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!

Foraging for Dinner

My youngest and eldest sons gathering their dinner. The plants are still pretty small, so the pickings were scarce.

New growth on the sumac in our woods.
This plant was 1 inch high last fall.

Last fall my eldest son discovered a small staghorn sumac bush sprouting in the woods behind our house. Sumac was one of the first edible wild plants we identified last year, and my kids have a particular fondness for it, so having sumac growing on our own property was pretty exciting for him. Not long after this discovery, in his zeal to snip as many things as possible with a pair of clippers I had begrudgingly let him use, he cut it to within an inch of the ground. He realized his error moments later, but of course it was too late. Except it wasn't, because this spring the sumac has somehow managed to get about 3 feet tall already. All I can figure out is that it must have done some growing over the late fall or mild winter. When my son told me the sumac was sprouting, I had to see it for myself before I believed him, even though I know he can identify the fuzzy sumac branches quite well (poison sumac has smooth leaf margins and smooth branches, whereas staghorn sumac has fuzzy branches and toothed leaf margins).

Sumac shoots of a new plant. New
shoots are supposed to be tastier
than shoots growing off existing bushes.

Although we used sumac berries to make many pitchers of sumacade (a tart drink modeled after lemonade) last summer, we haven't tried the shoots yet. When new bushes are growing or old bushes are putting forth new growth, the rapidly growing stalks and branches are tender and juicy rather than hard and woody like the older branches. Late spring and early summer is reportedly the time to look for these, so I wasn't expecting to find the shoots coming out yet. But given the progress of the little sumac bush in our woods, I decided to check out a stand of sumac I had noted at the edge of a parking lot for an athletic field down the road from our house. On the way to the library a couple of days ago, I thus swung by the parking lot and, much to my surprise, found the brush all cleared and two new electric poles in its place. Over the winter someone seems to have erected a building (a warehouse maybe) behind the athletic fields, and these electric poles are no doubt part of the construction project. Only a few smallish sumac branches (they could not really be called bushes yet) were left standing.

Although at first I was dismayed, I soon realized that the construction actually meant good things for our foraging prospects. First of all, there's a good chance that the trucks didn't dig up the sumac roots but just leveled the bushes. A few small shoots I found emerging from the ground offered evidence in support of this theory. Second, disturbed sites are great places to find all sorts of edible plants because seeds that might have been waiting in the soil for years finally have their chance to get close to the surface without encountering competition from well-established neighbors. Sure enough, when I took all three boys on a bike ride to the lot later that afternoon, after my eldest son got home from school, we found lots of plants we could eat.

Lady's thumb. Note the thumbprint-shaped dark spots on the leaves.
These plants will get much larger and produce pretty pink flowers
in the summer.

The most plentiful was lady's thumb, which I had previously seen only in flower (lady's thumb makes droopy pink flowers in the summer) but which I recognized right away by the dark thumbprint-shaped mark on each leaf. Unlike many other edible leaves, those of lady's thumb are worthy of eating during all stages of growth, even when the plant is diverting its energy to flower production. I had tried the leaves last summer and found them to be pretty mild and unobjectionable. I was thus surprised to find that the younger leaves of the non-flowering plant tasted somewhat lemony.

We also found lots of small wild-spinach plants. I spent considerable effort learning to identify wild spinach (also known by a multitude of other names, including goosefoot and lambsquarters) last year. I thought I had found the plant growing in abundance at our local train station, but I wasn't positive enough to eat any until I had seen the flowers and seeds. Unfortunately, by the time flowers and seeds develop, the leaves are no good for eating. I therefore collected the seeds instead, winnowed off the chaff (the papery seed coating that would be a little annoying to eat; I'll provide more info about winnowing in a future post), and cooked the seeds into a quinoa-like hot cereal. The cereal was tasty, but the seed coats were quite hard, which along with the black color made eating the cereal slightly reminiscent of eating fine black sand. If I can perfect my winnowing technique (it needs a lot of perfecting), I plan to experiment further with the seeds. I also collected some seeds to plant in my garden, and I now have tiny sprouts growing. They are nowhere near ready to harvest, though, so I was pleased to find some choice specimens growing down the street. I picked a leaf and prepared for my first taste of wild spinach.

Wild spinach. Yum! Note the white powder
on the leaves, particularly the new growth. You
can rub the powder off with your finger,
and it also makes the leaves water resistant.
An oil-based salad dressing is likely
to slip right off these leaves, so they need
to be mixed with other greens in a salad. You
can use wild spinach in any recipe that calls
for cultivated spinach.

The verdict: much juicier and tastier than cultivated spinach! It's also much smaller, which does make collecting enough for a meal somewhat challenging, but the motivation is high because wild spinach is also one of the most nutritious leafy greens ever analyzed. It has more fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, potassium, riboflavin, calcium, zinc, copper, and manganese than cultivated spinach. Cultivated spinach does win the prize for omega-3 fatty acids, folic acid, and iron, but nonetheless wild spinach is a worthwhile addition to the diet.

Another plant growing at the edge of the lot was pokeweed, which I wasn't expecting to see because the pokeweed that graces our compost pile every year hadn't made its appearance yet, nor had the pokeweed that lives by our mailbox. I've been wondering what these plants are for years; they make the most interesting, dimpled purplish-black berries that grow together in a long, dramatic droop (called a raceme; click here for detailed drawings and photos of the mature plant from "Wildman" Steve Brill's The Wild Vegan Cookbook). I wanted so badly to know whether I could eat them. Well, the answer is not just "no"; it's "NO, NO, NO!" Eating any part of the pokeweed plant except the young shoots will apparently cause everything on the inside of your body to try to get outside as quickly as possible. The offending toxin is high concentrations of phytolaxin. Here is what Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms, the book that led to my first pokeweed identification, warned: "Entire plant, especially raw berries, highly toxic and potentially fatal. Even young shoots, considered edible by some, should not be used due to the presence of a blood cell altering chemical." That warning was sufficiently terrifying to make me conclude that I had learned as much as I needed to know about pokeweed. After coming across accounts in several other books, however, I've decided that the first book was a bit alarmist.

For example, in Wild Plants I have Known and Eaten, written specifically about Essex county, Massachusetts, foraging expert Russ Cohen titles the seventh chapter "Pokeweed: As American as Apple Pie (and Just as Tasty)." He notes that Pokeweed has been imported to Europe for its edible and ornamental value and says the shoots are "delicious." He points out that plenty of other commonly eaten plants, including rhubarb and potatoes, have highly poisonous parts. So do peach, plum cherry, and apple trees. We eat asparagus shoots, but the berries of the mature plant are inedible (although not nearly as toxic as pokeweed berries). Pokeweed is apparently enjoyed commonly in the South, where the shoots are sold fresh and canned in the supermarkets under the name "poke sallet" or "poke salad" (perhaps some of my Southern readers are familiar with this). Gainesborough, TN, even has an annual poke sallet festival!

Pokeweed shoots growing amidst last year's stalk.
Incidentally, the plant is called pokeweed not because it pokes
above the ground but because its name is derived from the
Algonquin Indian word pokan, which means "dye."
The Algonquins used the ripe berries to dye fabrics and baskets.

Identifying the new shoots is actually pretty easy. The first thing to look for is the dead stalks of last year's plant. These long, hollow, straw-colored stalks sprawl over the ground like a big dead spider. They all emanate from a central root, which is purple and contains the plant's highest concentration of the toxic phytolaxin. Once you've found last year's stalk, which perhaps you've located because you saw the fruiting plant the previous summer, you look for the new shoots in the same area. According to Cohen and other sources, they should be harvested when they are less than a foot (some sources say 8 inches) tall and have no trace of purple anywhere, and cooking them (and discarding the water) will remove any traces of the toxin. The pokeweed we found wasn't tall enough to bother harvesting yet (nor was the sumac), so we'll have to check back a little later. When we do, of course, we'll use caution and consume only a small amount at first, which is good advice no matter what plant you're harvesting.

Wintercress rosette. A wild-spinach plant
is in the top right corner.

We also found some wintercress rosettes, so I tasted a leaf and verified that it was just as bitter as the older plants I tried previously. I'm also fairly certain there were grape vines hanging from some of the trees; the clusters of baby grapes looked just like the ones we found in Missouri.

Now the boys were excited to make our first wild salad. So the next evening we rode our bikes back down the road and collected some lady's thumb, wild spinach, and a few wintercress leaves (which I actually thought made a fine addition to the salad, despite significant skepticism; the only reason I picked any leaves at all was that there wasn't a lot of wild spinach to go around). Back at home, we picked some sheep sorrel, blue violets, and violet leaves. I added some store-bought grape tomatoes and, atop each salad, a single pansy (one of the edible flowers suggested in my book on edible flower gardens). Despite the lack of interesting vegetables to eat with their leafy greens, the boys all cleaned their plates! Salad prep is usually one of my least favorite tasks (I would eat more salad if it weren't for all the prep work), but making this salad was a fun family activity! I do admit that I should probably not have chosen this particular activity on the same night my eldest son had soccer practice, though. By the time the 2-year-old awoke from his nap and we all got down to the end of the road and back, my eldest son and husband had to postpone their dinners and head to practice. But at least they were met with a beautiful and tasty salad when they returned!

My first wild salad, including wild spinach, lady's thumb, wintercress, sheep sorrel, blue and white violets, violet leaves, store-bought grape tomatoes, and a pansy as an edible garnish.

Sheep sorrel growing outside our garden. Note the two small lobes at the base of the largest leaf lobe. Not all sheep sorrel leaves have these extra lobes (which make the leaf look like a fish), but the leaf shape is common enough to be an identifying characteristic.

Sheep sorrel uprooted. Notice varying leaf shapes.