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.