Might think about trimming the chickweed better next time.

If I don’t get the rest of this New England story out soon I’ll be permanently stopped up in the blog-hole, though perhaps it’s something a large dose of chickweed (Stellaria spp.) could solve.

I already wrote about chickweed in Part I of this series, I know, but I just read an amusing account in Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants (1985), wherein he first spends an entire hot and humid day prostrate in a chickweed patch gorging himself on the stuff before suffering “the worse case of diarrhea [he has] had to this day,” followed later by his idea to make an extremely strong chickweed tea for a constipated friend—only to discover that it worked so well his friend was stricken with the shits for days.

For use as a laxative, Brown recommends to steep a “palmful of fresh, chopped leaves” for a half hour, strain, and take ½ cup twice a day; I’ve never tried this but I do know an oft-constipated sister who has chickweed growing in her garden…

When I made chickweed for my parents, I snipped it far down the stems, found it too tough and chewy for my liking, and then wrote about it in Part I of this series. Meanwhile I’ve got Sam Thayer (2006) in the back of my head saying, “The deplorable state of information on edible wild plants can be cleared up over time if those who write on the topic exhibit professionalism and follow a few simple guidelines,” one of which is to “not condemn a plant based on limited experience with it.”

I love you, wood sorrel, down to your heart-shaped leaves.

Okay, okay. And then, as if summoned, there’s the answer in Steve Brill’s (1994) book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild Places): “I don’t collect chickweed until I find a thick mat of it,” he writes. “Then, as though I were giving an unruly cat a haircut, I snap off the top few inches.” Ah, I see. Cat haircut. Got it!

I don’t find any stern warnings about chickweed as a cathartic in Brill’s book, though he does mention that it contains saponins. Instead, he lauds the prolific weed for its numerous health benefits. “It’s as safe a food as you can find anywhere, with no harsh or irritating substances,” he writes. Hmm. Though I’ve decided to put my money on Steve Brill for the time being, I probably won’t go overboard with chickweed any time soon either.

Sorrel & Sheep Sorrel

“I’m sorry I didn’t find any sorrel,” my friend’s daughter repeated back to me, as we sought a mnemonic device to help her commit the name of the yummy, lemony plants to memory.

Sandy sheep sorrel on a Connecticut roadside, April 2012.

First we tackled wood sorrel (Oxalis spp.), often mistaken for clover but bearing three heart-shaped leaves to clover’s ovals.

Then we delved into sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella), which is also lemony and characterized by a distinctive leaf-shape—with leaves that are somewhat shovel-shaped, borne singly, and featuring two flared lobes at their bases when mature. The “flowers are green and inconspicuous at first, then flowers/seedheads turn reddish,” Cattail Bob Seebeck (1998) writes of the plant. Sheep sorrel might seem hard to pick out at first, but if you see a reddish-hued hillside later in the season, it might be a good idea to take a closer look, as the hillside might just be covered with the stuff.

The fresh leaves of both sorrels are great in salad, and that’s what my 7-year-old niece and I did with them; we made a tiny salad of wood sorrel, sheep sorrel, chickweed, and carrots—though when it came time to eat it she revealed that raw salad wasn’t really to her liking. I take comfort in the fact that she can lead her mom to the chickweed if there ever is a need for it.

A wild salad maker who refused to eat her own cooking!

Up here in the Colorado High Country I don’t get enough of any kind of sorrel, even though Cattail Bob reports that sheep sorrel grows up to 11,500 feet in elevation. The only sorrel I find up here above Fairplay, Colorado is mountain sorrel, Oxyria digyna, thought generally not in large enough quantities to merit foraging it.

Note: Like spinach, sorrels contain oxalic acid, and for that reason neither the wild nor cultivated plant should be overindulged upon in one sitting.

Violet Leaves, Thank You Very Much

April was wildflower-recipe-invention month at Hunger and Thirst. My friend Butter posted recipes for Violet Cardamom Soda and Violet Walnut Conserve (where does she get these ideas?!), the first of which involved 3-4 cups of violets, and I couldn’t help but echoing a reader’s sentiment: “That’s a HUGE amount of flowers!!”

Blue violet leaves, glistening in the spring rain - New Hampshire, April 2012.

I knew violets were edible but hadn’t given much thought to eating the leaves prior to my trip east, and according to Steve Brill (1994), many people apparently do not: “The common blue violet is a well-loved spring wildflower, but few people know it’s one of the best-tasting, most abundant wild foods of springtime.” He dries quantities of the leaves and flowers to eat year-round, but warns foragers to wait until Viola papilionacea is in flower to make certain of their identification. He also warns not to confuse violets with the also-purple-flowering, toxic larkspur (Delphinium tricorne) or monkshood (Aconitum uncinatum), not to eat the poisonous rhizomes of violets themselves, and not to eat African violets.

In Colorado, Cattail Bob Seebeck warns against confusing the immature leaves of Viola species with heart-leaf arnica, which is also poisonous. “Only use numerous, abundant violets,” Cattail Bob adds. “Some species are rare in the Rockies.”

Back in New Hampshire, however, I found a plentiful yard-full of blue violets and collected several cups of leaves. Fortunately, they kept for several days, as I did not have a chance to try any until returning home with them in my carry-on cooler bag, which incidentally was filled with other edible wild plants as well as meat and fish foraged from my dad’s freezer. We ate our first-ever batch of violet leaves finely chopped in eggs, which is how I try most of my wild edible treats the first time around. Gregg said he liked both the flavor and the texture.

A bundle of miniature evening primrose roots. Not much to write the internet about just yet.

In Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West (1997), Gregory Tilford cautions that too much violet leaf-eating can cause stomach upset due to their saponin content. Time will tell on that one, as far as I’m concerned.

Other Spring-Spotted East Coast Wild Edibles

Aside from the plants I’ve written about in detail over the course of these entries, I also found and nibbled on the following plants during my spring stay out east, at least some of which are probably still in season: evening primrose roots (Oenothera biennis), young black birch branches, sassafras leaf stems, and feral chives. I also saw but did not try: curly dock (Rumex crispus), false Solomon’s seal rhizomes (Maianthemum racemosum or M. stellatum), trout lily bulbs (Erythronium spp.), a couple of purple-flowering mints, plantain (Plantago spp.), milkweed shoots (Asclepias syriaca), mallow (Malva spp.), mullein leaves (Verbascum thapsis) for tea, yarrow (Achillea spp.) also for tea, and possibly cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum). I suppose there’s always next time!

Note: I am now officially done with this round of New England foraging adventures. Thanks for reading!

Seemingly innocent poison ivy lies in wait, plotting your extreme discomfort.

One of the things I noticed about foraging in New England that does not present a problem here at 11,000 feet in the Colorado High Country is the seeming ever-presence of poison ivy (Toxicondendron radicans). One morning, overjoyed to find false Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum racemosum or M. stellatum) growing in abundance in the forest around my parents’ Connecticut house, I borrowed a trowel and headed out to dig up some rhizomes, only to find each and every plant intricately intertwined with poison ivy.

Poison ivy is not edible. And, unless you are one of the lucky few not (yet) allergic to T. radicans, coming in contact with it can instigate a blistering, itchy rash. I know first-hand how potent the roots can be, having developed a nasty case after a day digging in the not-yet-leafing-out plants as an archaeology student in college. My hands and arms were so bad that the Health Services department insisted I had contracted scabies. Inhaling fumes is a thousand times worse—the unlucky sap who accidentally burns it in a campfire and then huffs the stuff should be rushed to the hospital immediately, as the rash can develop internally throughout the body as well.

Pretty, fuzzy fiddlehead whorls--but they're NOT edible ostrich ferns.

Poison ivy is distinguished by “long-stalked, alternate, three-parted palmate-compound  leaves” wherein “one leaflet points to the left, one to the right, and one has a stem and points straight ahead” according to Steve Brill (1994) in Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants. The leaflets bear teethy indentations and are “dark glossy-green” with “red overtones” in spring and fall. Poison ivy grows low on the ground, in shrub-like form, and as a vine on trees.

Guilty by Association?

I stared at the false Solomon’s seal plants, happily cavorting about with their toxic neighbors, in dismay. If I could get by the threat of contact dermatitis unscathed, I wondered, and then adequately separate edible roots from the itchy-pain causing ones, was there still a chance poison ivy had contaminated the false Solomon’s seal roots by virtue of proximity?

Better safe than sorry, I concluded, abandoning the edible root-bearers to the care of their shiny-leaved guardians.

Later, deep into a quest for ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris) fiddleheads in New Hampshire, my sister found the supposed objects of my desire in a swampy bog and eagerly set about gathering them before noticing that they, too, were intermingled with young specimens of poison ivy. Unwilling to simply toss out my long-sought find, I left my bag of fiddleheads in her refrigerator for several days while contemplating my next move.

A handful of smooth NH fiddleheads--but they're NOT edible ostrich ferns.

Roots were one thing, but would poison ivy leaves taint above ground vegetables merely by growing nearby? I perused the wild food literature, and although I found several entries regarding the dangers of T. radicans, not one (in my possession) specifically addressed the question of eating other plants growing in proximity.

In Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) Euell Gibbons recounts a radical immunity-building technique whereby a person eats three new poison ivy leaves of spring when they first appear, repeating this practice each day (thereby gradually increasing the dose) for three weeks. Although the famed wild edible plants author tried it himself without incident, I never will—and I wouldn’t recommend you do it either.

But I did wonder this: If it were remotely possible to eat three small leaves of poison ivy safely, then how risky would it be to eat fern fiddleheads whose sole crime was to grow near young specimens of the offending weed?

Damn You, Inedible Fiddleheads!

In and of itself, fern fiddlehead edibility is a widely confused matter, I discovered in Thayer (The Forager’s Harvest, 2006). Many believe cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) fiddleheads to be edible, while other sources say that they are not. Thayer conducted two experiments on himself to test non-ostrich-fern edibility. First he and a friend consumed a serving of interrupted fern (Osmunda claytonia), thereupon experiencing “severe headaches, nausea, dizziness, lethargy, and general malaise.” A later test with cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) yielded similar but milder symptoms.

A delightful green-gold garden of ostrich ferns light up a New Hampshire forest, April 2012. Fiddleheads and their stalks can be eaten, but not fronds.

The Osmunda fern fiddleheads both bear a fuzzy or woolly coating, which I used to distinguish them from the sought-after Matteucia’s in my hunt. After many fuzzy disappointments, I was elated to find non-fuzz-bearing fiddleheads with my sister, so you can imagine I did not look forward to forgoing the fuzz-less fiddleheads on poison ivy grounds.

Still, I had yet come to a decision about whether or not to consume them when it came time to depart her house for my uncle’s to the north.  My uncle—the man who introduced me to wild edible plants many years back—has ostrich ferns growing on a dark hillside that descends to a floodplain beside a small river. Although many are the occasions on which he’s extolled their virtues, not before this trip have I made it to his house while they were in season.

I was surprised to find it took a little convincing to get him to share, as he’d invited “a horde of foragers” a day prior to chow down on fiddleheads with him, but in the end he invited us to collect a side dish’s worth. They didn’t look much like the meager fiddleheads my sister and I’d found down south. Their glowing, green-gold forms lit up the dark forest, a veritable enchanted garden of dreamy delicacies. Mostly I gathered the broken, unnoticed fiddleheads from the previous day’s assault and mom did the same on the floodplain I couldn’t reach due to my recently-reconstructed knee. We stir fried the ostrich fern fiddleheads with garlic, asparagus, and sweet orange peppers and they were an absolute delight; I can see why people go gaga over them.

The telltale grooved stalk of the ostrich fern.

The next day, while out walking with my uncle, I kept trying to identify new patches in the hopes of sourcing some fiddleheads beyond his backyard. I found some powdery-stalked specimens—different from his, which were dark green, but Thayer indicates that the ostrich presents in both a dark green and powdery form. My uncle did not believe me, however, and it was not until a spirited rereading of Thayer’s chapter that I rediscovered a telltale feature that distinguishes ostrich ferns from the others: “The stalk of the frond has a deep, U-shaped groove running its entire length on the top (the side facing the center of the rosette), similar to the groove in a celery stalk.”

No, my powdery finds were not ostrich ferns—and as it turns out, nor were the poison-ivy-seasoned fiddleheads in my sister’s refrigerator either!

I daresay New England is lucky for all that poison ivy—if only to keep would-be foragers like myself from making unfortunate mistakes.

NOTE: If anyone has any experience eating poison ivy-tainted wild veggies, please do share. Inquiring minds want to know how that turned out for you.

Garlic mustard, busy invading

“There’s a reason why the pre-Columbian population of Colorado was low,” wild plants author Sam Thayer once wrote me, referring to the relative lack of edible wild plants in this semi-arid land compared to lusher parts of the country. How dare he? I recall thinking—though truth be told, here at 11,000 feet in the Colorado High Country, the new spring growth is still less than an inch tall; meanwhile the rest of the country is happily chatting it up about their bountiful spring forage, whether dock and dandies, redbud flowers and milkweed shoots, chickweed and sorrel, and so forth.

Honestly, though, I’m not sure I could handle the abundance.

Take my recent New England trip for example. I arrived in Connecticut mid-April, just as the trees were newly leafing out. One walk with mom down our old country road renders me speechless. There are so many plants I want to try—plants I recognize from my books, plants that nearly every other forager knows well and uses often, plants that I have not had opportunity to try since Wild Food Girl was born.

I conclude that I need a few years out east, not two weeks interspersed with family visits, to get down and dirty with all these wild plants. Especially when my 7-year-old niece purportedly complained to her mother: “With all the wonderful plants in New Hampshire, how will I be able to get enough time to play with Aunt Erica since she loves plants so much?”

Tiny chickweed and its tiny flowers.

A Survey of Spring Edibles in the Northeast

Instead of going into great detail on any one plant, then, what follows is a survey of some of the edible wild plants I saw and tasted on my April 17- May 1 trip. The range is eastern Connecticut, southern – mid New Hampshire, and Troy, New York.

Understand that I have limited experience with some of these plants. This is not meant to be a guide to identification. It is always expedient to check and double check ID’s in multiple guidebooks prior to tasting. Just the other day a reader admitted to tasting a toxic plant she was unsure about, and then experiencing nausea and dizziness. Heavens to Betsy! Please be prudent! Your safety depends on it!

Parents Enjoy Plants More Than Progeny

My parents have been skeptical of my wild food creations for years, surveying both me and the meals askance, then tasting but the smallest bit and pushing away their plates. In that light it’s all the more surprising that on this trip, both mom and dad enjoyed two wild plants more than I did.

A ubiquitous chickweed's low, spreading form.

The first was chickweed (Stellaria spp.), the small plant that is so ubiquitous as to have escaped my identification until this trip. Newly aware, I found it in mom’s Connecticut rock garden, my sister’s New Hampshire vegetable garden, and pretty much everywhere else I looked.

The master northeastern forager, “Wildman” Steve Brill, gives some excellent identifying features for this prostrate, spreading plant, including the exhibition of “tiny white flowers 1/8 inch across, with 5 petals so deeply cleft they look like 10,” the “tiny, pointed, oval, untoothed leaves, 1/2 to 1 inch long” which grow in opposite pairs, and the fact that one “fine line of hair extends along the length of the slender, delicate stem.”

He cautions not to mistake chickweeds for “poisonous spotted spurge (Euphorbia maculata)” or “non-edible matted doorweed or oval-leaf knotweed (Polygonum arenastrum). See his site for details.

Chickweed is edible raw or cooked—leaves, stems and all. I collected a bunch, chopped fine and boiled for 5-10 minutes, then served with butter and salt as a side dish. I found it tough and hard to chew, concluding that perhaps I had collected specimens that were too mature. Mom and dad, on the other hand, gobbled theirs right up and pronounced it good and not the least bit tough. Am I getting snooty about wild plants in my old age? I who once declared that I’d like every wild plant I ate, no matter what?

Lush bitter dock growing outside a neighbor's chicken coop in eastern Connecticut.

Bitter dock (Rumex obtusifolius) was next up. Although I have experience eating curly dock (R. crispus), narrow dock (R. triangulivalvis / R. salicifolius) and what I now believe to be Western dock (R. occidentalis), this was my first trial with bitter dock, and I found it to be—you guessed it—rather bitter.

Bitter dock is distinguished from other docks by its “broad, heart-shaped leaves and the coarsely toothed margins of the valves on its fruit,” according to Thayer (2010). I have also noticed a tendency for the leaf midribs to be reddish.

Following my modus operandi for other docks, I collected only new, unfurling or recently unfurled leaves, including leaf stems, then chopped and sautéed with garlic in olive oil before tasting. Whoa Nelly was that batch bitter! I added chopped carrots to balance the bitter with sweet, but I still couldn’t handle eating it. Undeterred, mom set about flavoring the dish with honey and curry, dancing around the kitchen and exuding real joy over having a new ingredient to play with. I’ll say it’s a wonderful thing to see mom with all this new time on her hands, but I’m not sure how I feel about her upstaging me in the wild plants cooking arena.

Anyway, mom’s curried bitter dock came out decent. I ate some, even helped myself to seconds. My uncle ate some too, and later, upon a second cooking attempt, dad decided it would make a good addition to stuffing.

Garlic mustard is everywhere along my parent's country road in eastern CT.

Don’t Be Fooled By the Pretty Flowers

Don’t be fooled by the pretty flowers, as has been my friend’s mom in Troy, New York who is blissfully happy to let this Eurasian invader spread about her yard, ruining everything. Garlic mustard (Allaria petiolata) is a nasty invader that ranges deep into virgin forests and conquers natural habitats, decimating native plants in the process. This stuff is everywhere I looked—all over Connecticut and New Hampshire, even in my parents’ backyard. To prevent its spread, dispose of it prior to flowering.

In his 2006 Conservation in Practice article, “Bon Appetit,” [PDF download], Joe Roman makes a case for encouraging humans to develop an appetite for unwanted invasive species. “Sure, fighting invaders requires a killer appetite, but just look at our track record: Atlantic cod, bison, manatees, and Pismo clams have all but disappeared under the weight of human demand,” he writes. “So why not put our destructive streak to good use for a change?” Based on this idea, Roman created Eat the Invaders, a site that outlines edible invaders for folks interested in joining the “invasivore” movement.

Mom goes in for a taste of garlic mustard. You should've seen the face she made afterwards.

Thayer includes a chapter on garlic mustard in Nature’s Garden (2010). Though he admits to being unable to stomach the mature leaves, he recounts success with steaming or boiling the young, not-yet-flowering shoots. I tried this with our backyard batch, then served it with mayonnaise for dipping. I wish I had gotten a photo of the look on my mother’s face, because it screwed up something fierce before she spit the offending ball of yuck out onto her plate.

I emailed Sam: “The garlic mustard stalks that I ate, although not yet flowering, were icky. Growing conditions I guess. It’s been dry here for a while so I’m thinking they grew slowly and came out extra pungent.”

He emailed back: “Maybe you just don’t like garlic mustard.”

Again my reaction is this: How dare he?

On the flip side, “Wildman” Steve Brill was rather enthusiastic when I bothered him on Facebook about garlic mustard. “It’s very strong-flavored,” he admitted. “I use it sparingly in salads and vegetable recipes, and purée it into pesto and spreads.” He also said that it’s “loaded with nutrients” and invited readers to find out more—both about the plant’s nutritional content as well as cooking ideas—on his Wild Edibles iPhone app, updated April 27, 2012.

Man, I gotta get me one of these iMachines.

In the meantime, maybe I can convince mom to put her cooking skills to work to come up with some use for garlic mustard that she and I will not both detest. After all, if it’s wild, I am committed to liking it.

Okay I’m ending Part I right here at 1,200 words. Thanks for reading and please stay tuned for Part II of WFG’s East Coast Foraging Adventure!

NOTE: This entry updated 5.8.12 with a closer-to-correct version of my niece’s quote. Thanks sis!

A peeled, sticky cactusicle, almost enticing enough to lick!

Apparently I’m not the only one to have gone about prickly pear cactus the wrong way the first time around. Allow me to relive that fateful day two years ago on a Malibu, California hillside where I endeavored to pick a plump prickly fruit bare-handed only to suffer the instant ejection by said fruit of 30 or so its tiny, nearly invisible glochids into my fingers, after which I made matters worse by trying to pull them out with my teeth and ended up with lips and tongue laden with the pointy buggers.

The glochids are the prickly pear’s secret weapons, for the perennial succulent also hosts larger, more apparent spines meant entirely to deceive you. You’re a sucker if you grab a piece by a supposed non-spiny section because meanwhile the cactus is spearing your unwitting hands 30 times over—or mouth and throat, as in the case of Sam Thayer, who describes his first childhood bite-and-swallow of a glochid-covered prickly pad in Nature’s Garden (2010). Still, Sam did not let it spoil a fabulous weekend seeking snakes and turtles, and neither did I let it spoil my random hike through the Malibu nudist colony that day.

I learned my lesson, but it took two years to give the prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) another go. Fortunately I had the opportunity to collect some two weeks ago while visiting properties in Mesa, Colorado with outfitter Joe Keys. The Opuntia in Mesa are small and meager compared to those Malibu giants, but beggars can’t be choosers, and Joe was kind enough to spear two small but mature pads with his knife (as neither of us had gloves) before shoving a stick into the base of one and handing me the “cactusicle” to carry.

We ate a pad of this Mesa, CO prickly pear.

Fortunately the cacti have a long (refrigerated) shelf life because it took two weeks and another unpleasant encounter with the glochids for me to finally get around to preparing and eating those suckers.

Colorado Opuntia

I saw several different low-lying specimens that day in Mesa, but since Cattail Bob Seebeck (1998) indicates no look-alikes for the Rocky Mountain region’s Opuntia species, poisonous or otherwise, we decided to go for it. Joe sliced the pads at their joints, though I later read a recommendation in Thayer by Carolyn Niethammer (2004) to cut the pad an inch above its base, leaving a stump for a new pad to grow.

Seebeck also notes that “Some larger prickly pear clumps may be over 100 years old” and recommends against harvesting from those.

The prickly pear cactus offers many edible products, the most well-known of which are the fruits, or prickly pears, themselves. I spent many years purchasing these plump purple fruits, called “tunas” in Spanish, from a Los Angeles farmers’ market. Inside, the seeds are tough but edible, “marginally chewable but hard enough to give your jaws a lot of exercise,” as Thayer puts it. I always ate them regardless, but some people prefer to scrape them out.

Wild nopal "flower," ready for frying.

In terms of Colorado’s wild prickly pear, Seebeck indicates that “the really succulent, fruited species are found in the southern and eastern regions of the Rockies.”

Nopales Experiment

As April is not the time of year locally for fruits, I went for the pads instead. Known as “nopales” in Spanish, the mucilaginous cactus pads are popular south of the border and in the southern U.S., either sold fresh with spines/glochids removed, or pickled in spicy vinegar. Much as I love Mexico and its cuisine, I spent years staring at this curious vegetable but only tried it recently when my local market put some big jars on sale for $2.10.

I’ll say this: “mucilaginous” is an understatement. With each sliced nopal I forked, a long trail of clear slime came with it, from the jar all the way to the cutting board. They tasted like the Serrano peppers of the pickling mix. I ate most chopped and fried with eggs in breakfast burritos—good training, I think, for my first culinary experiment with wild prickly pear pads.

Glochid Battlefield

Cattail Bob says to burn off the big spines, so I tried this first. It smelled like burning hair and by the time I got to the end of the first tiny cactus pad, the lighter was red hot and burnt my fingers. Perhaps stirring them in some hot coals might have been a better approach?

Next I donned gloves and sliced off the outer layer, digging into the indented glochid-bearing areoles with my knife while trying to hold onto the increasingly slippery cactus pad with my “cactusicle” stick. Somehow I still managed to get glochids stuck in my fingers anyway.

Wild foraged Colorado nopales with hot sauce.

No matter. After the work was done, I was proud of my sticky cactusicle and looking very much forward to eating it. Thayer says you can eat them raw but I decided to slice my nopales lengthwise to get two tiny “steaks” per pad. I sauteed them in oil until they were lightly browned and served with salt and Cholula hot sauce on top, alongside eggs with oyster mushrooms/musk mustard and dock potato pancakes.

The prickly pear pads came out juicy and crisped on the outside. Thayer says they “taste something like green peppers with the tang of purslane” and I’ll buy it, in part because I’m no good at describing flavors. Gregg said they were “slightly lemony.”

It was a lot of work for the tiny treats, but I’ll do it again—especially if I come across a finer Opuntia specimen. I suppose next time I visit a California nudist colony I’ll have to bring gloves.

Venison grill fare: Wild dry-rubbed steaks and kabobs marinated in ginger rosehip vinaigrette.

If wild is a flavor, then venison is it. I can remember days not too distant when the taste of deer was too much for me—too gamey, too foreign, too reminiscent of Bambi’s mother. Enter my brother-in-law, hunter extraordinaire, and suddenly before I know it a hunk of gifted venison is in my freezer, taunting me. How the heck am I supposed to eat that stuff again?

What worked for me back then in Los Angeles works for me still: Bathe the extra gaminess away with one or two days soaking in buttermilk in the refrigerator prior to rinsing, patting dry, and undertaking additional preparations.

Never mind how hypocritical this sounds as I write it, but this time, after painstakingly removing the “wild” from the venison, I then added it back in with the following preparations. Here are the wild things I did with our recently-thawed cache of venison steaks:

Venison Steak Rubs

After the buttermilk bath, I tried two different rubs, basting the steaks first with olive oil before pressing powdered seasonings onto both sides an hour before grilling.

Overwintered juniper berries still make for good spice.

Juniper: For the first one I used a rub of dried and ground juniper “berries” (Juniperus comunis) collected locally in the Colorado high country. This variety of juniper abounds here, so I had been looking for more uses aside from my homemade gin and juniper soda creations, and Dad suggested the rub. I ground the blue “berries” in a spice grinder (a coffee grinder works well) and patted it onto the meat, which Gregg then grilled medium rare. Although I refused to tell him what I’d used, he picked out the taste right away. The juniper is sweet, distinctive, and unmistakably wild, a more than fitting pairing with venison steak.

Sumac: The next night I rubbed two more steaks with dried sumac (Rhus spp) foraged from parts lower by my friend Butter and played the guessing game once more. Gregg again proved his prowess for identifying wild spices, picking out the lemony sumac right away. He said he preferred the sumac to the juniper but enjoyed both.

Dried sumac, whole and ground into spice.

While juniper and sumac grow wild in many places, they can also be purchased from major spice vendors such as Penzey’s. Sumac is a common ingredient in Persian cuisine.

Venison Shish Kabobs in Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette

The Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette recipe I came up with last month has turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving in our household. After polishing off several batches of last fall’s canned rosehip (Rosa spp) syrup in vinaigrette form, I decided to marinate the smaller chunks of venison in it with onions for a night and a half before skewering them alternately on damp wooden sticks and grilling.

Maybe it was how nicely the curved pieces of onion spooned the meat, or maybe it was the long marination, but the meat maintained its moisture marvelously, such that the marinated venison kabobs truly came out amazing—wild, tender, lightly caramelized, melt-in-your-mouth morsels of meaty goodness. Yum! I’m so glad we put away all that rosehip syrup in the fall, especially since at the time I had no idea what I’d use it for.

Venison Steak Sandwiches with Pennycress Honey Mustard

At the end of the multi-day venison binge, pieces of both the juniper and the sumac-spiced steak remained left over in the refrigerator, so I used them for a few days’ worth of sandwich sack lunches, slicing the meat thin on bread with mayo and …wait for it…wild pennycress honey mustard!

Pennycress mustard is made from the seeds. These dessicated, overwintered pods still contain seeds ripe for the gathering.

I expound on the topic of pennycress (Thlaspi arvense) mustard at length in the entry, Wild Mustard Potato Chips, but the addition of honey to that mustard is what made the sandwiches incredible. I’m not honestly sure whether I succeeded in creating honey mustard or mustard honey, but whatever it is, it’s fantastic on sandwiches! At risk of going too overboard in my enthusiasm, I will say that the honey was without a doubt the ingredient that mustard was missing. It could be, however, that I’m a bit of a fanatic for honey mustard.

The honey mustard is made with the ingredients outlined in Wild Mustard Potato Chips plus honey and additional thickener (like flour) to achieve the desired taste and consistency. It’s superb on venison sandwiches. Thinned a little, it would undoubtedly make a fantastic marinade as well.

Freezer Foraged Fare

Separated by years from my former self, immersed in an expansive Colorado forest with which I connect in a much different way than I once did, I now welcome a good venison steak when it presents itself. In fact, Bro, if you’re reading this, my apologies in advance if you find a certain sister-in-law digging in your deep freezer when she visits next week.

Don't eat the grass; eat the musk mustard.

Try as I might to remember, I almost always forget my shopping bags when I go to the grocery store. I rarely forget them, however, when I go into the wild.

It’s a good thing too, because Friday’s foray among the wild former farmlands of Denver’s outskirts was a shopping trip to remember; I found so many awesome “deals” [read: free green food] under the capable guidance of my dear friend, metro-area forager, Butterpoweredbike.

The Mile High City was bursting with plant life, the ground dappled with sunlight streaming through new foliage and flowers on the trees. “Stop. Listen. Do you hear that?” Butter asked. “It’s the sound of the wind through leaves. It wasn’t like that a couple days ago,” she mused happily as we skipped back with our afternoon forage of nettles (Urtica spp.) and musk mustard (Chorispora tenella).

I had managed to sting my injured knee through the hole in my pants while collecting the nettles, but Butter gave me a handful of mallow (and grass) to chew up and spit onto it. After weeding the grass from the handful, I did as instructed, and it seemed to do the trick. Afterwards we were nibbling musk mustard on the side of the trail when two gents walked by and said, “Don’t eat the grass, girls! That’s for the dogs.” Tee hee.

Wild grocery shopping is the best grocery shopping. New knee pictured at left. Pants are not new.

Denver Area Stuff in Season Now

When all was said and done I came home with many shopping bags of goodies, including what Butter referred to as “wild garlic,” thistle rosettes/crowns/roots, a few burdock (Arctium spp.) roots, horehound (Marrubium vulgare) leaves, stinging nettles, musk mustard, dock, and young, new cattail shoots (Typha spp.), not to mention the other stuff from her stores that she pressed into my hand.

Some of the spots we visited were once farmland, and because of that, asparagus and fruit trees exist in some places as “volunteers,” or cultivated plants gone wild. They can be found springing up in unlikely locations if one takes the time to look.

Some of the foods we foraged are “weeds” in the undesirable sense of the word. Burdock produces unwelcome pricker balls and is a pernicious reproducer. Farmers might invite you to dig up their thistles—certain species of which are considered to be invasive—and I can think of no other person but a forager who squeals with delight upon encountering a patch of stinging nettles.

Can you see the potential for a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship between foragers and would-be weed eradicators, one necessitating no additional poisons to be introduced into our environment? I’m just saying…

A lunch of stir fried oyster mushrooms, dock, dandelion, and wild garlic, served up by the illustrious Butterpoweredbike.

Fresh Oyster Mushrooms for Lunch

Anyway, we had fresh oyster mushrooms stir-fried with dock, dandelion greens, and the “wild garlic” over rice for lunch.

Butter foraged the mushrooms from a dead cottonwood stump the day prior and it’s a good thing she did because when we returned to the scene so that I could see where low-elevation oysters like to hang out, someone else had already sawed off the ones she left behind. Back at the house, she handed me Vera Stucky Evenson’s book, Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains (1997) and made me confirm her identification, even though she herself was confident with it already.

This double/independent verification is good strategy, especially considering the case of author Nicholas Evans, who served foraged mushrooms to a party of family members after he and his brother-in-law mistakenly put their faith in each other’s uninformed decision to eat them and ended up consuming poisonous Cortinarius Speciosissimus (deadly webcap) instead of the intended Boletus edulis (ceps). This resulted in kidney failure for Evans, his wife Charlotte, and brother-in-law Sir Alastair Gordon-Cumming.

It is not impossible to eat wild mushrooms safely, but neither is ‘To eat or not to eat’ a decision to take lightly. My PR professor used to say, “When in doubt, throw it out,” and although he was referring to that type of writing known as “spin,” the dictum is applicable to wild mushrooms as well, especially when one lacks expertise with fungi or the willingness to consult reliable ID guides.

Butter’s oysters did fit the profile for Pleurotus pulmonarius, a mushroom I’d never before eaten, though I have dined on its high elevation cousin, Pleurotus populinus. The low elevation variety is supposedly tougher, but the consistency was excellent nonetheless and 24 hours later I am happy to report I have lived to tell the tale.

Folks seem a bit incredulous that it is wild mushroom season already, but my tummy can attest to it—at least insofar as lower elevation locations are concerned. Some words of advice for the would-be mycophagist: 1. Look for mushrooms after it rains; 2. Be absolutely certain of your identification; and 3. Try not to eat Butter’s oysters.

The Denver area dock is getting big quick.

Denver Gives Good Dock

Denver dock is everywhere. I saw it growing in clumps amidst the grass on nearly every highway median that met my eye. What a tragedy to see so much good food growing by the roadside, since wild organic veggies are better when they’re not coated in automobile exhaust.

Fortunately, there are less trafficked spots hidden throughout the city, so we were able to access a dock-spotted field from an isolated roadway. “Take a lot,” Butter said, as her Denver docks are reaching the end of their spring season, during which time the basal leaves of young spring docks are clean of bugs and not yet tough or bitter.

In contrast, my dock patch at 10,000 feet has barely seen the light of day, having only recently emerged from under the spring snow melt. Upon greening, it will give good dock all season long.

Young spring cattail shoots.

While we were collecting the young, stretchy leaves, up pulled a car driven by a man in a business suit with an elderly woman in the passenger seat. She smiled at me and rolled down the window to ask what we were collecting. “Dock!” I replied enthusiastically. “Would you like some?”

In the end the duo drove away with a small bag of dock and some hastily delivered preparation instructions, including to cook the stuff. “Now we know where to get it,” the man enthused. “And it’s probably healthy too!”

Peas Are an Unusual Find

Back at Butter’s house, looking for something with which to ice my knee in preparation for the long journey home, she came up with a bag of frozen peas. Frozen peas, eh? Now that’s an unusual find for such a fanatical forager’s freezer. They must be “volunteers.”

As close as I got to oven-baked wild mustard potato chips.

“They’re practically potato chips!” Gregg exclaimed, helping himself to more of the thin-sliced, seasoned, golden-brown oven-fried potatoes until they were gone. I’m not sure which enthralls him more—my recent food inventions, or the fact that I am cooking at all.

Now that I can stand up on my own two feet (after 5 weeks off I am now to start putting weight on my injured leg), it is a joy to be in the kitchen. I cook, I clean; I must be a housewife.

The chips didn’t come out as crunchy as I’d hoped. I did them on a cookie sheet in the oven because I didn’t want to deep fry, although online recipes say to use a rack so the hot oven air can circle them entirely. Then there’s a bit, too, about flipping them manually, with which I didn’t want to bother.

So, I used a food processor to slice the potatoes fine, stirred in a mixture of olive oil and wild mustard, and stuck them in the oven on a greased cookie sheet at 350 degrees for an hour, unsticking and stirring with a spatula occasionally. The ones that turned golden were crunchy indeed, the others just a bit chewy. It was enough to ensure all were eaten in one sitting regardless.

Dried, ground pennycress seeds look like the real thing.

Wild Pennycress Mustard

I’m such a big fan of John Kallas these days, having obtained his 2010 book, Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate. I’ve wanted to make wild mustard from seeds for ages and there it was, an entire section devoted to “Pungent Greens” of the family Brassicaceae, including several recipes for making mustard from seeds.

The dried pennycress (Thlaspi arvense, Brassicaceae family) seeds in my closet are from two autumns prior—the product of an old obsession and simply begging to be eaten. I ground up a big batch in my favorite new toy, the spice grinder (which is basically just a second coffee grinder) and put it in a spice jar where it looks very much like a real, honest-to-goodness spice you might buy from the store.

Following Kallas’ cautions that homemade wild mustards can be very spicy, I added sugar, vinegar, water, and flour in sparing amounts, sort of a hodgepodge combining aspects of the recipes he puts forth in his book. Somehow I managed to use apple cider vinegar instead of the intended wine vinegar, however, so my mustard ended up extra sweet while also hot.

Homemade wild mustard, who knew?

“It looks like mustard!” Gregg exclaimed, turning the jar over in his hand to guess at what I’d made. “It tastes like mustard!” he shouted after dipping a finger into the jar. Apparently wild mustard is as exciting as potato chips.

Foraging Wild Mustards

You can’t go wrong getting the low-down on wild mustard foraging from Kallas’ book, which covers field mustard (Brassica rapa), wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris), garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), and shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris).

And, the late-season seeds are only part of it. Mustard greens are good too. Here at  11,000 feet outside of Fairplay, Colorado, the pennycress (T. arvense) produces its pepper-garlicky fresh leaves long into fall, some of which can even be dug from under snow. The first time I ate spring pennycress rosettes was after a year of observation, as many plants start out with similar rosettes. We also have peppergrass (Lepidium spp., Brassicaceae family) here, though I think both mustards came to our backyard via a shipment of topsoil from parts lower.

Too green yet to strip the seedpods, but field pennycress nonetheless.

I collected my pennycress seeds from light brown, dry plants in fall, stripping their seed-laden, papery round pods into a collecting container, and then later separating the chaff by rubbing it between my hands. Then I used Gregg’s tap-the-backside-of-a-slanted-cookie- sheet method to winnow out the seeds. It’s not a perfect science, but I discovered yesterday that the spice grinder takes care of the remaining unwanted non-seed bits like a charm.

A Tall Order

“If you could make potato chips all the time then we could stop buying them!” Gregg announced excitedly later that same evening, after the oven-fried spuds had disappeared.

Here we go again, I thought. But no worries; I’ll try to get right on that.

Two dock cream cheese spreads--one with garlic, the other with salmon.

I never would have thought it was already dock (Rumex spp.) time of year again were it not for my friend Butter and the pristine metro-Denver-area suburbia full of wild green vegetables where she resides, in contrast to the still snow-covered High Country in which I dwell. But on March 7 she wrote to me: “Knock knock! Who’s there?” and then answered her own question: “Dock!”

“It was close to 70 here yesterday, which melted the last of the snow from the ground,” Butter wrote. “I took a ride today (once again in the 30′s and snowing), and surveyed the ground. The dock plants in the sunnier areas of the fields have leaves which are 1-2″ long! I estimate that in about 2 weeks, they’ll be long enough to pick the first leaves.” Oh, Front Range Denver, I sighed. It’s like the Garden of Eden.

Sure enough and earlier than predicted, Butter picked her first batch on March 14. I know because she squealed happily to Facebookland about it, announcing plans for “a nice coconut-laced dock curry.” Honestly I am more excited than jealous.

For those who do not yet know, Butterpoweredbike mans a monthly wild food recipe-sharing event and this month she’s chosen her beloved Rumex to star in it. Send in your dock recipes or post about them and send her a link to participate, or just check back at the month’s end for a wealth of cooking/foraging ideas. Even wild food greats like veteran foraging-vegetarian, Wildman Steve Brill out of NY, sometimes participate.

Dock Recipe Trials

Dock cream cheese-spread bagels.

Although I myself do not have access to fresh dock right now, I am pleased to share my last year’s experiments, as well as some recent trial and error with a container of blanched, frozen dock I put away over summer.

• Dock Cream Cheese Spreads – Inspired by dad’s salmon cream cheese spread and mom’s presence, I used some finely chopped, thawed, blanched dock to make two spreads—hopping around on one foot, mind you, on account of my recent knee reconstruction. The first consisted of dock, cream cheese, a tiny bit of sour cream, and garlic. For the second I left out the garlic and added shredded wild-caught salmon. Both were well-received on both crackers and bagels, though of the two, mom and Gregg both gravitated towards the garlic dock spread. I was dubious but they insisted they were not humoring me when they helped themselves to seconds. “You’ll have to teach me to identify this one,” mom said of the lemony dock; “I like it!”

• 

  Dock Potato Tahini soup topped with sesame seeds.

  Potato, Dock & Tahini Soup – I was hoping the blanched dock would impart a lemony flavor to this concoction of 3 Russet potatoes, ¼ cup blanched dock, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 onion, and 2 tsp of tahini simmered together in water for a while and then blended, but it ended up not being enough dock for that so I squeezed in a hint of lemon. “I like chunky soup,” Gregg said, after I blended it. Thanks a lot, dude. The soup came out almost gray, making for an interesting presentation—especially when topped with equally light-colored sesame seeds. Gregg paused upon tasting it and said, “It’s almost bland and then you add salt and it’s great…” I’m not sure that’s a very solid endorsement. The next day I topped the leftover soup with finely ground sumac (Rhus spp.), which has a strong lemony flavor. The sumac was foraged by Butterpoweredbike and my new spice grinder does wonders getting it super fine so it’s not teeth-breakingly crunchy. It’s a nice touch and reminds me of 365 Kitchen’s yummy sumac mashed potatoes.

  

  Dock and wild mushroom stuffed pepper, because I was too lazy to dig out the stuffed dock leaves photo from the old hard drive.

• Stuffed Dock Leaves and More – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I like stuffing stuff with stuff. For this post, I was hoping to dig out the recipe for some dock-stuffed stuff I made last summer, but when I opened the file named “Stuffed Dock Leaves” I found only incoherent ramblings about an unrelated subject. Oh well. My general formula for making stuffing comes from dad and consists of melting butter or heating olive oil or some combination of both in a frying pan, sautéing onions and garlic until translucent, and then adding bread crumbs, liquid, and any other ingredients (wild mushrooms, chopped/cooked veggies) to make the stuffing. This is then stuffed into other stuff, such as Bell peppers, hollowed-out squash, or clamshells (don’t eat the clamshells!) and baked until the stuffing gets lightly browned and crusty. Last summer’s stuffed dock leaves most likely consisted, then, of a bread stuffing with finely chopped, sautéed fresh dock spooned onto a giant dock leaf, which was then folded to encase it, secured with a toothpick, painted with oil, and baked for 45 minutes or so at 300 or 350 degrees. These dock stuffed dock leaves were very popular with my boyfriend!

Dock Taste Test

Back when I was more of a beginner with wild edible plants, I went through a love-hate phase with docks. At first, I found only large dock leaves along a dusty road, foraged them when they were too old, and boiled forever only to create gross, slimy creations to which Gregg turned up his nose.

Boiled narrow-leafed dock variety. Looks funky, no?

Two summers ago, frustrated with my earlier dock experiments as well some confusion over identifying different species of dock, I undertook a taste test with two varieties I eat often: one a broad-leafed species (R. occidentalis? R. obtusifolius?) and the other a narrow-leafed one (R. salicifolius? R. triangulivalvis?). I collected relatively young specimens that time, chopping both varieties fine and then boiling in separate pots for 20-25 minutes before flavoring the mushy broad-leafed dock with butter and salt and the narrow-leafed dock with soy sauce and finely chopped raw onions.

The winner? The narrow-leafed dock by a hair, though admittedly it was poor science what with the double variable and all. Still, both were tasty enough to eat cold as leftovers for the next two days. Several authors, including the March’s in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado (1979), and John Kallas, PhD, in Edible Wild Plants (2010) indicate a preference for curly dock (R. crispus), but I have yet to try that one.

“Just keep in mind, a well-hydrated plant that has healthy great-looking leaves is more likely to have leaves that cook into greatness,” Kallas states in his discussion of curly dock harvesting, though I imagine the same principle can be applied more broadly. He says that curly dock leaf stems and main veins are tough and stringy except in very young plants, so he recommends removing them prior to preparing, but I do eat the leaf stems of my young broad-leafed variety. Kallas also says a little bit of red spotting on the leaves is not a concern. He includes some neat recipe ideas in his book, like Curly Dock Greens with Raspberries and Cashews, and that’s just in the dock section.

Sam Thayer also includes a detailed and informative dock account in Nature’s Garden (2010).

As with all things, time and practice have rendered me much more comfortable and capable collecting and consuming docks. My current practice is to collect dock leaves young—whichever variety—and sauté them, finely chopped,  in oil with onions until it the dock becomes the slightest bit fried and crispy, and then serve as a side dish or throw into stir fries or stuffings.

Get on it, Dock!

Another month or so remains before my own local docks will be ready, but based on Butter’s report, the time seems about right for those of you who dwell in parts lower, at least in Colorado. For the uninitiated, it’s a good time to be on the lookout for young docks and other edible wild plants—taking pictures, cross referencing with ID guides, and studying them as they grow. Do that and it may not be long before you develop pattern recognition for new edibles, opening up the possibility of free wild organic Rumex and other greens on your own dinner plate, in some places from spring all the way through fall.

For more ruminations on dock, particularly local Colorado High Country dock identification, please see my past entry, Reconciling Docks.

Heavenly Nevada pine nuts.

Okay so first off I have a confession about my new found pine nut obsession, which I decided to find a worthy subject for the blog despite the fact—and here comes the confession—that I did not forage them myself. No, rather, my parents purchased them for me from the grocery store.

It says “New Crop Nevada Pine Nuts” on the small label, along with a cute pine tree and a PO address. This is all I know for certain of the purveyor of this fine pine product, who send me manna from heaven in this my time of greatest need. They cost $10 a bag at City Market in Breckenridge and already mom’s bought five for me, despite what seems an exorbitant price. I love them love them love them love them.

Wild-foraged pine nuts I go back four years to California’s Eastern Sierra and evoke several memories. In my quit-smoking days I would purchase them at Mahogany Smoked Meats in Bishop (which makes the best teriyaki jerky in the world, IMHOP) to consume in lieu of cigarettes on the endless trip from Mammoth to LA and back again. Once in those days I went with my roommate to wild-forage some ourselves, only to be beaten to the crop by legions of tiny insects.

New Crop Nevada Pine Nuts, bag #3 of 5.

Also the tall pines over our porch on Main Street in Mammoth Lakes dropped long orange needles in abundance and I liked to root the tiny winged pine nuts out from among them, mining their miniscule morsels of meat whilst my roommates smoked despite the fact that I was unsure of their edibility at the time.

These pine nuts from City Market, though—they are of the same variety I used to buy in Bishop, the pine nuts of fine cookery, used in Italian basil pesto or plastered into dulce de leche candies. As they are purchased in their shells, however, I find they lend themselves less to recipe-making than to cracking between one’s teeth individually to pass the time.

The nutseeds are soft and sweet—both characteristics Gregg found to be unsavory in what he expected to be a crunchy, nut-like nut. But as for me, I can’t get enough of them. They are rich and buttery and, on the occasion that I get an older, drier one, somewhat piney as well. Frankly, I’m happy he doesn’t want any for as I said I am in the midst of obsession—and it is between me and the pine nuts alone.

Foraging as a Means for Preservation

“Know your vendors!” Pinyon Penny Frazier advises at www.pinenut.com, where she sells jumbo Nevada soft shelled pinyon pine nuts (Pinus monophylla), which are native to the Great Basin, as well as hard shelled New Mexico pinyon pine nuts (Pinus edulis), which also grow here in Colorado.

Pinus edulis by Buena Vista, Colorado.

While many pine nuts sold commercially in the United States are imported (major pine nut exporters include China, Italy, Pakistan and Portugal), Frazier explains that pinyon pine nuts are “uniquely American” and preferable to imported varieties for reasons ranging from freshness to sustainability.

“Buying our pine nuts, you support American forests,” Frazier writes of her wild-foraged product. “For over 15 years now, we have been using the proceeds of pine nut sales to preserve millions of acres of pine nut groves which are under constant threat of destruction.”

Pinyon trees take 75 to 150 years to become seed producers, and yet, “between the mid 1950s and 1973 more than 3 million acres of pinyon forests were converted to grasslands, generally under the auspices of ‘invading pinyon’ myth— a theory developed to support the creation of grasslands for the cattle industry at tax payer expense,” Frazier explains. Current threats include continued conversion of pinyon forests into pasture in the name of fire protection (which she argues to be based on poor science) and use of pinyon wood as biomass for fuel production, among other threats.

While she is in the business of selling pine nuts and other wild crops, Frazier is also quick to invite others on board, because she sees the collection and sale of wild products within sustainable management guidelines as working hand-in-hand with conservation efforts. To that end, she helped to write a management protocol for pinyon-juniper ecosystems posted at www.pinonnuts.org, which encourage consideration of cultural factors (such as traditional land use practices by Native people) via multi-stakeholder discussions in addition to habitat biology in formulating pine nut collection polices.

Bird friend hanging out.

Ultimately, Frazier explains, “We need to encourage people to harvest so the forests are protected. Our work is about the forests, the nuts are just a vehicle for that work.”

Currently, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management regulate pine nut collection based on a three-tiered system including “incidental use” (permit not required for same-day personal use), “personal use,” for which permits are generally not required, and “commercial use” for forage intended for sale or exceeding the personal use limit. “Personal use limits vary from 25 pounds per year on most BLM and Forest Service lands in Nevada and western Utah to 75 pounds per year on most BLM and Forest Service lands in Colorado and northern New Mexico,” explains pinonnuts.org.

“The more humans value a species, the more it will be protected,” Frazier asserts. “If we do not  connect with the wild foods, we run the risk of both losing the knowledge of the plant and the food source.”

Pine Nut Foraging Resources

Though I haven’t done much of my own pine nut foraging/processing here locally, I did find a couple instructional posts online that I’ll link here for when the time is right.

There are a few fun posts at Penniless Parenting; the first is freakin’ hilarious, and the second a more sober attempt to make pine nut forage work. I learned that some species have such hard shells they’ll crack your teeth, in contrast to the soft ones I’ve been eating. Apparently there can also be a messy black soot.

Pine nuts look like this on the ground. They are not round like the one Gregg picked up and broke apart only to discover it was a small poo.

Cattail Bob includes an entry on Pinus edulis in his guidebook, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado and the Rockies (1998), which is now back in print and available for purchase.

In “Gathering Your Own Pinyon Pine Nuts,” John Buckley gives gathering tips for the east slope of the Sierra Nevada while at the same time warning the non-foraging-savvy that gathering the “delectable nuts” … “may not be an effective way to supplement your fall diet” but at least “has the benefit of pleasing the taste buds, as well as making for lasting memories.”

In Search of Penis Edulis

Speaking of memories, when mom asked what we wanted to do on her last day in town, I answered that I wanted to pack a picnic lunch and head towards Buena Vista in search of “Penis edulis” trees. It was an honest albeit hilariously-botched attempt to pronounce “Pinus” in Spanish. After all, the word pinyon is but piñon en español. Gregg stared at me, dumbfounded. “What did you just say?” he asked.

Dried-out pine nuts in a cone.

“I love Penis edulis nuts and I want to find some myself,” I replied mischievously before descending into the full decrepitude of my unintended joke, which I share now for your benefit at the risk of attracting unwanted traffic to my internet weblog. The gag went on all evening and into the next day at the park outside BV—where mom, bless her heart, got down on her hands and knees under the sap-sticky conifers to find the dried shells of last autumn’s pine nuts in and among the needles.

“This is fun!” she exclaimed, venturing from picnic table to forest and back again, her hands full not only of pine nuts but also whole pine cones laden with now-defunct dry pine nuts, as the season for foraging them is long passed. I am amazed how many fit into one small cone, and all the more excited to forage some come fall—by which time I will be permitted, hopefully, to walk on uneven ground. If not, I suppose I could always call mom back out here, as I think I might have created a convert.

In the meantime, in case you haven’t yet had enough, here is a PG-13 pine nut advertisement with a monkey that might interest you.

Heavenly Nuts of the Great Basin

So where did my Nevada pine nuts come from? They weren’t Pinyon Penny’s, which are distinctively labeled—instead they bear just a small tag with a PO box address, as I explained. From whence came, then, these heavenly wild nuts that nursed me through the awful first pains of healing? Wherefrom these gifts of God and Nature and Man?

Mormons, I’m guessing.

I have a postcard en route to the PO address to find out more, but in the meantime find one of the most popular commercial purveyors of Nevada pine nuts to be the conglomerate businesses of LeBaron Pine Nuts and The Pine Nut Guys, “now joined fully as ‘WholeSale Pine Nuts” and represented by www.pine-nut.com and www.wholesalepinenuts.com. There are eons of positive reviews and testimonials published thereon. Plus, CEO Dayer LeBaron is widely cited—for example in this Seattle Times article, which discusses the climbing prices of pine nuts.

So I’m wondering if these pine nuts I love so are courtesy of they.

Pine nut processing station, mmm.

The LeBaron family represents a longstanding Pinus tradition that dates back six decades to the Mormon pioneers’ first arrival in Utah, where they traded for Utah and Nevada pine nuts with the Shoshone, Paiute, and Goshute people, according to the WholeSale Pine Nuts website.

Presumably pine nut collection continued even in the tempestuous 1970’s and 80’s, when a fundamentalist Mormon sect led by the notorious polygamist Ervil LeBaron left a trail of murder spanning the US and Mexico. Ervil himself is to be found munching on pine nuts and spitting out the shells out in Dorothy Allred Solomon’s 2003 book, Daughter of the Saints: Growing up in Polygamy. But that is neither here nor there, as polygamy and pine nuts need not have anything to do with one another.

I will say that www.wholesalepinenuts.com is a great resource for photographs, foraging tips, and weather-based pine nut crop predictions. I enjoyed reading about the glory days of American pine nut collection, back when it was a family affair, as well as the company’s “leave no trace” foraging ethic. Last, the author makes a plea, like Frazier, to cease controlled/experimental burning on public land.

A Pine Nut Production

Little did I know when I started obsessing over pine nuts a few weeks ago that it would lead me down so many meaningful and interesting paths. Not only am I a fan of the idea of foraging for sustainability, but I am equally drawn to learning more of the improbably diverse cultures that intersect over a small, piney nut.

Two thousand words later and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but my injured knee hurts now, sitting as I am upon the floor that has become my office so I can keep the leg straight out in front of me. I desperately need a break and you undoubtedly do too—so without further ado, let me bring this to an abrupt close with two last words recommended by a boyfriend who is admittedly tired of listening to draft after endless draft:

The End

Last week's spinach, iceberg, and sauteed tofu salad with Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette.

Why didn’t anybody tell me how much pain follows surgery? Here I’d pictured a scary hospital visit followed by a rosy home-bound ever-after in which I didn’t have to work and played with my toys, happy as a wounded clam.

No so much. Visits to the bathroom on crutches have felt like a knife slicing flesh and bone in my inner knee region, accompanied by a dull ache in the place where some deceased angel’s tendon now acts like an ACL for me. Mealtime means crackers because I can reach them from the bed and they settle the stomach from this bottomless cocktail of oxycontin and vicodin I’ve been imbibing.

The crackers are starting to get to me, the crumbs itching my bum in the bedsheets where I lay. Crackers from breakfast to dinner for 4 days straight—until last night, when I finally ate a big dinner topped off with a bowl of ice cream and then popped a pain pill only to wake up near-vomiting in the night.

Surely all this talk of pain and vomit is getting you in the mood for my yummy Ginger and Rosehip Vinaigrette?

But anyway, crutching my way out of my bedroom confinement to vacation in the living room today was like a revelation. It was all I could do to stand on my one good leg long enough while the bum leg burned to throw together a salad—but the light upon Mt. Silverheels was divine, and the salad, my god what a salad that was.

Rosehip soda, not yet my favorite, but at least you can see the color of the canned rosehip sauce.

Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette

I made the dressing using a jar of canned rosehip sauce that dates back to October of 2011 from rosehips (Rosa spp.) gathered in the Steamboat Springs area, and sauce being my operative term for any non-jelled and canned sweet goo in my closet that once used to be a wild plant.

The vinaigrette came out lovely and includes: rosehip sauce, vinegar, olive oil, finely chopped garlic, and finely chopped pink marinated ginger and/or marinating liquid. I don’t remember exactly how I made the rosehip sauce originally, probably by simmering the rosehips, straining and mushing the fruit through a strainer, then cooking some sugar into the juice before canning.

Tofu Spinach Salad

For the salad I used baby spinach, raw tofu cubes, and unsalted sunflower seeds, though I long to throw some wild greens into the mix come summer. It was a variation on a pre-surgery salad I made the other night, which I topped with tofu cubes sautéed in the same Ginger Rosehip Vinaigrette and soy sauce, iceberg lettuce in addition to the spinach, and carrot shavings I couldn’t be bothered with now that I am a stork. “This is a really good salad,” Gregg said of it at the time, “and I don’t like salad very much.”

I’ll tell you what, though, even without all the extra froo-froo, that salad was way better today.