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.

Forage Fridays!

So I think everyone who opted in to this new challenge have either forgotten or are willfully ignoring its existence.  I have some stores of food I have collected and want to use them up, so I came up with the idea of Forage Fridays!  I thought it would be an interesting endeavor to see what is available in the wild each week and then try to make a meal from it.  I will for the most part use only what I have foraged, with the exception of salt (I do not feel like driving 9 hours to get to the ocean, I am sure one of our upcoming trips will get me much closer and I'll harvest some then.)

You should, of course, consult with a professional if you are looking to forage in your own area and not take any of my accounts or descriptions as canon.

What I found;

1) Mulberries.  A friend mentioned these were fruiting a few days ago, and it was my first stop on my tour of the woods.

2) Clover Flours.  In all varieties these edible flowers taste like green beans.  Go ahead try one, you'll be surprised!

3) Wild Garlic & Onions.  Your nose knows when you've got the right plant or a look-alike.  Always smell them as sometimes poisonous doppelgangers will grow nearby!  Garlic grows all around our place, I spotted some wild onion while walking in the woods.

4) Common Burdock.  We used to call these 'elephant ears' when we were kids.  I was pretty sure they were also known as 'Stadul weed' because I had only ever seen them in our yard while we were growing up. 

5) Wild Strawberries.  I had wandered through the woods nearby in hopes of finding some chantrelle mushrooms (which I hope grow in the woods near me.)  I found none, but did spot a few patches of wild strawberries.  They were scattered and I only got a handful but if necessity dictated I am sure I could gather more.

What's coming soon: I saw a few wild grape vines with green fruit on them, hopefully it will ripen in the next week or two.

 The sumac horns aren't quite red enough to harvest for drinks yet, hopefully next week they will.  I also spotted a blackberry bush, it looked a few weeks away from being ready.

The Meal:

For the past few memorial day parties I have been making a Slovak dish called 'Rabbit with Mushrooms.'  I thought I would try to recreate it with whatever I found.  The biggest problem being I don't have any good stores of fat.  Small game animals tend to be lean.  

To sum up, I took the back half of a rabbit (I don't want to use a whole rabbit on one meal, especially since I'm eating it alone.  Hopefully I'll have friends along with me in the future.)  and some blanched and frozen dryad's saddle mushrooms from the freezer and added them to my day's forage.

The process ended up being a bit convoluted, I would have done it differently in hindsight (and may very well do that next time.)  The broth ended up being very good, though I hadn't added any salt to it which it needs.  Everything in the rabbit dish tasted ok, but there is a lot of chewing and eating it became a bit arduous.  I was worried that the garlic would be overpowering but it was pretty good, especially since there wasn't any salt in it.  I ate about a third of this plate, the rest I will probably dissect and turn into a soup.

The berries (both strawberries and mulberries) were added to some maple sugar, a dash of cattail flour, and some black walnuts.  Though not as photogenic these were awesome.  I literally licked the bowl clean.

As for the Dryad's saddle, which is now out of season, Here is a photo and my notes from foraging a month or so ago;

Not really knowing what I was doing at the start, I carried 29lbs of mushrooms home.  Many of these weren't suitable for eating, which I found out later (but did not waste.)  

They are distinctive as they look like the feathers of a pheasant, and the big ones grow to look like bicycle seats.  They grow on dead wood in spring (the same time as morels, a mushroom I have never actually seen.)  They smell like watermelon rind.  It is distinctive.

So what to look for?  I found pretty much everything larger than 6" diameter weren't any good, when they get older they get really tough.  If you like chewing on tires you can ignore this part and just take them all.  Some of the smaller ones are tough as well, so don't just think the 'baby' ones are the onese to take.  The easiest way to tell if you have a good one or not is to scrape the pores off the bottom.  If they come off easily you'll probably have a good mushroom.  If they don't you can leave it behind.  The flesh should also cut easily, think about the difficulty of chopping up a mushroom you buy from the store (maybe a little more, but if you have to saw through it you've definitely got one that is too tough.)  You want to scrape the pores off before eating.  

Out of my 29lbs i had about 4.5lbs that were still tender enough.  I cut them into slices and blanched them for 2 minutes, then froze them.  I have since unthawed about half and used them, they are just fine.

The big ones that were too tough got cut into chunks and left in the crock pot overnight (over a series of several nights, there was a lot.)  No water was added.  The mushrooms can then be wrung out and the remaining broth has a very good flavor.