Forage Friday IV (which actually took place on a Friday, but still took me 4 days to write about)

Here is the catnip I promised to photograph.  It has flowered as you can see.  For identification the stalks are square and it smells of mint, but when you taste it its not really great mint.  Still, its edible.

I found a small number of ripe blackberries out in an open field, but on a periphery I found these still young ones in quantity.  I expect to find some mature fruits this Friday.

The chantrelles were in abundance a week ago, but these poor little dried specimens were all I discovered this week.  Rain has been absent for probably 8-9 days.  It did rain a bit today (the following Monday) so I am interested to see if more have come up.

Some local mayapples have some large green fruits (which are at this stage poisonous.)  I will keep an eye on them and see when they turn yellow if they are worth bothering with.

Wild Carrot, alias Queen Anne's Lace, are starting to flower.  This is a biannual plant so when you see the flowers the root underneath is a stick.  If you can find smaller greens nearby at ground level those are first year plants and the root isn't hardened.  The greens look like the tops of carrots you'd get in the store.  Always smell them, your nose knows.

Here is what I brought home to cook, a small haul in comparison to what I usually drag out of the woods but I was trying not to make a giant mess this week so I kept it polite.

Left to right, catnip, a carrot root, staghorn sumac, garlic bulbs, another carrot root, garlic bulblets, burdock root. 

The mulberry tree had a few pink berries but only like 3 ripe berries.  I didn't feel like walking all the way to the previously mentioned apple tree (which is about a mile away) so my meal was light on a fruit/desert dish this week.

I found a hot pepper I had dried a few years ago and along with some garlic, black walnuts, and chantrelles made a sauce for half a rabbit I pulled from the freezer.  The walnuts/garlic/pepper were AWESOME when I tasted them, the chantrelles didn't really compliment the taste very well but that's what I added so that's what I ate/  At the bottom of the picture are the burdock roots I collected, boiled to hell for about 40 minutes. At the top (like 1:00) there are the bulblets from the garlic plants, boiled along with the burdock roots. At the right was an attempt to rehash a previous idea - after forage friday II I took the leftover roast garlic/basswood nuts and mixed it together and made a few patties that didn't hold together well, pictured below, but were nonetheless good.  I attempted to retry this but without the basswood nuts, what I had crumbled to bits (BUT WAS DELICIOUS.)  In the background is tea I made with the sumac cones I had picked.

Those are the previously mentioned patties, they were crumbly but good enough to flip and get on a bun. 

As for this week's ratings, I'd give the rabbit with walnuts, mushrooms, and pepper a 6.5/10.  I'd lose the chantrelles and probably hammer out the rest of the rabbit, the filets from the back were the only really great meat part.  The garlic bulblets 6/10, its a nice vegetable once it spends half an hour boiling away.  Burdock I'd give 5/10, its a little plain jane but its nice to have a starchy vegetable even if it is a lot of work.  The failed rabbit/garlic patties get an 8.5/10, it was delicious if not what I envisioned it should be.  Sumac tea 6/10, good but the cones aren't quite ready. In a couple weeks this tea will be exquisite.