Friday Forage III (which happened on a Thursday, and I didn't bother to write about for 11 days)

Chantrelles.  In great quantity.

My friend Matt and I went out to our 'spot' for Chantrelles on Thursday, July 5th.  There were rains the few days before, and the forest floor was virtually blanketed in orange.  In the lower right are a few black trumpets and a couple old men we spotted, but the big haul were the chantrelles.  My bag (the white one in the foreground) weighed in a 4-1/2lbs at the end of the day. 

I did not make my typical 'only from the woods' meal this week, instead I made linguini with chantrelles in white sauce.  2 weeks ago I could have told you the ingredients but by now I have forgotten.  There was definitely cheese.  It was very good, a 9/10 on the foraging scale and at least a 6/10 on the fine dining scale.

Chantrelles are a ground mushroom and thus are always a little gritty, the only real detractor from the experience.  I think if you just focused on the 'caps' you'd probably be pretty grit free. 

There was, of course, some loss when I cleaned them and weeded out all the questionable and really filthy ones. I think I ate a pound.  The rest were divided into different preservation methods - 2/3lbs dried, 1/2lb sauteed and then frozen, 1/2lb blanched for 2 mins and frozen, 1lb left in a crock pot over night then frozen.  I have yet to revive these stores but will report which method was the best when I do.

Forage Friday Part II

I went out again this morning before it got too hot.  I saw pretty much the same as last week, I won't reshoot everything I already did, with a few additions.  The mulberry tree still has pink fruits on it so I should be able to collect again next week.  Garlic is ever-present.  The wild onions are nearing the end, there were a lot of dried stalks with aerial bulblets on them and only a few green stemmed ones left.  Here's what I found new (or just happened to notice this week)

Wood Sorrel - it looks a bit like a clover, it has a distinctive lemon taste.  Don't make this a primary food source as it contains oxalic acid, which is bad for you in large quantities.

Chicory - if you've ever played Skyrim, you know this as blue mountain flower.  Its roots are used to make a coffee substitute.  I collected a bit but it needs to dry.

Chantrelles - I found my first one of the year!  These small orange/yellow mushrooms can be found on the forest floor.  As always with mushrooms, if you're not sure throw it out!  I'm sure on this one though, and I've found a spot near me where they are growing (so I don't have to drive 40 minutes to my other spot.)

Basswood nuts - I just missed the window on what I think is a new and good source of wild food.  I had previously found these nuts to be edible when they drop on the ground though they are tiny and have 2 shells.  The first can be peeled and the second one you can crack by heating them in a pan, they reminded me of popcorn kernels I recall.  I was by our old house on Sunday and for no good reason picked one of the unripe flour/seeds.  It was nutty and a little sweet.  Today the flowers are falling off and the nuts are much greener.  I still picked a small container of them, even though I think they are past their prime.  I will have to try to get them a little earlier next year.

Sir Not Appearing in this film - there is an apple tree between our old house and current residence that always drops fruit on the sidewalk, and always seems to be fruiting too early.  I stopped there on the way and sure enough, I collected a pocket full of small under-ripe apples!

Here were my collections for the day, clockwise starting at noon - mugwort, garlic, burdock root, mulberries, wild onion bulblets, basswood nuts, wood sorrel, apples.  Off to the right is a sumac cone soaking in water.  

So here is what I managed to craft.

Back row, soup made from the mushroom broth mentioned in my last post, this was a little too strong and a bit bitter.  I added water later but haven't revisited it since I was full.  Sumac tea, the cone was still a little weak, it should have a good strong vitamin C flavor.  It really reminds me of Dairymen's tea when its good.  This was passable.  Basswood tea, this was a byproduct of boiling the hell out of the nuts, it had a fairly good flavor.  I dropped a bit of catnip in there, which is a mint relative that grows around here.  I guess I'll photograph that next week.  Anyways that and a bunch of sugar and I had a fine beverage.

Plate, clockwise from noon; apples and mulberries, uh, compote? I don't really know what a compote is but I guess that's what I'll call this.  I feel like this took a lot of sugar to sweeten up since the apples were so dry and tart, but the final outcome tasted good.  Rabbit, uh, pate?  I was trying for a pate but there isn't enough fat so its really just shredded meat.  It tastes good, its made of meat after all.  Apple and Maple glazed rabbit, this was the best of the plate.  I took the other (front) half of the rabbit I started on last week, and cut 2 good strips of meat off the back.  I am saving the legs for a bbq tonight.  The rest I threw in a pot with the burdock root and boiled into the previously mentioned 'pate'.  Back to the fillets, I put the apples in enough water to cover them and cooked them down until they were soft, I added the fruit into the mulberries that were already cooking and saved the liquid.  To this liquid I added some sugar and let it reduce down a bit.  I pounded the 2 fillets thin with a kitchen hammer, then dipped them in the maple apple glaze and then cooked them in a cast iron skillet.  These were completely devoured.  Burdock root, after last weeks experience I figured out how to deal with these roots.  If you have ever peeled the center out of a carrot, that is pretty much what you have to do to these roots and then boil them for an hour.  They were acceptable, a bit like a starchy asparagus.  Roasted garlic, I just put some of the bigger cloves in the cast iron pan and put it on a very low heat and kept rotating them until they were soft.  I have had better in restaurants but I haven't had much success prior to this on my own, so I call it a win!  Finally, mashed garlic and basswood nuts.  I boiled the hell out of both of these.  There wasn't that much mashed garlic so I added into the basically flavorless basswood nuts, resulting in something that feels very filling but a bit of a chore to eat.

Everything was at least edible.  Here's my ratings;  soup 3/10, weak sumac tea 5/10, basswood tea 6/10, compote 7/10, pate 7/10, glazed rabbit 9/10, burdock 5/10, roast garlic 6/10, mashed gruel 4/10.

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.

Fall Forage I Was Too Lazy To Post - Cattail Flour

Last fall while wandering the woods behind our building I found a path that went right down to the river's edge next to a stand of cattails. 

 I had always read that cattail roots were a great source of flour so I decided to root around in the muck. I took a garden weasel, a bucket, and some hand shears to see what I could find.  After a short learning curve I was able to pick out a few choice roots.

Covered in muck I dragged them back to the picnic table and gave them a quick scrub.

The hard part was keeping the muck out of the broken ends and the smashed sections.  I washed them better in the sink and then peeled the outer layer off of them, discarding the bits that had gotten muddy.

I found at this point the easiest way to separate the starch from the pulp was to immerse them in water and then just work all the fiber until the starch falls out, then decant and dry.  I also tried drying the roots then mashing the flour off it, this was much more labor intensive though there was a color difference in the flour.

You can see the dried then separated on the left.

I had also tried boiling sections of the root, this didn't do anything to help the starch fall off but it did cook it into something resembling a potato with fibers in it.  If I were lost in the woods this would probably be the best way to turn those cattail roots into something palatable.  I might also try in the future to make chicha using this method, it will probably be way easier than chewing on all that dried cornmeal.

Early Boxelder (Maple) Sugaring, I Make My Own Spiles.

Looking at the weather forecast last week I saw the upcoming week's temperatures would cycle in the range that is good for sugaring maples.  I have been procrastinating buying spiles for about a month now, and last Thursday I decided I would try to make my own out of some scrap tubing I had lying around.

Here is what I came up with.  I would say it was better than paying a couple dollars each but I broke my bandsaw blade in the process.  A bit of scrounging and 4 extension cords later I headed out to the treeline and installed it in a boxelder tree growing out back.

After installing it I promptly forgot about it until Sunday morning.  I headed out to check the pail.  It had collected a quart of sap, not much but enough to see if there was a decent sugar content.  I boiled it down on the stove until it was very thick and then stuck it in a 250° oven to drive the rest of the water off.

There was my yield out of that first quart, 3/8oz.  This would work out to 1.5oz/gallon of sap.  The Lohman's maples yielded 2oz/gal in previous averages, and the previous time I sugared this particular tree I got an amazing 4oz/gal, though reading through previous posts I only yielded 2 gallons of sap (and I can't remember if I got more after that post.)  I suspect the yield was low because it is so early in the season.  In the 2 intervening days I found about a quart each day, and that little jar is now full to the top of sugar.  I have yet to weigh that but I will give weekly totals as this season goes on.

I personally prefer to take the sap all the way to sugar because the first time I sugared maples some of my syrup got moldy.  In a sugar state it is a lot more shelf stable, and I could always rehydrate it into syrup if I wanted.

Oh, and for Sharon who asked about bird poop getting in the bucket, it seems ants are a bigger problem.  Filtration is still the solution.

Here We Go Again!

Peter sent me a text last night.

He wants to run the original Starting from Scratch challenge.  Therese and Kathy also agreed to join.

The challenge will take place August 27th through September 2nd, 2018.

Collecting will commence immediately. 

Anything participants can farm, forage, fish, or hunt is allowed.  Nothing purchased is permitted.  Trading between participants IS permitted.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!

Making Cheese. From Scratch. With Things In Your Kitchen.

A few times during the last challenge I experimented with making cheese out of milk on the ragged edge.  Since then I have done a little more experimenting, and here are my results.

Ingredients: Old milk, vinegar, salt.

I used whole milk and waited until it had expired by 8 days, never having opened it.  I had previously used partial gallons that were near spoilage, but in this case I wanted to determine the yield on 1 gallon to accurately calculate the yield.

For 1 gallon of milk, add 1/2 cup distilled white vinegar.  Add salt too, I don't know how much becuase I didn't add enough.

Put it in a pot. Stir it for a while.  No, just keep stirring.  I promise it will eventually turn into cheese.

See? There it is getting all clumpy.  When the background fluid (the whey) looks pretty clear you're done stirring.

Now dump it into a collander lined with cheese cloth.  drain as much whey off as you can.

Tie the bundle, cover it with a plate and put a weight on top.  I used a pizza tray with holes in the bottom and my SFS Hammer of Victory as the weight. 

A few hours later (I think I left it for 2 or 3) you have a very crumbly cheese.  Yield on 1 gallon of whole milk was about 17oz. 

Sure, you could age it for weeks in optimal conditions, or you could just build a smoker and chuck it in.  I had previously smoked some queso fresco I bought in the store and knew it would work well.

Raw cheese goes in 

Smoked cheese comes out.

It should have come out better but it was 20 degrees out with a driving wind when I put the smoker outside, and the chamber was a little too cool to melt it consistently.  I ended up

How does it taste? Not salty enough.  I think I only added a few tablespoons to the gallon so if you're trying yourself go from there.

Was it a good value?  No.  Shopping at the store the other day, 8oz blocks of cheese were on sale for $1.69.  The milk was $2.89/gal and yielded about a pound, so that 's 49c for the labor, fuel, and cheese cloth.  I would do this again with milk about to expire or to say I made cheese but not because of the savings over store bought product.

Oh, and here's a video of the pot close to the end.  Riveting, I know!