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.

Pernicious, Delicious

After locking everything up on the job, I picked a bumper crop of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), a particularly nasty invasive weed which I added to my foraging repertoire last year:

The leaves of the plant have a pungent flavor similar to that of broccoli rabe, blanched and sauteed in olive oil, it makes a wonderful side dish for roast pork or a great addition to pasta (orecchiette or penne are my usual go-tos here). The weed also lends itself to being made into a nice pesto. It would also make a nice addition to a saag dish. The white taproots have a bite reminiscent of a more mild version of horseradish (Cochlearia armoracia), though they can have a 'woody' texture. I figure I'll slice them fine and add them to vinegar as an accompaniment to boiled meats.

For this batch, I am considering cooking the garlic mustard with lambs' quarters (Chenopodium album), a wild relative of quinoa, which are ubiquitous in my neighborhood, and adding the mixture to all sorts of dishes.

Garlic mustard is pernicious, but delicious... the struggle goes on, one plate at a time, but the fight is its own reward.

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.

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...