Archive for 'mertensia'

Stir Fry on the Wild Side

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011 at 6:21 am  
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wild everything stir fry 350x279 Stir Fry on the Wild Side

A delicious and attractive wild stir fry.

Yesterday I experienced the somewhat unique problem of having too many bags of wild edible plants in my refrigerator and not enough “normal” food with which to make lunch. So I improvised—and it worked out surprisingly well. 

When In Doubt, Stir Fry 

My most successful stir fry in recent months, then, involved sautéing finely chopped red onions and fireweed shoots for 10 minutes in olive oil, then adding yucca petals and Mertensia leaves, sautéing for another 5 minutes, and serving with noodles. 

Normally I add a sauce to my stir fries, but this time I didn’t season it at all. Yucca was the dominant flavor, followed by the onions and olive oil. The fireweed shoots made for a nice, crispy texture, and although the Mertensia leaves lost the mild oyster-like flavor they have when raw, upon cooking they turned a beautiful bright green that made the dish look fantastic.   

Here are some more details on the wild ingredients:  Read the rest of this entry

Stalking Bluebells through the Wild Food Literature

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 3:25 pm  
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bluebell mertensia 229x300 Stalking Bluebells through the Wild Food Literature

A pretty bluebell of the genus Mertensia.

[This is an updated version of an entry posted at etmarciniec.com]

Quite a few people have told me that “bluebells” are edible, and yet, despite my growing collection of books on wild edible plants, I’ve only found one reference to them as a food source.

“The leaves are awesome,” my friend Rachel Sowers, a gardener by trade, told me as we rode up the chairlift near the season’s end at Arapahoe Basin. “If you’re camping in the backcountry you can add the leaves to a salad. They’re super tasty.”

And, a friend of Gregg’s sister “goes gaga for bluebells,” as she put it, but has also, on occasion, eaten enough of the bright bell-shaped flowers to become sick. 

Last summer I tasted a few bluebells at Gregg’s behest because he, too, recalls eating them, although he was unable to remember when or how he came by the knowledge of their edibility.

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