My cousin on the other side of the pond has recently become interested in foraging for edible plants. She’s been harvesting and researching and designing recipes and creating dishes, and she published her first cooking video this week:
I think this is exceptionally neat.
For one thing – speaking as a soon-to-be-broke-again college student – foraging sounds like an excellent source of free food!
Only a little bit like gardening. My mother has a garden. From watching my mother in her garden I’ve learned that gardening requires a herculean investment of work and time and careful attention. I don’t know how she does it.
Foraging is different. The weeds grow up everywhere, all by themselves; you usually can’t stop them.
All you have to do is know what to look for.
And you have to go looking. Go out for walks, with a knife and sharp eyes and a paper bag or a basket.
To be honest, oftentimes you probably don’t even need all of that. If you’re willing to get a little dirt under your fingernails, if you can live with the mud and the grass stains on your clothes, your elbows, your knees – the willingness to go is usually most of what you need for the going.
And so I’ve been foraging, on my own side of the pond.
It’s become an unexpectedly sweet way to stay connected to my cousin. Because on my side of the pond, some of the same plants grow. (Some of them are invasive species, but this does not necessarily mean that that they are not delicious.)
Wild garlic mustard, for one. Grows under trees and on roadsides, tastes bitter with a savory aftertaste, and if you crush the leaves in between your fingers you can smell a hint of garlic. (Kathrin noticed it was growing in the background of the picture of the deer skull on the front page of this blog.)
Garlic mustard, and ribwort plantains, and purple dead-nettles, and dandelions leaves before the flowers…
This week I learned that in order to cook dandelion leaves and still be able to eat them, you have to mix them with strong flavors to complement the bitterness. Soy sauce, garlic, bacon fat, coconut oil. (Maybe not all of them at once?)
nb: dandelions aren’t poisonous! Anything but, actually; allegedly they’re quite nutritious and the whole plant is technically edible. You can make wine from the petals and a coffee-like beverage out of the roots, in the fall. It’s just that the leaves taste like dirt, but greener. Especially later in the season, after the blossoms. I think they’re a lot more palatable when they’re new.
I’ve spent the better part of the last handful of days researching dandelion wine recipes, and I’ve discovered that there are easily as many ways to make the stuff as there are people who’ve written about making it. But most of them have the same basic processes in common. Dandelion wine is made up of dandelion petals, yeast, sugar, citrus, a couple of handfuls of raisins, and enough time in the right conditions for the yeast to convert the sugar into alcohol.
I have access to a kitchen and some fermentation materials, because I live with my mother. I have some old wine bottles and a few corks. And the backyard is covered in yellow blossoms…
To be fair – I’ve never done any home brewing before, my research has been made up of sources that are probably varying degrees of credible, and there’s a chance that if I do this wrong I’ll wind up with a couple of interestingly loud explosions and subsequently a very sticky mess.
(I know this on a rational level, but I haven’t actually had to clean up any particularly sticky messes yet)
So this weekend I’ve been picking dandelions in the morning, when the blossoms are open, and then separating the petals from the green stuff at the base. It’s oddly meditative work, and it’s something to do.
Remembering to leave some for the bees…