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.

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.

Easier Than Pie

My two youngest boys show off their Japanese knotweed stalks.
The plants are also growing in the background. Collecting these invasive weeds
is easier than making knotweed-strawberry pie.

A mallow plant sprouting at the edge
of the parking lot at the train station.
Mallow leaves are roundish, with gently wavy
margins. They are covered in tiny hairs,
have a long petiole, and have a dark spot
at the tip of the petiole (in the
center of the leaf). I find this latter
characteristic helpful in distinguishing
mallow from look-alikes, although I haven't
seen it mentioned in any book.

This past Saturday I took my two youngest sons to our local train stop to see what we could find growing there. It was much easier to look around the edges of the parking lot without so many commuters' cars in the way. I was hoping to find some purslane, which I did find there last year and unsuccessfully tried to transplant to my garden (this is both annoying and unbelievable given that my books claim it is sure to be found in every garden but, believe me, I've looked! Especially after I tasted the purslane I finally located at the train station last year; it was yummy! Succulent and lemony. So I tried to transplant some, but it didn't take, even though supposedly other gardeners have a hard time getting rid of it.) The purslane must not be up yet, but we did find lots of garlic mustard (see previous post), wintercress, and mallow.

Mallow has mild flavored but slightly mucilaginous leaves, which are covered with fine hairs and are thus a little fuzzy on the tongue. I first identified it at a kids' birthday party on a farm in southern Massachusetts last summer. It's most recognizable when it bears its tiny fruits, mallow "peas," which are cute little spirals that my kids thought it was so fun to eat. They don't really taste like much, but the cuteness makes up for it. They're a little crunchy and would make an interesting salad addition. They (like okra) have good thickening properties and would be useful in soups (one of my books has a gumbo recipe I'm interested in trying). When we first identified the mallow growing by the barn, my eldest son was so excited that he collected a handful of the mallow fruits and ran off to offer some to his friend, big sister of the birthday girl. To his great disappointment, she wouldn't try any, but another little girl volunteered. She put the "pea" in her mouth but almost immediately spit it out whilst delivering the most dramatic display of disgust I have ever seen. "Ew!" She shrieked. "That is disgusting!" I think she even spat. Truly, it was an amazing performance. And performance it most certainly was; I assure you that no

Wintercress in flower. A mallow plant is in the
foreground.

open-minded person could possibly object to the mallow pea. I later learned that this little girl objected to vegetables on principle, so that leads me to wonder why she would so enthusiastically volunteer to sample the thing in the first place.

Unlike field mustard, wintercress (a member of the mustard family)
has ridges along its stalk.

Well, now that I've got that off my chest, let's get back to the parking lot at the train stop. In addition to the mallow, (which isn't making its fruits yet), I found multitudes of yellow flowers that I thought might be field mustard. After reading the description of field mustard, though, I decided that couldn't be right. A little more investigation pointed to wintercress, which my sources agreed was bitter, bitter, bitter. Usually, if a plant is bitter, my guide will advise that one just needs to harvest it at the right stage, or harvest the right part, or cook it the right way, and then the thing will be delightful. Not so with wintercress. No part of the plant is not bitter, and there's really nothing one can do to make it otherwise. Boiling the unopened flower buds and tender stalks for a few minutes reportedly makes the plant marginally less bitter, so that it tastes pretty much like broccoli raab. That wasn't warming me up to my discovery; I detest broccoli raab. However, being the adventurous outdoorswoman that I am, I picked a leaf and put it in my mouth. I'd like to be able to tell you that the reports were wrong, but in reality I couldn't spit that leaf out quickly enough.

A collection of wintercress flower buds.

Not one to give up without giving something a thoroughly fair trial, I decided to broil some of the unopened flower stalks with a little olive oil and salt, as I do with broccoli (which I also find bitter unless I prepare it exactly right). I then squeezed a little lemon juice on top and tried again. Although I managed to swallow this time, my mother-in-law, who was with me, can assure you that my reaction did not invite further tasting. "Oh! That is really nasty! Disgusting!" I cried.

Later I read another wintercress description that claimed the flower buds are excellent in cheese sauce. I'm not sure I'm willing to give this vegetable another trial, or at least not quite yet. My taste buds are still recovering. The bottom line is that, if I'm ever lost in the woods, I'll have a ready source of food if I can just manage to swallow without tasting or chewing. Wintercress is apparently loaded with nutrients, and it grows everywhere (although I first found it in a sunny location, I later found it while hiking in the forest, too).

We collected this knotweed in about 2 minutes.
I'm sure it would take an adult
without kids even less time.

The most exciting discovery at the train station, though, was that the Japanese knotweed stalks were coming up. As you might recall from a previous post, Japanese knotweed is an invasive weed with large, hollow stalks. When the stalks are just growing and still tender, one can easily snap off the shoots and have an excellent substitute for rhubarb. The boys and I collected an armful of shoots in our few remaining minutes before we had to head to soccer practice (my husband and my eldest son were already there). It turns out that there was more Japanese knotweed growing at the fields, so after his game my eldest son collected more. So much more that it took me quite a while to peel all the leaves off when we got home!

My eldest son collects Japanese knotweed after his soccer game.
He has made a little pile of it by his soccer ball.

We of course had to try a knotweed-strawberry pie right away, so my middle son and I headed to the grocery store to get strawberries. Collecting the knotweed turned out to be much easier than making the pie; the juices didn't set right, so we ended up with a pie crust dunked in a knotweed-strawberry soup. Nonetheless, the results were delicious. I have read that knotweed-strawberry pie is even better than strawberry-rhubarb pie. Without the two contestants in front of me at the same time, I would be hard pressed to say, but the knotweed version is certainly in the running.

I also tried sauteed knotweed, which at first I rather liked, as did my middle son; my other family members found it too sour. After eating several stalks, however, the sourness began to get to me. I will have to experiment with more ways to eat it, especially given that I now have two gallon-sized Ziplock bags full of it in my freezer!

Here you can more clearly see the dark spot in the center of a mallow leaf.

Far Away and Close to Home

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

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

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

Silvery underside of the leaves of an autumn berry bush.

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

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

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

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

Honeysuckle blossoms.

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

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

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

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

Garlic mustard in flower at my friend's house.

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

Garlic-mustard flowers in MA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another garlic-mustard flower, this one in MO.

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

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

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

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

The Easter Bunny Goes Foraging

Two of our naturally dyed Easter eggs nestled in some wood sorrel at the edge of our foundation.

This Easter, the kids weren't the only ones who found treasures during the egg hunt. I have it on good authority that the Easter Bunny found some wood sorrel and mouse-ear chickweed growing in the crack between our foundation and the paved patio in our backyard and that he specifically placed some eggs there so that we would find and sample the plants.

Wood sorrel leaf.

Wood sorrel was the first edible wild plant I positively identified in our yard. Since I learned to recognize it last summer, the boys and I have been spotting it everywhere. It looks a lot like clover (many people confuse the two plants), but the leaves of wood sorrel are heart shaped rather than oval, and they lack they characteristic white semi-circle that runs horizontally across a clover leaf. Both plants grow in lawns and at the edges of woods and have three leaves at the end of each stalk. Wood sorrel makes tiny yellow flowers in summer. The leaves have a pleasant lemony zing and make a wonderful outdoor nibble. They would also make an excellent addition to salad, and I imagine they would flavor certain soups nicely.

Mouse-ear chickweed growing at the edge of our foundation.

We were thus already quite familiar with wood sorrel, although we didn't know it was growing along our foundation. The mouse-ear chickweed was much more exciting given that we'd never tried any before. You might recall that I recently identified common chickweed on a national wildlife reserve but didn't sample any (see March 20 post). Mouse-ear chickweed looks exactly the same as common chickweed except that the stalk, petioles, and leaves are covered with tiny hairs (so that the leaves are reminiscent of mouse ears), whereas the stalk and petioles of common chickweed have just a single line of hairs along one side. I understand that the flavor of the two varieties is the same. Now that I've tasted the mouse-ear variety, I can report that the taste is pretty unobjectionable. Chickweed is a mildly peppery green that would make an excellent addition to any salad mix or sandwich. The mouse-ear variety does remind me of eating peach skins because of the fuzzy texture, though. My mother thought it would probably be good in a pasta dish. I collected enough for a few tablespoons of chopped leaves and upper stalks, and the plants made a nice addition to our Easter-egg salad. Once the chickweed was chopped up and mixed in the salad, the fuzziness wasn't a factor.

Mouse-ear chickweed. The leaves and stalks
are covered with tiny hairs.
A poisonous plant that resembles
chickweed is scarlet pimpernel, which lacks
any hairs and has spots on the undersides
of the leaves.

Incidentally, this year we made a lot of egg salad and deviled eggs. We dyed four dozen eggs as part of a kids' science class I hosted at my house. I had read that one can use natural dyes, including beets, grape juice, red-onion skins, cranberry juice, yellow apple peels, lemon peels, orange peels, and various spices and seeds, to dye Easter eggs without those little chemical tablets. I thought it would be fun to have the kids guess what color each item would turn the eggs and then test our hypotheses. To dye the eggs, we were supposed to place our color agent in water, add a little vinegar, and bring the dye to a boil with the eggs in the solution. We were then to simmer the eggs for 15 minutes. The colors of the dyes were deep and vibrant, and a mixture of ground tumeric, lemon peel, and yellow apple peels had successfully colored a test egg the night before the science class. However, despite extra-lengthy boiling, I could not get the color to stick to any of the eggs before our guests had to go home. I'm really not sure why the experiment didn't work, but my guess at this point is that we needed a lot more dye ingredients to get the color to take. It just so happens that ground tumeric produces a really vibrant yellow, so it seems I was simply lucky in my choice of test dye (or unlucky, if you consider that the test gave me false confidence in my ability to dye eggs other colors). After everyone left, we tried the grape juice and found that it made our eggs look like giant robin's eggs. You can see the results of the tumeric (yellow) and grape juice (blue) dyes in the picture at the top of this post. Our other eggs eventually turned various shades of brown, yellow, and gray. It's fair to say that the foraging was more successful than the egg dying, although I plan to experiment further next year.

Soon we should be able to gather a nice mix of salad greens from our own yard. We have chickweed, wood sorrel, sheep sorrel, and some wild spinach (also known as both goosefoot and lamb's quarters) that I planted from seeds I gathered at a nearby train stop over the winter. I also planted some curly dock from seeds I gathered last fall. The wild spinach and sheep sorrel are too tiny to harvest yet, and the curly dock is just sprouting, but a tasty salad shouldn't be far off. Thanks, Easter Bunny!

Now Growing in a Parking Lot Near You

One of many wild carrots we found growing at the edge of a church parking lot.

I'm sure I made an interesting sight as I knelt at the edge of the church parking lot after services, asparagus knife (see photo) in hand and a plant book at my side. One woman called quizzically as she got in her car, "What are you finding?" "Wild carrots," I replied. She raised her eyebrows, probably deemed me a little too far removed from sanity for her taste, and got in her car without further comment.

An asparagus knife has a V-shaped blade
that is perfect for digging up roots.

The first time I saw a wild carrot, a friend had taken me to the edge of a landscaped area of her yard, pulled up a scrawny white root, and asked me to smell it. "Doesn't that smell like a parsnip?" she asked. "Can I eat this?" It did smell delicious. But of course I cautioned her not to eat it until I'd done a little research. I went home and looked up wild parsnip (which is just the same as the cultivated kind you buy at the supermarket; this is not so for wild carrots). The plant looked nothing like the one we'd seen in her yard, so I told her she definitely shouldn't eat it until further notice.

I cannot say why it did not occur to me then to find out whether there was a wild carrot, but it didn't. It was winter when I happened upon a description of wild carrots and their close resemblance to poison hemlock. After looking through the photos and reading the description, I was sure we had found a wild carrot. My friend and I attend the same church, and she had mentioned seeing these plants all around the parking lot there, but I'd had to wait until the spring to go looking for them.

Cleaned and washed wild carrots.

So there I was, digging up these miniature white carrots. I consulted my book closely to make sure I understood the difference between wild carrots and poison hemlock. Both plants go by the common name "Queen Anne's Lace," but they are decidedly different plants: most importantly, one is tasty, and the other will kill you. But what I had was certainly a wild carrot: witness hairy stems (poison hemlock lacks hairs), grooved petioles (petioles of poison hemlock are round and hollow), lack of a purplish tint to the root, and a delicious carrot smell (poison hemlock smells only faintly of carrot, and the leaves smell bad). I had a positive ID!

Most of the carrots were no bigger than my pinky. It's not possible to peel them; there just wouldn't be anything left (trust me, I tried). A thorough cleaning is thus in order. And how did they taste? Well, if you expect a crisp, cultivated carrot, you'll be in for a disappointment. They were rather stringy, although they did definitely taste of carrot. They were also a little softer than the cultivated kind. I tried one raw and put the rest in the refrigerator in the hopes of finding enough elsewhere to warrant cooking them. My book reports that chopping them into small pieces and boiling them makes them much easier to eat.

The basal rosette of an evening primrose. Note that the midrib is
much lighter than the rest of the leaf.

The next day, I took the two older boys on a hunt for more wild carrots in a parking lot within walking distance of our house. We only found two, but we found a multitude of evening primrose roots. I'd seen the flower stalks growing there last summer and had tried the flower buds (a bit spicy and not my favorite thing, but they would probably be good in certain soups), so I knew it was a good place to look for the rosettes that mark where to dig for roots. Evening primrose is a biennial; the first year, it exists as a basal rosette (see photo), and the second year it shoots up a flower stalk and produces five-petaled yellow flowers. Both the growing stalk (before buds appear) and the flower buds are edible, although I'd only tried the latter.

Evening primrose root. Note the purple coloring
near the leaves.

The rosettes were everywhere around the edges of this parking lot, and we got a bag full without much trouble. We also spotted some of last year's Japanese knotweed stalks, of which we made note so we can return a little later this spring (see March 11 post). Last year we collected autumn berries there (yum!), and there are a bunch of sumac bushes and some milkweed as well, although we didn't collect any sumac from that location (and I haven't tried milkweed pods or shoots yet). I wonder what food we'll discover there next!

On the way home, we walked around the edge of an athletic field and found some blueberry bushes just starting to wake up, lots more evening primrose, and a couple of blooming trees I think might be cherry trees. I can't figure out what kind of cheery tree they are, though. I considered pin

As-yet-unidentified cherry-like tree.

cherry and sand cherry. I don't think the flower clusters looked like those of black cherry, and the trees were pretty small, which suggests sand cherry. The leaves were too small for me to tell what shape they will be or even whether the margins will be serrated or smooth. The flowers were about an inch in diameter, which is larger than my books say the flowers of either pin cherry or sand cherry should be, but the bark (which is dark brown and has horizontal lines, or lenticles, along its length) is suggestive of some type of cherry, and the flowers look like cherry blossoms. I'll have to keep an eye on these trees. (Postscript: when the fruit finally appeared, it was golden brown and speckled and did not look like any edible fruit I'm familiar with, so I still have no idea what kind of trees they are, but obviously they're part of the landscaping plan at the high school).

Blossoms of the mystery tree.

On our way home, we discovered a multitude of wild carrots growing at the side of the road, just a minute from our house. We only dug up a few because by now it was past time to be starting dinner, but now we know where to find more. Wild carrot shoots are reportedly better than the roots, so I look forward to gathering some later this spring.

At home, I scrubbed the carrot and evening primrose roots with a potato brush, picked off all the root hairs, and sliced the roots into quarter-inch chunks. I vowed to find larger specimens next time; scrubbing the little ones hardly seemed worth it. Although my guide book advised that raw evening primrose root is a bit spicy and itches the back of the throat, I tried it anyway. At first I thought, "This isn't spicy! This is pretty good, actually," and then I started to feel it at the back of my throat. Yep. A bit spicy and a bit itchy. So I roasted the carrots and evening primrose in a little olive oil, sprinkled some garam masala (an indian spice mix) over them, and squeezed a little fresh lemon juice on top.

The boys resting by some Japanese knotweed stalks
on the way home.

The result was ... still a little itchy and spicy. The carrots had promise (they were just a little overdone and dried out; they seemed to cook more quickly than the evening primrose), but evening primrose prepared this way is not something I'd try again. I might try boiling it next time (this is what my book recommends, and perhaps the water carries away the spiciness). If that doesn't work, then at least the boys and I had fun digging them up, and I can look forward to trying the growing shoots of both wild carrots and evening primrose a little later in the spring.