Spring Is Here, Ouchy and Delicious

Among the welcome signs of early Spring, among the sound of the red-winged blackbird, and the sight of the American robin, is the emergence of the stinging nettles on the property.  They are small and unobtrustive at this point, but will be good eating when they get a bit taller.

Nettles have a high protein content, so their emergence in the early Spring was fortuitous for our forebears, who needed nutritious foodstuffs after a Winter of preserved foods... if they were lucky.

Back in 2020, when grocery shelves were bare (one night, the only stuff in the entire frozen food aisle at Stop-and-Shop were bags of okra, necessitating Gumbo Week), the one thought that kept me going was 'you just have to hold out for nettle season'.  Once the nettles came up, the bare grocery shelves didn't loom so large.

It helps that nettles are delicious, and, once parboiled to remove the 'sting', can be used for any applications that one would use spinach or kale for.  Even better, the emergence of the nettles is the harbinger of other plants emerging- the lambs quarters, the pokeweed... the promise of greater bounty.

A Most Welcome Spring

 This past winter was a fairly harsh one, with a two-foot snowfall setting the stage for a cold end to a season which eventually dumped a yard of snow on the yard.  Thankfully, I live in a functional state (despite our Governor turning out to be a shithead), so the harsh winter was a minor inconvenience.  Sure, there were weeks when I simply left my car at work, but I have a workplace, and the public transportation infrastructure is fantastic.

Still, I'm glad winter is over.  I can put the flannel-lined jeans in storage.  Even more importantly, old friends are returning: i heard the trill of a red-winged blackbird resounding from the marsh on the property, on the drive home I see skunks gamboling throughout my neighborhood, my beloved stinging nettles are poking through the leaf litter. Soon, the spring peepers will be chiming their love songs by the pools of meltwater throughout the night.  The robins and mourning doves have returned.  

More importantly, it's more comfortable being outside, in conditions more salubrious than cramped indoor spaces.  Soon, it will be feasible to take the old laptop outside and work al fresco.   The social isolation of a pandemic winter will be mitigated.  With the prospect of vaccines being broadly available, it looks as if a genuine spring awakening is on its way.

Newsflash: Rich Old Lady Doesn't Eat Cat Food!!!

In this all-coronavirus-all-the-time news climate, it takes a lot for a non-COVID-19 story to break out, but the right-wing outrage machine tried to make a big deal about the expensive ice cream in Nancy Pelosi's freezer. Nancy Pelosi is not a socialist, no matter what Republicans say, she is a wealthy, well-connected woman who can afford $12/pint ice cream. If she were a socialist, their outrage would be just as ridiculous- my friend Frenchie, the man who took my profile picture back in the day, once told me, "Republicans hate nothing more than a socialist who has more money than they do." These are the same sort of people who tried to portray Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' Yorktown family home, pretty much a 'starter place' not much bigger than a bungalow, as a demesne. They support a trust-fund baby with a gold-plated toilet who pretty much says 'let them drink Lysol', but they howl when a successful elderly woman doesn't subsist on cat food, or at least gruel.

I have to confess to being decadent myself. Since I haven't spent any money in a bar since March 10, I've been buying the fancy 79-cent/pound Savoy cabbage instead of the 59-cent/pound green cabbage. Oo La La, Mr Fancypants!

In the interest of full disclosure, I've been subsisting mainly on 'perpetual stews', pretty much the sort of stone soup that we would call 'suicide stew' as young-uns (empty the fridge and cupboards into a pot and pray that it's good, as it invariably is). A couple of incarnations of this have been based on Iberian cocidos or fabadas, bean soups simmered with bits of meat and a variety of vegetables, with tonight's being lima beans with Linguiça- Savoy cabbage just seems appropriate for these dishes. It's funny, my favorite YouTube chef just posted a video recipe for something not unlike what's been simmering on my stovetop all day:





He even mentions throwing stinging nettles into the soup as the 'green' component. Now, THAT is a luxury that anyone can afford.

First Signs I’ve Seen of Panic

Last night, I left for work early so I could run some errands. My first stop was an Indian grocery about halfway between home and work... if disruptions occur, and I have to subsist on rice and legumes for a while, I would need spices, and this is a place to buy them in bulk for an inexpensive price.

When I arrived, I found the parking lot full, so I parked across the street. Upon entering the store, I saw that the line for the cashiers stretched the length of the store, and the shelves were denuded of large bags of rice and various forms of ‘dal’. I pretty much left as soon as I saw I’d have little success there.

I then stopped by a small supermarket close to work, where I picked up a couple of containers of star anise (a precursor to Tamiflu- hey, even I occasionally engage in magical thinking). I checked out all of the aisles and, sure enough, about eighty-percent of the TP was gone (I bought a 12-pack two weeks ago, having been down to my last roll). Most of the dried beans were also gone, but I picked up a couple of bags of yellow split peas (alas, the pigeon peas were sold out) and some bulgur. The bread section was practically empty.

I imagine most local supermarkets are similarly cleared out. People have taken the self-isolation message seriously. Personally, I am holding out for foraging season to begin, the nettles, knotweed, and poke should be coming up any day now.

MAGACrash!

After working the graveyard shift today, I had to stay up for a few hours so I could run some errands before hitting the sack. I spent the time between getting home and the opening of the businesses I had to visit checking out the financial news... big mistake! When I was young and immortal, I used to joke that my retirement plan was an early grave, and everytime I went out on a weekend bender, I was 'paying in'. Now that I am older, wiser, and conscious of my eventual mortality, I max out my 401(k) because, when I began paying into a 401(k) it seemed like a good idea. Even though the Dow dropped more than two thousand points, I'm not freaking out- I'm not planning on retiring for a while, so there's time for the market to recover enough so that, while I will still be eating nettles, they won't be my sole source of nutrition in my latter years.

I have to observe, though, that, despite being known as the 'Party of Business', the Republicans are terrible at running functioning economies. The last stock market crash before this current one took place on Dubya's watch, now this crash is taking place under Trump's watch. You want recessions? Vote Republican! Meanwhile, I think I'll stop looking at the financial reports... on paper, I've lost thousands of dollars. I'd be tempted to make some stock purchases to take advantage of the current low prices, but the money I'd use has been earmarked for, you got it, my 401(k). At least the stinging nettles are coming back into season, so I'll be getting my hands on SOME green.

Post About Pokeweed

I'm not a Southerner by any stretch of the imagination, but I recently added pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) to my foraging repertoire. It's toxic, though tasty, and it comes up in the early spring, right around the time that my beloved stinging nettles are poking (heh) out of the ground. It was with some surprise that I recently found a post about pokeweed from the Saveur website.

It's a good article, but the idea of pokeweed making it to farmers' markets isn't plausible to me... after all, the stuff is toxic (though so are the ubiquitous kidney beans we eat worldwide). They are delicious, when boiled thrice, then cooked with oil or bacon drippings or what-have-you, but they do, as food historian and chef Michael Twitty noted in the article: “It will clean you out from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet.” I don't know if it's because the body is trying to unload the stuff, but it gives Plantago a run (heh) for the money. For the record, I also eat Plantago, but it's not very high on my list.

This post also gives me an excuse, as if one were needed, to tout Michael Twitty's work- the man is a national treasure from a historical, sociological, and culinary standpoint:





My first exposure to the man was through his collaboration with the good folks at Townsends, with his period re-enactor cooking demonstrations being a good introduction to his oeuvre:





Akara are delicious, they'd go really well with a side of poke sallet.

2018 Earth Day Musings

Shortly after dawn on Earth Day, I walked the site, opening up the parking lot gates for the public. It was 36F (2.2C) at 6:30 in the morning, in late April. Paradoxically, the cold Spring weather can be chalked up to warming in the Arctic, which disrupts the jet stream.

Having written this blog since December 2009, I have a pretty good indication of the conditions in my environment for the past eight and a quarter years. I can look back and figure out when the animals were becoming active, when the plants were starting to bud. This cold Spring, I've heard the spring peepers singing their love songs, I've seen the Canada geese building nests, heard the red-winged blackbirds trill to announce their presence. The nettles are poking up through the frost-bedizened ground. It doesn't FEEL right, though- wearing a watch cap and a fleece under my sweatshirt at this time of year is foreign to me. We humans have broken our planet (but not THE planet- there are plenty of organisms which will thrive in the fucked up world we're producing).

The current maladministration, with an Environmental Protection Agency being run into the ground by a fossil fuel flack, a rollback of fuel efficiency and carbon emission standards (though higher gas prices will curtail some driving), and general hostility to regulation, is an environmental disaster. The Resistance to the GOP, the drive to flip Congress to the Democratic Party, takes on additional urgency. Electing GWB in 2000 was a disaster- a regime hostile to environmental concerns at exactly the wrong time, and electing Donald Trump represented a doubling down of this huge environmental failing.

I'm an outdoorsy fellow- much of my work takes place outdoors, as does much of my recreation. I'm a biology nerd as well. I value our fellow denizens of Earth, but it goes beyond that- environmentalism is about human health, human happiness, human quality of life. The environment we are altering is our environment, destroying it would be our collective suicide... and that is too high a price to pay for maximizing next quarter's profits, or 'owning the libs', or trying to make up for one's deficiencies as a tough guy.

In the Spring a Not-So-Young Man's Fancy Lightly Turns to Thoughts of Eating Something Poisonous

Last year, after posting about pokeweed (Phytolacca americana), I finally tried the stuff out, even though the stuff is poisonous. Thrice-boiled pokeweed (with the water changed after each boil), known formally as poke sallet, is a staple of rural southern foodways.

Today, after locking up at work, I picked a mess of poke, which will be boiled tomorrow:

I also picked a bagfull of nettles, which pack a whallop of a sting, but have no toxins... though the mature, flower-bearing plants accumulate phytoliths, which can irritate one's urinary tract. I tend to parboil the nettles to kill the 'sting', though drying them has the same effect.

As the old maxim goes, the dose makes the poison, and even such commonly eaten plants as the ubiquitous red kidney bean and spinach contain toxins. The best way to deal with these toxins is to eat a variety of plants, which is pretty much what I get when I forage- I throw the miscellaneous greens together into a food processor and puree them into a green slurry, the composition of which varies as the foraging season progresses. Now, pokeweed will join the nettles and dock and garlic mustard and lambs' quarters and dandelion greens in the mix.

Fröhlich Walpurgisnacht

Here's wishing a happy Walpurgisnacht to all of my readers, as is my tradition. I celebrated the festival by indulging in some herbalism- picking a bunch of garlic mustard and nettles which will form the base for a batch of green slurry.

On a serious note, people are still being persecuted for witchcraft in parts of the world, with the Saudis being particularly heinous when it comes to 'fighting sorcery'.

Even in the United States, there is a witchcraft panic among evangelicals which hearkens back to the Satanic Panic of the 1970s and 80s. It's just not safe to be an eccentric in a hotbed of religious fundamentalism, especially if you are an independent, wise woman.

Anyway, be safe on this Walpurgis Night, stay away from anyone who looks like Vincent Price:





Or this guy...

Happy Easter!

Here's wishing all of my readers a happy and healthy Easter. I always loved the Easter holiday, because it signals the promise of Spring, with all that it entails. The daffodils and crocuses are in full bloom, the warm-weather birds have come back, my delicious stinging nettles are finally ready to be collected. Everything is coming awake... the toads are singing their love songs. I even saw one of our resident bullfrogs in the pond.

Today has been uncharacteristically warm (85F, 29.4C), so in accordance with recent Easter tradition, I had to yell at a couple who had jumped the fence at work. Seriously, people, there's a sign on the gate that says 'STAFF ONLY', can't you people read? There were a couple of folks in a picnic area adjacent to the parking lot... I have no problem with people on-site as long as they don't jump a fence and they know to clear off at sundown. I don't mind people looking for hidden Easter eggs, I do it myself, but they can do it in their own places.

You So Fucked

Via Interrobang's Livejournal (my blogroll conforms to Canadian Content laws), we have the sobering observation that the flowering of many fruit trees depends on a certain period of cold days. Certainly, this past year, I noticed that there was no foraged/scrumped fruit to be had... no mulberries, no cherries, no peaches, no apples, no quinces, no kousa-dogwood fruits. Put succinctly, this was a crap year for foraging, though the nettles have been plentiful and the fall re-growth is coming in luxuriously. Forget all of the idiots who claim that global warming will be a boon for agriculture, the fruit trees of the temperate world are well-and-truly boned. As someone who, despite living in a city, lives 'close to the earth', I can see consequences of climate change that most Americans would not notice... a lack, a delay, an alteration in a natural process. It's one thing to read about ocean acidification on a website or in a newspaper, it's another thing not to have any cherry cordial this year.

Post title derives from this, a topic I have blogged about before.

Polk Salad Bastard

Last month, inspired by a post about pokeweed by Thunder, I posted about pokeweed and the country-rock standard Polk Salad Annie. We actually have quite a bit of pokeweed growing on-site here, far north of the Mason-Dixon line:

I was actually lucky enough to encounter a couple of small poke plants, small enough to be solidly in the 'pick me' category:

Erring on the side of caution, I boiled the pokeweed that I had harvested in three changes of water, then sauteed it in some olive oil with some garlic. The greens have a nice flavor, similar to that of spinach... and I consumed them without any ill effects, though they do tend to 'clean you out' very well if you know what I mean, and I think that you do. I can readily see a small amount of pokeweed becoming part of the weekly foraging take, in season. We have a secondary growth of stinging nettles coming up, and the pokeweed would be a good accompaniment for the nettles and lamb's quarters in my typical green slurry.

So, now that I'm a poke-eater, I guess that I could qualify for a song of my own:


Polk Salad Bastard, the dude likes getting plastered.
Everybody thought it was a joke, that this Northern boy is chowing down on poke.
A big, bald, Schick razor shaving bastard.


I found a really great cover version of Polk Salad Annie by Sammarinese singer Little Tony (who's a better Ciacci than Scott Baio ever could be). I particularly like this version because he was singing the song phonetically and made some charming errors due to his unfamiliarity with such regionalisms as 'truck patch'. I find this version a lot of fun, but not quite as much fun as Tony Joe White's duet with Johnny Cash:





I think Italians would 'get' the whole polk salad thing- Italian cuisine specializes in making bitter things delicious, and pokeweed seems like it belongs alongside such greens as escarole, arugula, and radicchio. I think poke would go well with beans, which like pokeweed can be poisonous if prepared incorrectly. Like poke, they can also clean you out really well.

The Affliction and the Cure: Both Delicious

Walking across the property this evening, I ran across a storied plant combination:

In the foreground, on the left, one can see some of my beloved stinging nettles, while the spindly plant with the narrow leaves is curly dock. The plants are known to grow together frequently, and crushed dock leaves are reputed to take out the sting of the nettle... though this may be B.S. At any rate, the dock/nettle combination is one that you should familiarize yourself with, so you won't face situations like this:





Pity Mr Bishop didn't know that he could have had that entire weed patch for dinner. For the record, the broad leaved plant in the background is burdock (Genus Arctium), which is known for its edible roots.

Happy Easter!

Here's hoping that everybody had a Happy Easter. To me, Easter's always been about the Earth's return to vibrancy after winter. Once Easter rolls around, it's safe to say that Spring is in full swing. Here at work, the daffodils are at their peak. Check out these lovely cream colored ones with yellow centers:

They make a nice contrast with the more conventional yellow ones:

All over the site, there are green things popping up- crocuses, wild alliums, and my beloved stinging nettles. There are no chocolate bunnies growing on trees, but I can't complain... I prefer the real ones to the chocolate ones... though I guess a conejo mole poblano could be considered a chocolate rabbit.

I Don't Worry, I've Got Slurry

There are few things more delicious than a fine green curry, but that's not the subject of today's post. Rather than writing about green curry, today's topic is a green slurry, composed of foraged greens, that makes up a large component of my Spring diet:

This particular slurry contains about fifty percent stinging nettle, and about forty percent garlic mustard, with the remaining mix being curly dock, dandelion greens, and a wild Allium that grows all over the place. While the slurry doesn't look auspicious or delicious, it has a fine flavor. I've already used it as the base for croquettes (adding eggs and bread crumbs), and for a pasta sauce (adding a roux, some milk, and pecorino Romano cheese). The latest use for the slurry is a batch of hortopita, rolled up "cigar style" for ease of snacking:

If I had to guess, I'd bet that the butter/olive oil mix that I brushed the filo dough with has more calories than the rest of the ingredients put together

As the season progesses, the composition of the "slurry" will change. I'm planning on freezing some nettles to tide me over when the plants flower and develop phytoliths, but the main base for the slurry will shift to chenopods and garlic mustard. The current batch of foraged greens is about 50% nettles, 40% garlic mustard, with ten percent a mix of dandelion, dock, alliums, and a hint of plaintain (an herb I'd previously used only as a topic itch reliever).

A spoonful of slurry will cure what ails you!

An entire summer's worth of slurry, and I'll be unstoppable.

Noxious Nosh

This year, I added a new plant to my foraging repertoire. One of my favorite websites is Eat the Invaders, a listing of edible invasive species. One of the most noxious invasive plants in North America is garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), known as Jack-by-the-Hedge in England, a Brassicacous Eurasian plant which is supplanting native woodland herbage throughout the continent. The plant has a tendency to kill the native fungi which have mutualistic symbiotic relationships with native plants. By killing the beneficial fungi, the plant can take over habitats that it is introduced into. It's also delicious.

Like a lot of foragable edibles, garlic mustard was initially introduced to the New World as a vegetable and medicinal plant. Foraging maestro Steve Brill compares the long taproot with horseradish, hilariously noting:

Use them like horseradish, grated into vinegar, as a condiment. I love chopping these roots into thin slices, and handing them out to children during classroom visits. Overwhelmed by the pungency, chaos reigns as the kids rush to the water fountain. Then they all want seconds.

I'd have to concur. The greens taste a lot like broccoli rabe, having a pungency which I particularly like, but which might not please all palates. The immature flowers even look like broccoli rabe flowers:

The mature flowers are white and cross-shaped:

Once you can identify the plants, you will see them everywhere, which is why you must eat them... if you want to save the forest, grab them and devour them.

I grabbed a bagful of garlic mustard and a bagful of nettles, plus a handful of young dandelion leaves. I am planning on making a hortopita with these greens. Mixing the greens is a good idea, because I forage opportunistically, taking whatever is available, and because mixing the greens tempers the pungency or bitterness of the more "challenging" ones- the nettles are tasty but somewhat bland, the perfect foil to the dandelions and garlic mustard. Additionally, some of these greens contain high amounts of oxylates, so it's good to mix them up.

This time of year, I almost never buy salad greens, because there's such a bounty of feral foods. Most of these plants are "forgotten" vegetables, once valued culinarily, but now sadly neglected. In their neglect, they've "left the farm", usually to become pests. If more of us valued them, and used them, we can stop them from being so pernicious.

It's Supposed to be SPRING!!!

Tonight, I had to hunt for my winter hat before heading off for work. It's supposed to dip down to right around the freezing point. Last week, the mercury hit 77 degrees (25 Celsius) and I was wearing shorts as I strolled throughout the neighborhood. I'm glad I didn't plant anything (I have some butternut squash seeds I plan to plant in a corner of one of our sites) yet.

I have a suspicion that the temperatures are going to jump from the current lows to a summery heat in the course of the next couple of months. If last year is any indication, it'll be a crappy year for wild berries. Oh, well, at least the lambs quarters will be plentiful.

Thunder keeps trying to send redbud flowers my way, but Old Man Winter keeps sending them back to dormancy. He's got his redbud already, so I see a redbud salad in his near future. I'll have to make do with my nettles for the time being.

The Daffodils Are Nice, But...

We have a profusion of daffodils at several of our sites, and they happily were in full bloom around the time of our Spring fundraiser. The daffodils are lovely, but the resurgence of the stinging nettles makes me happier than their blooming. Long-time readers will know that I eat a lot of stinging nettles in the Spring.

Nettles have a high protein content for a green vegetable. Being one of the first herbaceous plants to emerge in the Spring, nettles were an important food in the days before fresh produce could be shipped from distant parts. This onetime "make it or break it" food has fallen off the radar for most people, but there are a handful of nettle adherents out there.

For the next two months, I'll be subsisting on nettle soup, nettle fritters, creamed nettles, nettle hortopitta, nettle pesto, nettle quiche, nettle omelets, nettle... I think you get the picture. I'm kinda like Yosemite Sam in Rabbitson Crusoe with his coconuts, but I actually love nettles:





I don't know if you can eat daffodils... nah, the very dedicated gardeners of our grounds department would have my head.

Thoroughly Nettled...

Aunt Snow's latest post shows a picture of a lovely dinner that her son cooked. The last thing I cooked was a big pot full of delicious, nutritious stinging nettles. Every spring, I subsist largely on nettles- they grow profusely on a couple of my jobsites, so they are free and plentiful. Even better, they are packed with protein, and historically were a crucial post-winter food, bridging the lean period between the end of winter the the appearance of late spring's bounty.

To be entirely candid, I merely parboiled the nettles to neutralize the "sting" of their urticating formic acid-filled hairs. Now that they are parcooked, I will treat them in the same way I treat spinach. I can now use them to make nettle pesto, nettle soup, creamed nettles, nettle fritters, nettle pie, nettle omelets... thankfully, unlike this guy, I actually like the basic component of my spring diet. The nettles are good until their flowers develop, which in these parts typically occurs in late June- after that, phytoliths in the leaves can harm the kidneys. Given their ubiquity on-site, they'll be a major component of my meals for the next month and a half.

I am always happy to see the nettles appear on the property, though I believe I am the only one who feels this way- the wineberries receive a much warmer reception.

Opening Day

Today was the first day of the regular tourist season. We've had various group tours and a couple of special events, but this was the first day the doors were open to the general public for regular tours. I got to work with two of my favorite co-workers, a sweet woman who, like my mom's mom's mom had, has Graubünden roots, and a hilarious, flamboyant rocker gal who wears a ton of eccentric jewelry and used to be in an almost-up-and-coming band in Germany in the late 70s (the latter took these pictures last year). Visitation numbers were good- several tours had to be added to the schedule.

When things quieted down, I ascertained that the loon is still on site- my first sighting of it was two weeks ago. As an added treat, there was a osprey on the premises, perched in a tree in the same vicinity that the loon tends to occupy.

Behind our visitors' center, the gorgeous flowering bushes (I'm pretty sure they're Viburnum) are giving off a most delightful fragrance:

The daffodils are still doing quite well. More importantly, my stinging nettles are coming in like gangbusters, and I plan on picking a bunch of them tomorrow so I can make creamed nettles on my day off- I've gotten pretty good at making Yorkshire pudding over the past month or so, so I'll probably split the little things open so I can fill them with nettles.

I'm happy to say that our opening day was a success, and I hope that it portends a great upcoming season. I'm actually pretty optimistic here.