A good year for fruit

It's going to be a good year for fruit. Juneberries are finishing up but had a big yield this year, particularly since I found many more juneberry plants that I had known previously. Also, to my delight, MIT just threw in about 10 very mature juneberry shrubs over by my old stomping grounds, building E40. Walking always reveals way more foraging opportunities than cycling, and the other day Sarah and I walked right under a cherry tree busting out with brilliant red and juicy sour cherries. Went back for a bunch. If I go back again, a step ladder could be put to good use.

Peaches are looking real good around town, and I spotted a huge nectarine tree in Allston the other day. Dust off the Ball jars.

Purslane is coming out now too, and I just enjoyed a salad of it with chickweed, both taken from my brother's yard yesterday. I only had to remove one of sadie's (their dog) hairs.

And savvy's last night: mega bread, golden delicious apples, a peach, onions, turnips, and two sirloins. The biscuit: wrapped sandwiches, sure enough. This I learned from a fellow d-diver, swapping diving locations.

I better learn amaranth pronto because I was flipping through a new book at harvard co-op the other day, urban homesteading, and in their chapter on urban foraging, they mention amaranth. Shameful that I haven't pinned down that one yet. Did however FINALLY find the elusive (around here) salisfy plant the other day. Just check in the driest, nastiest, railroad "soil" and there it will be.

Making the world a better place

I was doing my public service of weeding a community garden over in Newton, along the charles. After getting a handful of lady's thumb and such, a nasty old gardener (nog) asks me if I am a "member". I say no, I'm just picking weeds. Then something like this ensues.

nog: you gotta leave, get out of here.

me: ok. but (leaving) but i was just picking weeds.

nog: doesn't matter. you have to go.

(i'm still walking toward the exit at this point, where I was heading anyhow).

nog: .... you were here before, right?

(I think for a sec and then say)

me: yeah, like two years ago I think I came here.

nog: no, you were here last week.

me: ahh...nope.

nog: yes you were.

as I am getting on my bike, he is grumbling to his friend, another nog no doubt, about my being there. amazing. some people are just not out there to make the world a better place. I was tempted to show him my findings, explain to him these are good eats, etc.

Anyhow, I tell this lightly, but I was all stirred up inside. I hate when people treat others that way, and I should know to completely avoid even sharing words with them at all, no matter how diffusing and polite I try to be. Trying to argue with that guy would have obviously gone nowhere, and just gets me riled up. Next time, I just say nothing. I'll play a mute.

Amsterdam has a LOT of nettles, and I saw a chicken mushroom (already) growing on a willow outside of de hortus. Almost took it but it would've been hard to get through customs. Actually, no it wouldn't. I find that you just lie and say you have nothing and you have a good chance. Instead, like an idiot, I admitted to the customs that I took a few seeds home (flowers seeds, a mask for my mary-j seeds). Total failure, they made me thrown them all out. In a fictional world...

me: Can I keep the 4 mary-j seeds I paid 20 euros for?

them: step this way, sir.

Savvy's dive last night (and a question we all have at some point: what is a lamb, a sheep, same thing? lamb is to sheep as beef is to cow):


Also, tons of juneberries and mulberries out. Since most mulberries usually are pretty bland, I made my sheet-gathered lot into spiced mulberry jam, which came out decent. Here's a tray's worth ready to be frozen.


Red and white mulberries in the pots.

Magic night, etc.

Last night Shannon was in town so we hit magic night. Stetson was good, the rest, eh. That's a valid banagrams word right there according to Jeremy. I thought the best trcik was Stetson's dice prediction trick where someone takes his large die and places it with a certain number facing upwards and then covers it. Stetson then predicts it, 4 times in a row. I google searched it but came up dry.

Lunch today is late season pokeweed shoots, polenta with grape leaves, topped with chickweed. All from the Fens yesterday evening. There was a whole section I'd never explored: lots of geese, lots of untended land, and two gigantic trunked hawthorns.

Monday night was Shannon's first night in town and we all burnt our candles as it were that night. We sat outside and boozed a bit at the Legal Seafood bar and became curious about this party we could see on the second floor of the Charles hotel. It looked lame (a lot of that Harvard fashion of coral-colored shorts and Izod shirts and such - awful - where are the fashion police these days) but it also looked like a lot of free booze. And that it was. We got kicked out several times, but made off with some wine and a nice plant. And as for the dumpsters, well, Upper Crust provided well for us. Although there were some complaints that the buffalo chicken pizza wasn't that great. Who complains about fresh pizza tossed away? Apparently my friends do. Not I.

I really don't understand why the magicians at magic night DO THE SAME GD TRICKS EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I KNOW they know lots of tricks, do these people have no boredom gene. I just don't get it. Hopefully I'll get some comments to this post that shed some light on this issue, in Chinese obviously.

Clear Flour Bakery

There is a neat little bakery tucked away off of Comm Ave in Brookline called Clear Flour. Next to it there is a huge apartment building. The amount of fresh bread in their little dumpster last night at 12:10 AM could have fed that whole building. I carried two bags home, left about 6 there. Please come to my house and have some bread, it's in the firdge and the freezer. And you might have a Baer sighting. My landlord, Baer, is lording over the pipes and trying to stop a drip in my bathroom. The place is crubmling. He stil calls the bathroom above mine "Ingo's bathroom". Ingo lived there two years ago. He hasn't rented it out again yet.

30th anniversary celebration of food not bombs this Sunday.

Braintree back roads to Braintree printing

I just a trip to Braintree Printing (T then bicycle). Passed a huge patch of milkweed right outside the T station. It's a little late, they are getting pretty tall, but I'm giving them a lengthy boil right now, see if that softens them up. I decided to go for a 250 run of my book, which brings them in at around $4.50 a pop. Which isn't too bad.

Everything in the suburbs is weird. One highlight though, and not typical 'burbs, was a stack of books for free outside someone's apartment. A bunch of poetry (a guy like John updike publishes a book of poems, and you can't really tell at the outset if they are going to be good or they are published because he also brought us rabbits running and witches of eastwick). I started reading Murder in the Catherdral by T.S. Eliot on the train back. OK so far.

Late season milkweed shoot verdict in: it's too late. They are pretty stringy. I will eat them of course, but I'm glad I'm not serving them to anyone.

poke mountain

That cool pic? Hipstermatic, or something like that, an iphone app that gives all sorts of retro-looking picture options. Thanks sarah b and rob for alerting us to the app.

Milkweed and pokeweed hauls on the vineyard last week. Over by the famed watercress patch I found a construction site with a mountain of pokeweed in perfect stage for harvesting. I'd love to get to the bottom of "minimum amount of time to cook the stuff" since every book is different, but this is a risky thing to uncover. For now, I'll just continue to cook the heck out of it and serve up mushy greens.

The vineyard week was great, and I'm happy to report that my friends all put up with a large amount of foraged eating.

Also, my book -- Urban Foraging -- is finally available harvard.com's book site.

Brian tells me black locust flowers are out in NYC. Gotta go exploring...

x Weed

Japanese knotweed has ended its prime time (pickling worked, wild fermenting is stinking up my kitchen, and pan seared knotweed tops -- or "knotweed calamari" is good) and milkweed shoots are out and pokeweed is just poking up. Book hard copy #2 is out and in the hands of 5 new recruited editor friends. MIT press interested in carrying it, as well as Rodney's and Darwins and maybe TeaLux. I'll measure success in 10s, not 1000s :)

High Rise bakery provided me with 2 beautiful and huge whole wheat sour dough loaves the other day, which will keep me honest for a couple weeks.

Vineyard next week!