Island #2

Last week I went to the Cambridge department of public works for some free compost. They had a mountain of the stuff. The former City Arborist happened to be there, so I took the chance to let him know I was a forager and see if he had any cool trees that I should know about. He hooked me up big time. A couple female ginkos on Church St, some june berries in Inman Square, a Kousa dogwood over by the library. That info was worth more to me than the free compost, but I'm pretty excited about both.

Today, Brian and Sarah E and I hit the minuteman trail to harvest some knotweed. It was pretty fun to barrel through the old stalks, they crunch away pretty easily and create quite a ruckus. Brian and I are both pretty scraped up as a result but it was fun. We had to get a bunch of knotweed for the competition we are hosting here tomorrow. It looks like we'll have about 12 contestants or so, so it should be pretty fun, and funny.

The other night I ate a nice meal of nettles and knotweed that grabbed in the Fens. here it is. I've decided that when people say, Hmm, that's pretty good, all it really means is that I can cook pretty well. These vegetables, like all vegetables, are all about how they are prepared. There's very few magic vegetables that are just good no matter what you do with them. Sweet corn, garden tomatoes, they come to mind. For everything else, add some olive oil and garlic and salt and fry it up fast, and you probably have a hit.

I'm still hoping that Cambridge Tab covers me, they called me and chatted for a while yesterday about my knotweed cookoff, but I haven't seen anything yet. But I sent them some nice pics, and if they don't publish them there, well, at least they are going up here.


I finally convinced myself that all the marsh marigold I have been seeing is in fact marsh marigold. I cooked it up last night, 3 changes of water boiled for a total of 30 minutes to get rid of all the toxins. And sure enough, totally tasteless after that. And then Noah asked me a perfectly reasonable question: after all that boiling, is there any nutritional value left? Well, I guess what i should have answered is, imagine you were on an island with either 1) only water or 2) water an marsh marigolds. I'm sure you'd live a lot longer on island number 2. Still, I see his point. And to roughly quote Sam Thayer, "The problem with marsh marigold is, they inherently taste bad." Pretty funny coming from a great foraging book. So why include it in the book? Because it's an old standby for New England foragers and it's one of the first greens aplenty to come up in Spring. It really tastes like nothing though, and I doubt I'll grab much more of it.

I've probably blogged about this before, but I have to vent a little more. it drives me absolutely buts that no one asks me what the heck I'm doing out there when I am digging up and plucking wild plants. I mean, we were crashing through knotweed stands today and no one asked a single question. PEOPLE!!! Finally Sarah E got some people to ask me questions which made me infinitely happy. She later told me she prompted them discretely, but whatever, once they started talking they asked more questions and were excited to learn.

Since I knew I'd be around for a straight month or so with no trips, I decided to finally undertake sourdough; I started a couple weeks ago. 6 days to make the barm, aka the mother starter.
I've had a little success with the actually bread, but nothing to write home about (although, evidently enough to blog about...). Basically, it's a huge pain in the ass and I'm going to probably leave it for the San Franciscans. The picture here makes it look better than it actually came out. Well, truth be told, it has been some of the best bread I've ever made, but not 8 days of effort good. After spending 8 days, the stuff oughtta taste like bacon wrapped scallops. Plus, I ended up using some active yeast for the final rise since it wasn't moving with the wild yeast that should've been naturally in there. It tasted somewhat sour.

On Easter, my brother Jay and I took 3 of his 4 kids on a great walk through the woods of west Hanover. Here you seem them all happy and fun. What you don't see is 30 minutes from that shot, when they are all complaining: how far, when do we get home, I'm hungry, I'm tired. Meanwhile, Jay and I are having a blast because we stumble across the old West Hanover graveyard, home to all the dead bodies of the 1860s of West Hanover. And the kids were alright once we came out of the woods and got them candy at the liquor store. It was Easter afternoon, but apparently they hadn't had enough candy yet. I had potato chips. I can never have enough of them.

Things in the Fens

Turns out the Fens has more than just community gardens and homosexuals in the reeds. It also hosts a good deal of stinging nettle, some evening primrose, a turtle in one of the ponds, and I'm pretty sure some marsh marigold which I will have to return to soon and verify, because that one will be a new one for me. It is a little strange though to harvest these plants from the Fens when there's very likely a used condom three feet away. Such is urban foraging.

I'm adept at getting nettle without needing my nettle gloves now. I'm a little slower at it, but I think that's fine, there's no rush. made a nice pesto last night of galric mustard weed, dandelion greens, spring onions, primrose roots, garlic, evoo, salt, etc. Threw it on a past with Andrew and crew, it was great. And a side dish of nettles with some very early japanese knotweed shoots. So small it's ridiculous to be harvesting them already, since in two weeks they'll be everywhere and crazy. But, you have to ease people into them, after all. They need a better name. I'm going to post a contest online I think for best vegan j-weed preparation. Should get a little stir in the community going. If it goes well, will do it for other local forageables.

Linden leaves will be out for the munching soon. Annie at the gallery brought in a branch of linden, which has sprouted it's yummy leaves earlier by being inside in the warm gallery. Gallery nibbles.

Walk

When you live in Cambridgeport and you like to forage - the Charles River is the best place for a little fix after work or something. On Wednesday, art night, which has sort of turned into music night with me, brian, rob and dan rehearsing old folk and soul numbers, brian decided we'd go with ethiopian food.
We did, but it was Ethiopian food with a side of evening primrose roots and wild onions (with berbere, of course).

The roots are starchy parsnip looking vegetables with a spicy taste but they're one of those foraging items that makes you proud to be a forager because they are so hearty and cool and unseen. Last year when I started foraging, the books said the evening primrose was one of the first edibles available, but I had no idea how to find it. I mean, they say it's everywhere, but is it really. One thing I've learned over the past year is, when they say that something is found everywhere, it really is. Seeds fly and go everywhere, and in habitats that are conducive to their growth, you will find them. The other thing I've learned is, walk, no cycling, you'll miss the basal rosettes, you'll miss the early nettles (which I saw the other day too - but am holding off until they get a little more substantial).

Caterpillars and butterflies

I don't get it at all. A caterpillar eats leaves creating a big squishy soft body, then wraps itself in a cocoon. Then a few months later out emerges a butterfly. Completely insane.

Wild onions on the Charles

A little over a year ago, my friends Brian and Alex left me a little surprise when I came back from a week away. My bed was covered with bananas. Trader Joe's was selling them for 20 cents each, they bought 100. For weeks afterward I ate 3 bananas a day - part of the genius of this particular surprise prank gift is that I can't waste food of any sorts, so right away I knew I was in for a lot of bananas. I ended up having to freeze a bunch [ :) ] of them, and I'm still working on them - I took a break for a while - but almost done. Anyhow, Brian also has this aero herb garden that is awesomely productive and he mowed down the field the other day and gave me a bucket of herbs to mow through. The combination is the result. Banana and herb smoothies, with some assorted whatever like pineapple, lemon, and also some nut milk like almond or hazelnut. And the verdict: excellent. So soon, instead of herb smoothies, it will be wild edible greens smoothies.

We always want spring to come quicker than it does, and we always get teased. The warm weekend in early March is the teaser. Today, the last Sunday in March, is cold and rainy and I'm sitting in the gallery awaiting the Muse Stew jazz show. But what I'm really awaiting is the coming of the foraging season. Here I've been teased too. I found some wild onions on the Charles the other day, and gobbled some up on the spot. Then i returned for more and put them in my miso soup. So I thought - foraging is on. I even think I've spotted lots of evening primrose stalks from last year so i am diligently returning to those spots to look for basal rosettes that I can yank up for a big yummy root. No luck yet though. And yesterday poking through my brother's woods, the most I found was some old wintergreen and some old puffballs, which amused my nieces and nephew. I tell them - don't eat these - as if a child would want to pop a weird dried out old mushroom in his mouth. Still, they've seen me pop in plenty of weird things in my mouth out there, so I gotta be clear.

Briefly, the 3 books in my life right now: Dragon Mountain - memoirs of a late Ming man. Sometimes I'm at a bookstore and I see a book that looks good and has high praise, and I know jack squat about the subject, so I buy it and see what happens. So, I'm learning about the life of one upper class Chinese guy born around 1500 who was an essayist. Upper class in the Ming apparently studied their entire lives away preparing for state exams, each rung they passed allowing them a better state job. So, nights of socializing and partying, and taking boats out across the lakes, and attending and organizing lantern festivals, and days reading ancient texts, Confusious, that sort of thing, preparing for exams.

History of Anesthesia. This topic has always fascinated me. I mean, there are plenty of things that "shouldn't exist" - sea horses being a prime example. The world is already strange enough that it exists as it does, and then you throw in the sea horse and it just pushes us over the edge. OK, so you have sentient life, which is _obviously_ whacked out. And then the straw breaking the camel's back - you can find not just one but several chemicals that shut off consciousness and allow doctors to saw off limbs and remove internal tumors and yank out teeth, with the patient having no feeling or memory of pain. The stories from the book that I like the the best so far are these 1840's science guys sitting around passing out as they experiment with ether, chloroform, nitrous oxide, what have you. Science doesn't happen that way anymore.

Just finished "Changes in the Land" which I picked up for free at the irate hippy Harvard square sidewalk book seller who is getting thrown out by Cambridge, so giving all the books away. Slim pickings, definitely now. A couple of months ago I stumbled on this book on their shelves, it's about how the ecology of New England changed when the colonists came over and pushed out the Indians. Briefly, the settlers were not about to be roamers like the Indians, and grazing and farming a single piece of land wears it out pretty fast. Indians working the land were constantly moving and burning undergrowth and had a pretty steady state sustainable thing going. This all changed come 1620, and the book details the process. Also, the book prompted me to look into the story about how the settlers gave smallpox infested blankets to the Indians to wipe them out. This always depressed me a lot. turns out, it's not true. There seems to have been one letter written by someone suggesting this as a possible tactic, but there is no evidence that it was ever done - and certainly if it was done it was a small time operation and not massively organized and repeated. Anyhow, a relief.

Jazz time.

A quick walk - oenothera by the tracks.

Today I'm sitting the gallery all day. Lots of people came in - the good weather gets people out. Pete kindly offered to sit and relieve me for a couple hours. I took this time to do a walking loop: I took 3 bags of clothes and dumped them in the Planet Aid box, which brought me along the railroad tracks through Cambridge. I suspected I might find some old evening primrose stalks, and I did (I think). In less than a month rosettes should be out and I can dig them up and eat that spicy root vegetable that is supposed to be underground from them. I searched for these guys last year, but I was a real amateur then (now I'm a real intermediate), and had no clue. In the case of evening primrose, it's all about looking for last year's dead stalks. So, today then marks my first official foraging day of 2009, which is pretty exciting.

Then, I found my way to the salvy and bought my third microwave in the past half year. I have bad luck with them, they die suddenly. I'm feeling good about this one. It's the same model as the one at the gallery.

Drinking watery coffee. Allowed to drink a lot of it, even if it's past 4 PM.

Pipe lights

I'm developing some new ways to get vegan food at a restaurant without being totally annoying and pretentious. Here's how I go: 'Do you have anything vegetarian?' (start them off gently). Then maybe they rattle something off something vegan in which case I'm good to go. Otherwise I say, that sounds good, but can you leave off the (cheese, milk, whatever), and everyone's happy. This might sound simple but it took some time to polish it so the whole vegan thing doesn't become mount vesuvius every time it comes out while out. I've been having much success with the technique here in Stockholm. I think it helps that I go to nice looking places, under the assumption that they have good chefs who are also hopefully decent people. Last night at a restaurant called the blue door (blo dorren or something) I got rice and ratatouille with asparagus, capers (HUGE capers, had to ask what they were), mushrooms, and spinach. It was fantastic. Also started off with some snaps. Their English spelling. They meant schnapps. They had some crazy flavors, including sweet gale, which I felt like I'd heard of. Back on the internet, I looked it up and it's similar to bayberry. Then I looked up schnapps recipes on the web, and it turns out that you can throw vodka over just about anything and make schnapps. Some examples - I'm not making these up: oak branches, pussy willow puffs (technically, "catkins", linden flowers and leaves, dandelion buds, and mountain ash berries). Foraging meets getting hammered Swedish style.

My days here, similar to in Costa Rica, have fallen into a nice workable pattern. Up at 7 or so for hotel breakfast, which is a great shmorgasborg of options that honestly tests my vegan will power every morning (all that cold herring and salmon, mmm) but I've passed thus far since they have lots of bread, fruit and veggies and mustard and nuts. I'll tell you though, the food that people waste kills me. Here I am not eating a slice of cheese and people are tossing out slices left and right. Hrrmph.

Found two great yoga classes thus far (much more impressive than Rekjavik, where I couldn't find a single yoga studio). Will go back to the first place tonight for a vinyasa class. I'm sort of going about this without the best yogi attitude. I'm essentially totally proud of all the yoga I've been doing and I know that I'm kicking butt in there. Oh well, one thing at a time, the yoga mindset is harder to instill than vriksasana (tree pose).

Stockholm is a great city and people should bump it up on their lists of places to visit. I keep finding new parts, which is a nice side benefit of searching out yoga studios. Last night's yoga, www.shaktiyoga.se, was in such a beautiful part of town I stood for a few minutes at an overlook just gazing at the city below. Then I saw some person far below on a path and it appeared that he was lighting his newspaper on fire. Turns out he was just lighting his pipe, it took a while and the flame looked bigger than that. After yoga I strolled around some more, and walked by tons of art galleries. The quality of the art in most of the galleries was poor. Makes me feel good, of course. I wonder what fraction of art galleries across the world are similar to all those Brooklyn boutiques you see: something besides sales keeping them afloat. I bet it's high.

Dark chocolate is a vegan life raft. I'm always on the prowl for it now...even the 7-11's here have it! And more than one type! Actually, the CVS at Charles/MGH also has a strangely good selection of dark chocolate.