Posts Tagged ‘foraging’

6 Jun

Using What You Have VII: Primary and Secondary Consumption of Elm

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, home food production, Perennial edibles, sustainable, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , .

I’ve become more and more intrigued by culinary uses of tree leaves, since there is nothing more ecologically sound: the soil is never disturbed, carbon is sequestered, soil biota is preserved, and a small tree can produce an awful lot of leaves. The drawback is that there is little information about how to use them or even which ones are safe to use. I’ve written recently about my elm leaf pasta.  Today I experimented with spaetzle, the firm eggy dumplings made in Eastern Europe but highly adaptable anywhere.

Here I will make my usual disclaimer about eating wild foods or foods that you have never eaten before: never trust your safety to a stranger on the Internet. Do your own research, be aware that your tolerance may be very different from mine, and experiment cautiously before you eat a lot if you do decide to eat wild foods. All green leafy foods can be laxative to people who don’t usually eat them. The decision is yours.

I refer in the title to “primary and secondary consumption” because not only do I eat the leaves directly in the spaetzle but the eggs come from my chickens, who eat a lot of elm leaves. So this is double-layered tree-eating.

I couldn’t find my spaetzle maker, so I tried a potato ricer, which I had read would also work. It doesn’t really. Have a spaetzle maker and life will be simpler.

This was a freewheeling experiment and quantities aren’t exact. Basic proportions for spaetzle are a cup of flour, two eggs, a quarter cup of milk, and a half teaspoon of salt whisked together, but this one is different because of the leaves. I started with all the elm leaves that I could squeeze into one hand, about two cups when fluffed up more loosely. They were steamed for seven minutes and cooled.

Then I put one and a quarter cups of flour in the blender, added the leaves, and chopped as finely as possible. This is a bit tedious, with some stopping and stirring required. Then I added half a teaspoon of salt and five egg yolks, and just enough water to make a very thick batter. Run the batter through the spaetzle maker into salted water at a fast simmer, cook until the spaetzle rise to the top, and simmer until done. Take one out and bite it and examine the interior. They should be cooked through when finished, no longer wet and sticky inside. This is usually 2-4 minutes tops. Drain, and spread out on a flexible cutting board to cool. Don’t use wax paper, as I show here, because it turns out they stick to it and it is a bit annoying getting them off again.

At this point you can proceed or refrigerate them for a day until needed. I wanted to try them right away, so I heated up a skillet to a bit above medium and chopped up a bit of celery, two healthy sprigs of marjoram, and two small cloves of garlic. Two tablespoons each of butter and olive oil went in the skillet, the garlic went in to sizzle for a few seconds, and the herbs were added and tossed around for a minute. Then the spaetzle went in. At this point you can either cook them at medium heat until heated through as seen here,

or do as I prefer and keep cooking until the little dumplings have some browned spots, as shown here:

Serve as a landing with something nice on top. My preference is fried eggs with runny yolks and nice crisp brown rims. My husband’s plate is shown at the top of this post, and yes, he really does like that much pepper on his eggs. I can also imagine the assemblage looking even more colorful with some deep red chile drizzled over the green dumplings and eggs.
There is no strong or objectionable flavor in elm leaf spaetzle, and there are certainly far more fiber and fewer carbohydrates than in all-flour spaetzle. My mother’s objection to nearly all my leafy foods is that they are green. Well, leaves are green. Maybe we just need to get used to eating some green food, and given that people love some odd colored things like deep blue potatoes, I don’t see any reason why green food is beneath consideration. Green is the color of growth, so maybe we can come to think of it as “growth food.”

no doubt it goes without saying that if you don’t wish to experiment with wild foods, you can use chard or similar mild greens instead. Steam, squeeze dry, and proceed as above.

21 Mar

Ditch Dinner, with notes on blue mustard

Posted by wooddogs3 in greens, Ketogenic diet, salads, Uncategorized, Vegetable dinners, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

My home area near the Rio Grande has an elaborate venous system of acequias, the irrigation ditches that move water out to farms and fields. Further south, they make local agriculture possible. Even now that my area is urbanized, the ditches are lifeblood. They maintain our water table, and the dirt maintenance roads along them are walking paths where we enjoy fresh air, exercise our canine companions, and encounter our neighbors. For me, there’s an added dimension. They are kept dry in the winter, and the east or south-facing side side of the banks are where the earliest greens appear. By scrambling to the bottom of the dry ditch and walking along the bottom, I can harvest greens growing halfway up the steeply sloping bank, where dogs can’t urinate.

The first plant to appear, often in February, is tumble mustard, also known as London rocket. It is a very hot member of the mustard family, and I don’t much care for it in any form, but the amazing John Slattery can tell you more about its culinary uses: https://www.desertortoisebotanicals.com/blogs/news/urban-foraging-for-london-rocket. Despite my disinterest in it for table use, I gather bushels of it for my chickens, who adore it. Within a couple of weeks I’m gathering eggs with the deep gold carotenoid-packed yolks that I associate with the growing season. So the ditch banks benefit my chickens directly and me indirectly in the earliest weeks of the season.

This week the dock plants on the ditch banks have leaves 6-8”long and are ready to harvest. I made a greens cake based on green onions and dock greens, using five eggs and five egg yolks for an 8” square pan. The flavorings were thyme and black oil-cured olives. The cheese was a grass-fed cheddar. It was utterly delicious but needed a side salad to brighten up the plate and provide even more greens. Enter blue mustard.

By this time the banks have large patches of blue mustard, Chorispora tenella. It’s shown above in flower, which is when you are most likely to recognize it for the first time. I haven’t seen it in foraging books and I have no clue why, because it’s delicious. The young leaves and stems are tender when gathered less than 6-8” high, and have a delightful tiny nip of the characteristic mustard flavor without getting carried away. They are fine cooked but lose their character. Salad is the way to go. Look for dense patches where the plants are shading each other’s stems, and cut off the top 3” with scissors. If the plant is forming buds it is past its tender best and should be left to seed itself for next year. Wash and dry your blue mustard, combine with a few other mild tender shoots ( I used bladder campion shoots,) dress with a good red wine vinaigrette, and dinner is served.

I have moved some blue mustard into my yard too, which germinates later than the acequia population and extends the season a little. It’s pretty in the blooming stage but gets weedy and unattractive when forming seed pods. This is one for the weed patch, not the front yard.

 

12 Jan

Wild Mushroom Experiments

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, Ketogenic diet, mushrooms, recipe, Uncategorized, Vegetable dinners, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , .

No, not that kind of mushroom and not that kind of experiment. I have been reading a wonderful new book, chef Chad Hyatt’s The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen, and it has led to compulsive kitchen experimenting. Hyatt writes about porcini, morels, and the other “premium” mushrooms, but also about more common mushrooms that you never encounter in upscale restaurants but might find a bagful of if you’re a mushroom hunter. He suggests substitutes where appropriate and encourages a lot of experimentation. He has me adding cooked ground black trumpet mushrooms to my umami sauce, and I’m especially interested by his mushroom leathers, in one case made from the Sullius mushroom genus that I no longer harvest because I dislike the texture so much. This makes the despised  mushroom sound worthy of a place in the take-home basket.

I happen to have a lot of lobster mushrooms in the freezer, because they are beautiful and plentiful and I can never resist harvesting them when I find them, but the unfortunate truth is that to my palate they have very little flavor at all. I love hummus, and as a low-carb person I can’t eat it often, so I was interested by Hyatt’s recipe for hummus made from salted mushrooms. I don’t have any salted mushrooms at hand currently, but I certainly do have lobsters.  They were sautéed in olive oil before freezing, and I decided to thaw a bag and try a recipe based on Hyatt’s. The lobsters went in the food processor, about 2 cups of them, with 1/4 cup of tahini, the juice of two small lemons, two cloves of raw garlic, and some additional olive oil. After a few minutes of processing and adding salt to taste, the taste was good but the texture and mouth feel were not at all what I wanted.  I moved the somewhat grainy lumpy mixture out of the processor and into my Vitamix blender, added more olive oil so that the mixture would blend, and blended it on the high setting, stirring the contents down a couple of times.   The texture was now exactly what I wanted, not totally smooth like baby food but with a texture much like chickpea hummus.  Dolloped into a bowl, sprinkled with ground chipotle chilies rather than the more traditional sumac, and garnished with chopped cilantro, it made a delicious spread. I should add that Hyatt calls for less olive oil than I ended up using, although I didn’t measure precisely.  I love the taste of top quality olive oil and lobster mushrooms have little natural flavor of their own, so for me this was a natural adjustment to make.

This first very successful experiment has me reading the book with renewed interest.  It can be rather painful to read mushroom books out of season, when there is no way to go out and find the mushrooms, but most of us who hunt mushrooms have a lot of frozen or dried  mushrooms from past successful hunts, and this can help us get busy and get them out of the pantry or freezer.  Also, specialty grocery stores have much larger selections than they used to. The last time I was in Whole Foods, I counted seven varieties of fresh mushrooms.  Buying those hideously expensive little packets of dried mushrooms from the grocery store is not really an option if you want mushrooms in bulk, but you can buy bulk dried mushrooms from several sources.  I usually use Oregon Mushrooms or buy from private foragers when I want to augment my pantry supply. By the way, know your forager. Not every forager should be trusted blindly.

In short, if you like to eat mushrooms at all, I highly recommend Hyatt’s book, whether or not you are a mushroom hunter. His creativity is wonderful.   For example, there is an entire chapter of mushroom desserts.  This is not a category of possibilities that I ever gave the faintest thought to, but the recipes look really good and seem designed to get cooks thinking. And this, to me, is the hallmark of a really successful cookbook. A good cookbook may give me a few recipes that I use verbatim, but it’s more important that it gets me excited about the endless vagaries of food and leaves me feeling that there are more possibilities than I’ve considered. Lifting simple nourishment and avoidance of starvation to an art form is what cooks do, and a good cookbook can get us very jazzed about doing it.

Keep in mind that the book has some very useful notes about lesser-known edibles but is a cookbook, not a foraging book. You will still need a field guide (and some good teachers) if you’re new to the sport.

Hyatt is selling his book directly, in both hard copy and ebook format, at the link above. As always, I don’t accept review copies. Books that I review are bought at the price that you will pay. This one is worth every penny.

13 Apr

Eating Up the Ground Elder

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, salads, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , .


Ground elder is a famous invasive, and most sensible people would never dream of growing it on purpose. But I live in the high desert and tend to be fairly fearless about moisture-loving invasives, on grounds that if I get tired of them I can withhold water and watch them disappear. Therefore, I let some variegated ground elder grow under a plum tree and harvest it aggressively for salads.
It needs to be harvested young, before the leaves unfurl, and at this stage it has a strong celery-parsley flavor that I find appealing, and a lovely crisp texture. The furled young leaf at the top is pretty, but the stem is the real vegetable, so pick it as close to the ground as possible. Toss in a mixed salad, or arrange artistically on top.

When the leaf opens out it becomes tough and is no longer desirable eating. I have read that it also produces nausea in some people at this stage, so it’s definitely to be avoided.

If you live in a wetter climate, you may want to confine ground elder to a large pot, because it can get out of hand in a hurry.

Because each individual leaflet is small, I never get enough to cook, but I imagine that it would be good in stir-fries.

Be cautious with invasives, but don’t rule them out completely if your natural conditions will prevent them from spreading. And if you live in an area where it would be irresponsible to introduce ground elder, help solve the problem. Find a naturalized patch and start foraging.

 

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