Archive for 'dock'

Baked Curly Dock Chips a la Kale Chips

Monday, May 20th, 2013 at 7:37 am  
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curly dock chips1 450x337 Baked Curly Dock Chips a la Kale Chips

Curly dock chips on the docket for snack time. The was my first batch, when I went through the effort to remove the midribs from the leaves.

Who needs kale chips when you can have dock chips? For this project—a bastardization of two online recipes for kale chips (Food Network, Allrecipes), I used young curly dock leaves (Rumex crispus) foraged a couple days ago in the outskirts of Fort Collins, Colorado. With the recent rains the dock is looking good, especially if you catch the young, light green leaves shortly after they unfurl, before the bugs have a chance to get to them.

Unlike kale, which is a mustard, dock is in the Polygonaceae family, which includes buckwheat and rhubarb—so the chips are bound to taste different than kale chips to some palates. To my simple one, both give the sensation of a melt-in-your-mouth crisped vegetable, which I find appealing.

One of the kale chips recipes I followed said to cut the leaves from the leaf stems, and to then rip the leaves into pieces. For my first trial I removed them from the midribs but didn’t rip the strips into smaller pieces, which made it easier to flip once they were in the oven. I tossed the leaves in oil and spruce salt and laid them out, not touching each other, on a cookie sheet, baking for probably six minutes at 275 degrees before flipping them over, one by one, using a spatula and my fingers. Read the rest of this entry

Wild Edible Notebook—April release!

Sunday, April 14th, 2013 at 7:53 am  
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WEN April 2013 640 226x350 Wild Edible Notebook—April release!Good news! After nearly a year on hiatus, the Wild Edible Notebook is back!

This first-time April edition centers on everybody’s favorite wild food—dandelions. Though snow still covers the ground here in the Colorado high country, the dandies have been up in Denver for a while now, and it seemed a safe bet for foragers in other locations too. I also included a piece I wrote on spring foraging in the Denver area last year. Although the season’s change is taking its time this spring (thank goodness), my hope is that this will at least get you thinking about all the delicious wild food that awaits. There’s a review of first-time author Rebecca Lerner’s recently released book, Dandelion Hunter, a wild edible poem from correspondent Brad Purcell, and a handful of recipes to boot.

I’m not going to lie to you—this issue contains recycled blog content, so if you’re an avid reader of this site, some of the text may strike you as familiar. Still, I included a bunch of as-yet-unseen photos to sweeten the deal while I wait for my own local wild food to sprout.

As with all other Wild Edible Notebooks, if you want to read it, you have to download it—and that means joining the list if you haven’t already.

How to Join the List

If you go through the process to join the list you will receive one (at most two) emails from me a month. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. To join, scroll to the bottom of this page and fill in your info. You’ll receive an email asking you to click on a confirmation link, and after doing that, you’ll get another email with the download link for the latest issue of the Wild Edible Notebook—in your choice of either a handy print-and-fold booklet or a file you can breeze through onscreen or print out one-sided. You’ll be able to access a few prior notebooks as well. Read the rest of this entry

Creamy powdered wings and blood sauce

Thursday, February 14th, 2013 at 8:50 am  
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wild mushrooms 350x316 Creamy powdered wings and blood sauce

A fall mushroom hunt yielded, clockwise from top left: hawk’s wings (S. imbricatus), porcini (Boletus edulis), Albatrellus confluens, and various puffballs. The sauce in this post is made with hawks wings.

This next mushroom sauce is the stuff of deep, dark forests and shady places, featuring flavors so strong and wild as to cause disquiet to a delicate palate while satiating those of us who desire to delve so deep.

For the second in my mushroom sauce series, then, I present venison soaked in a marinade of hawk’s wings (Sarcodon sp.) and wild red wine vinegar, topped with a Sarcodon cream sauce.

The hawk’s wings came from a two-year-old jar labeled “mature fruiting bodies” that I collected in my early mushroom hunting days. Back then I was more nervous about Vera Stucky Evenson’s advice in Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains (1997): “Only mild, young fruiting bodies should be eaten, as this fungus makes some people slightly ill.”

That year, like I did with many mushrooms, I collected the healthy hawk’s wings specimens I found—including mature fruiting bodies—but then sliced, dried, jarred and labeled them for later use. Read the rest of this entry

Late November foraging in the Denver low country

Sunday, November 25th, 2012 at 12:31 pm  
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highbush cranberry CO 350x262 Late November foraging in the Denver low country

The stinkier of the highbush cranberries, these guys are turning into sauce whether I stink my fiance out of the house or not, by golly.

Well, Denver’s not low country exactly — Mile High City and all— and the part where my friend B and I like to forage is one of the higher points in said low country, but it’s still low compared to the upper reaches of Colorado where I live, even though we moved down from 11,000 feet to 9,800-feet or so this summer.

Still, it’s supposed to be winter up here now, and most of the plants think it is, so it’s not ideal for food foraging aside from cold weather finds like pine needles for tea and flavoring or willow bark to sooth the ever-present, new-job-related headache from which I suffer.

You’ll understand why I’m so excited, then, that—after hightailing it from work to Denver for Thanksgiving and driving home to Summit County the next day only to discover I left my computer behind and had to go back to the fiancé’s parents’ house for it —I had opportunity to visit and forage food with Butter B, wildcrafter extraordinaire, and wound up going home with sacks upon sacks of wild stuff to eat.

That’s right: It’s November, and foraging season down Denver way is still kicking. Below is what I came home with yesterday. It’s stuff you might be able to spot, right now—and, upon absolute positive identification (of course), get busy with in the kitchen yourself:

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11 edible plants on North Tenmile Creek trail in Frisco

Sunday, September 16th, 2012 at 7:40 pm  
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fireweed fall 350x233 11 edible plants on North Tenmile Creek trail in Frisco

Fireweed is a little tough for outright consumption right now, but the fall leaves make a decent tea.

Last week I led my first-ever wild edible plant hike, from the North Tenmile Creek trailhead in Frisco. The hike was done through Colorado Mountain College, and instead of announcing it here or on Facebook, Gregg and I just went with it. Everyone was local and nobody had heard of this website before.

I marched the crew like a drill sergeant to 20 or so wild edible plants and regaled them with my vast knowledge on each one as we traveled up the trail a short way to the dam at the creek and back, for a total round trip of 1/2 mile in 1.5 hours.

Overall I think it went pretty well. On my feedback sheets I got mostly 5′s with a few 4′s. The chief complaints were that the participants wanted a handout, wanted the tour to go longer, or wanted it to have taken place during peak foraging season. Read the rest of this entry

Wild Edible Notebook—May Release!

Sunday, May 20th, 2012 at 7:00 am  
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WEN May2012 640 225x350 Wild Edible Notebook—May Release!Good news! A new season of the Wild Edible Notebook is here, one full month ahead of the planned start date.

This first-ever May issue of the Wild Edible Notebook features curly dock (Rumex crispus), examined both in light of its edibility and its designation as an invasive species, in a piece I wrote originally for Eat the Invaders website.  Then I interview that site’s creator, conservation biologist Joe Roman, about his invasivore project. Next comes “My Boyfriend, the Liver Fluke,” a lighthearted take on the touchy subject of those creepy crawlies who might be invading your watercress (Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum) right now. There’s a wild edible poem by correspondent Brad Purcell, a recipe for dock enchiladas by the inimitable Butterpoweredbike, and a handful more cooking ideas for dock and watercress to boot.

As with all other Wild Edible Notebooks, if you want to read it, you have to download it—and that means joining the list if you haven’t already.

How to Join the List

If you go through the process to join the list you will receive one (at most two) emails from me a month. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. To join, scroll to the bottom of this page and fill in your info. You’ll receive an email asking you to click on a confirmation link, and after doing that, you’ll get another email with the download link for the latest issue of the Wild Edible Notebook—in your choice of either a handy print-and-fold booklet or a file you can breeze through onscreen or print out one-sided. You’ll be able to access some prior notebooks as well.

Calling Advertisers

Take advantage of free advertising via the Wild Edible Notebook. This offer is open to both established purveyors of wild food products/equipment as well as individuals with classified ads. These will be free of charge until further notice, so please, send them my way and I’ll try to get you in the next issue.

New England Foraging Adventure – Part I

Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 12:53 pm  
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garlic mustard CT 262x350 New England Foraging Adventure – Part I

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?”

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Wild Shopping Spree — Denver

Saturday, April 7th, 2012 at 4:44 pm  
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musk mustard Colorado 350x262 Wild Shopping Spree Denver

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. Read the rest of this entry

Dock Time is the Right Time

Sunday, March 18th, 2012 at 10:52 am  
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dock cream cheese spreads2 350x264 Dock Time is the Right Time

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

I never would have thought it was already dock (Rumex sp.) 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. Read the rest of this entry

Seasons Change

Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 9:58 am  
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cow parsnip petiole peelings 350x259 Seasons Change

Cow parsnip petiole peelings that we discarded.

Harvesting wild edibles is not like shopping at the grocery store, where you can get your favorite fruit or vegetable the whole year long. In the wild, seasons change.

Some time ago I read a story about increased-Twitter-use coinciding with rising depression due to a person’s feelings of “missing out” on parties or social events that someone else tweeted about. Had there been no tweet, there would have been less chance of the person even realizing a party had taken place.

My sister and I talk about this feeling of “missing out” in other ways too. If a summer passes where she hasn’t made it to the beach, the water park, camping, the lake, the pool, and a half dozen other places, she feels like she and the kids have missed out.

I do it with wild edibles. “We have to get some cow parsnip before the season’s over,” I catch myself saying to Gregg, a touch of panic to my voice. For alas, the grocery store cannot fill this need for me.

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