M & M s

Last week on the vineyard brought a ton of foraging. I'm getting better about picking only things that I know people will like (although my friend Jody didn't seem to like the watercress soup, but everyone else did enough so that we sucked down at least 10 gallons of the stuff). So, for example, I didn't prepare anything "knotweed". I stuck to pokeweed, daisy greens, milkweed, and watercress as the bulk foraged items.

Here are my milkweed pickers.

And here is the haul.

I cut off the white part of the stem and boiled the rest for 10 minutes and.. no bitterness! I think I have, at least for the time being, satisfied myself that it is the white part that has produced the bitterness confusion in the foraging literature.

On the ferry boat home, I got a phone call from a friend in Cambridge saying she had possibly found morels in her back yard. The next day I verified that they were in fact morels and proceeded to eat them for lunch. Thanks Julia!!  So, Cantabridgians, keep your eyes peeled.  Look in your mulch, and even look where the foundation starts and the mulch begins.  The deformed one (which I split into two to make the "haul" look more impressive) was coming right out of such a crack.

Mountains of chickweed after a bit of rain

In preparation for tonight's dinner, hosted at Harvard, I headed out to my favorite one-town-shopping foraging spot - J.P. It started pretty mildly with some not so great tasting linden leaves, but started to pick up speed the deeper I got.  I was able to gather a quick bag of nettles and some milkweed shoots, and then I headed over to the giant composting dirt mound area at Peter's Hill in the arboretum.  Mountains of chickweed, lamb's quarters, and pokeweed, three top notch spring veggies.

Of course, while I was upon a mountain of lamb's quarters, I get a call from my work. It was 9:30am. I was supposed to be at the 9:00 meeting.  Instead of "I'm on a mountain of great edible weeds!" which I was tempted to say, I went with "Oh...I'm not there", to which I got a reasonable "Duh" response.

I ate some of those weeds during the 12 o'clock meeting. But I'm really looking forward to getting into all that pokeweed!

What is good for the goose?

First, a couple comparably mundane things. And then a strong kicker at the end.

Mundane 1) It's been a good year for shepard's purse. Here's one right outside my office. But the other day in the arboretum, Sarah B and I found some super plush ones which made great salad greens.

Mundane 2) I guerrilla planted 2 apricot trees and 1 aprium (apricot/plum hybrid) with Rachel the other night, somewhere in Cambridge.  They are still alive and looking pretty good. They get a couple of ball jars full of water each per week.  Hopefully Jay and the kids are watering the ones we planted in Hanover a bit more.

Kicker) I got a phone call the other day from a girl who does a lot of farmer organizing (farmhack.net is one of her many recent projects...she also runs the greenhorns) asking me if I'd like to come over with a bunch of her friends for roadkill dinner. It was kind of a garbled message, but I was pretty sure I heard roadkill.  So I took Sarah E to see what this was all about, stopping to grab some elm branches with young seeds and some redbud buds, in order to contribute something. They invited me because of my urban forager status after all, and I had to show up with something. No time to return home to my fridge which is already overflowing with wild edibles.  Anyhow, sure enough, on arrival, we were treated to a fine dinner including dried seaweed, black quinoa, and a roasted roadkill goose from the Charles river. Apparently Severin and her friend Dan were biking on the river, talking about how it'd be nice to try a river goose one day, and lo and behold, right up ahead moments later they came across a warm one, just bumped off. They plucked it, brined it, and cooked it. Hardcore, to say the least.  I had a bit, it was tough but tasty. God help me if I ever come across that situation.  I'll be torn.

No picture, but imagine a turkey with much darker meat.

Stinging Nettles

Easter Sunday brought me out to the burbs to visit Jay and Jodi and the kids, and then down to the Cape to visit with my mom for a couple days. I took my usual walk around the block on arrival -- she lives on a little peninsula of land adjacent to Waquoit bay (which should be famous for its mussels), full of mushrooms in the fall and a good variety of weeds the rest of the year. Towards the end of the loop I spotted a nice nettles patch -- by eye and by smell -- so I went back to the house for my nettle gloves and another plastic bag. I decided to pay a parking ticket on the walk back to the patch, which was voice activated and kept getting interrupted by this barking dog named Bruin. It took far longer to pay the ticket with him yapping in the background then it would have if I'd just mailed the check in.

Anyhow, my mother likes to show me the latest from this pacific northwest blog called fat of the land, and there they had a recipe for nettle soup. Of course, the "fat" in fat of the land was apparent in their recipe, heavy on chicken broth and heavy cream. We made our own version of it which came out good enough for me to post the recipe.

Creamy vegan nettle soup

In a large soup pot, sauté an onion, a couple cloves of garlic, and a chopped sweet potato in a couple tablespoons of olive oil. After 10 minutes or so, add a couple pints of either veggie broth or water or some combination. Bring to a boil, add salt and pepper to taste, and lightly boil for 10 minutes . Carefully dump in a plastic bag of fresh nettles. Then add one package of silken tofu. Cook for another 5 minutes or so, then blend the whole thing. We served ours topped with a basil leaf.

This is a spring or late fall recipe. In late spring and summer, nettles are too tall and tough for eating and should be gathered instead for drying for tea. The illustration below is a mid summer depiction of stinging nettle.

Spring chickweed

I've decided to forage for old botanical illustrations to supplement this year's blog. Not that my point and shoot pictures were not great, but, good drawings help people learn plants better because they can caricature a plant, highlighting the identifying features. Botanical illustrations also often capture a plant at various stages of development. Although I haven't found an early illustration of daylily that shows its "shoot" stage, where it looks like a green haircut dude buried in the ground, hair poking through. But I did find a nice illustration of flowering chickweed:

For most of the foraging year, when I spot chickweed it is just stems and leaves, no flowers. This spring though, it is out in abundance and it is a matted white flowering ready-to-go salad. The leaf shape is a helpful indicator: like a spade on a deck of cards. Chickweed (called so because it's eaten by chickens, so I read) is Stellaria media, Stellaria means star in Latin; the white flowers look like little stars.

I am continuing my investigations of daylilies. Specifically the fact that I am allergic to them. Raw..no good. Had a tiny amount the other day, felt it a little. So, had some for breakfast today, cooked, and feeling fine. More to come on this.

I weeded my first urban garden this past weekend and almost already had an "incident". A gardener came in and asked me my name, but it wasn't like she was curious about my name, I could tell what she really wanted to ask me (what with my backpack open and my spade out) was if I was a member. But I distracted her with plant chatter ("all the weeds are up..yummy wild onions...") and then ducked behind the shed and hopped the fence out of her line of sight. Anything to avoid a conflict, even when I know I'm in the okay zone. I yanked plenty of chickweed and evening primroses for people, saving them a few moments, and aerating their soil for them.

Here's what those primroses would have become had no one touched them:

Instead, they are pickled, in my backpack, and waiting for me for lunch.

The spring begins!

NPR hen nut special post

The other day on my annual fall visit to Mt Auburn Cemetery, in search of a chicken mushroom and some chinese chestnuts, I instead found a load of ginkgo nuts and the right type of pine tree for pine nuts. Not too much new to report on the ginkgo nuts, except to mention that if you are going to gather them and then jump in a friend's car, be careful not to step on any of the blue cheese-smelling fruits that surround the nut (the one nearest my fingertips in the picture). Blue cheese is being kind...these guys smell BAD.

The pine nuts were an exciting find, although the excitement wore off when I got home and cracked them open, getting quite sticky, only to recover 11 nuts. All the others were blanks. But, the ones that weren't were tasty! Here they are, all 11 of them. My Italian houseguest at the time ate about 6 of them.

And in case you missed the action about 1 month ago, hens were everywhere. I had gathered so many in early October that by late October I had assumed they were all done. Then I got a call from Brian in NY who had just stumbled upon some in a Brooklyn cemetery. Of course, I then had to get out of my cozy reading situation and venture out before dark. Not really expecting to find any right in the city, I took my best guess and headed towards Brookline, took a left down a street I never go down, and whoomp, double-take, brakes, 4 huge hens. I couldn't even take them all. Hen pickles, frozen hens, plenty of stir fries and them some. Two giants below:

These days...burdock and evening primrose are keeping my rice and lentils happy at lunchtime.

A day in Jamaica Plain

It's Kousa Dogwood season and this is a good year for them. After stats class at Harvard last night (which I am barely following, but I find the nerd level entertaining) I noticed a great kousa (there are lots in Harvard yard) right next to my bike so I loaded up.



I've basically given up trying to get other people to enjoy this fruit. I guess the skin wigs people out. Maybe it's because I eat kiwis with the skin on that I'm used to it. Or because I'm stubborn and have decided to like all foraged food.

This was anna's last weekend here. Another person moving through the revolving doors of Cambridge. She was here for a while and was a good seed. Never a bad word for anyone. Here she is with rob and ZARAH under an apple tree by J.P. pond.

An anna creation.

The apples looked runty but were good, especially the red ones that we shook down. Not quite like shaking mulberries down, but, effective nonetheless. Some guy came whipping by us during this and proceeded, in the span of about 3 minutes, to enlighten us on protein content of apples, paw paws, how many people the earth can sustain, according to his own calculations (less than 1 billion), and that there are 4 amino acids. Interestingly, he told us about paw paws and about Peter's hill in the arboretum, where there were lots of apples (worst protein food there is, said he), but he didn't know that there were in fact two paw paw trees over there, which we were heading to. I told him, but I don't think he listened. The paw paws were perfect for eating and we gathered and munched a bunch. Bad year for the quince though, there were almost none. But I grabbed some of the small ones from the flowering quince shrubs, and will see if they are any good in a jam.

After a brief pitstop at the Ukranian club (Andrew, a friend of anna's, is Ukranian), we headed over to the old Franklin park zoo. With all the rain and stories coming in from the boston mycological club, I was on the high lookout for hens. And sure enough, even in over-picked Franklin park I spotted a few. Which of course made my day because hens are great. I saw some for sale at the Cambridgeport farmer's market the other day. Forgetting to take a picture in situ, I propped this guy by another oak tree for a photo, and flipped a piece over to reveal an identifying characteristic of the fungus: brown on top, white underneath. Later the next night, spicy potato, mushroom, pasta soup.




In totally unrelated news, today is the first patient treatment using the MCO software I've been working towards for the past 7 years. A big day for IMRT treatment planning!