach,
slivered almonds, tomatoes, and pokeweed.

I also tried a favorite tortellini salad with wild spinach in place of the baby spinach in the recipe. I also added some boiled pokeweed shoots. I planned to try substituting garlic-mustard pesto for the basil pesto, but unfortunately the garlic mustard has all gone to seed, and the leaves are much too bitter for consumption. That's even more unfortunate given that my order of the garlic-mustard cookbook From Pest to Pesto should be arriving soon!

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.