GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: foraging

Dandelion Greens & Bacon Salad Recipe : GF Video

What do you with dandelion greens? You make a salad of course. Watch our video to find out how to identify and forage for dandelion in your yard, and make a great salad. If you are looking for edible plants in your yard, make sure the yard hasn’t been treated with herbicides or other things that are bad for you to ingest. Check out our other foraging videos here.

How To Find and Prepare Dandelion Greens

Wild Greens are abundant if you live in an area with grassy weedy places. They grow, we eat them. Things like mustard grow wild, wild onions, dandelion, purslane, burdock, all sorts. What I like about dandelion is it is ubiquitous and abundant, and it grows all summer. It is said that the dandelion greens are more bitter after the dandelion flower have bloomed, but my personal experience has been mixed. It is true the older the leaf, the more bitter it will be.

I do suggest buying at least one foraging plant identification book, I’m a big fan of Leda Meredith’s Foraging Books, she also has regional foraging books out as well. A second book you might consider is Joy Of Foraging.

Follow this simple dandelion greens recipe, and all will be great. It uses items you probably have in your fridge.

Dandelion Salad Recipe makes 2 salads

1 bunch of dandelion, about a large handful, tap root and flower stems removed, washed and dried.

2 strips of thick cut bacon

balsamic vinegar

2 eggs, poached for 3 minutes

1 avocado

Cook the bacon to crisp

While the bacon is cooking arrange the dandelion in two salad bowls or plates.

Cut the avocado in half, core and add to the bowls

Add the poached egg on top of the greens,

Cut the bacon into small pieces, spread over the salad

Pour about a half teaspoon of the bacon grease from the pan over each bowl.

Serve as soon as possible.

Now on to foraging for Lambsquarters!

Wild and Urban Foraging for Lambsquarters : GF Video

December 30, 2017
Foraging Guide Books For Your Area – My Suggestions
There are some good foraging guide books for the whole of North America, as well as other continents, but even better are edible plant guides that are local to your area. Here are a some that I like.

In the U.S., the northeast and the southwest are very different with regard to native plants, so why not a edible plant book that focuses on that area? Lucky for us, Timber Press had put together a foraging guide books series with regional experts in foraging. Yeah!

Even better, their book for the Northeast is authored by Leda Meredith, who has been on our podcast. Neat.

I have the Northeast Foraging book, and have browsed the rest of these in bookstores and online, and I give them all a thumbs up. I have met some of the people at Timber Press and what’s not to like about a group of people who publish cool helpful books. I picked up my copy of Northeast Foraging at Oblong Books in Millerton, NY. If you are in the Berkshires, go there, buy books, then get coffee around the corner.

This isn’t some half baked set of edible plant books, its a curated cast of authors with local knowledge of what grows near them and what you can eat. Plus, how you can use them in the kitchen. Its not all just some leaves you toss into salad, though that’s all good with me.

I was thumbing through Leda’s book on Northeast Foraging and its interesting that I landed on the Garlic Mustard section, which I just wrote about. And I learned from her that you can also harvest the seeds later in the summer to store for a winter snack. Always learning something.

Please consider buying these books from an independent bookstore, you can order from them online, find yours here.

Here are the links to each book on Amazon, (we get a referral fee on Amazon purchases)
May 10, 2017
Garlic Mustard Weed, Is It Edible? Yes!

To me, Garlic Mustard Weed isn’t a weed, its a salad green, right alongside Mesclun. Maybe because it is so ubiquitous in my area people call it a weed. I call it free food.

Garlic mustard weed identification is pretty easy, not many plants look like this. These photos are of a the mustard in its second year of growth. The first year it is a low growing green, with what I call a rosette of small green leaves. In its second year, it shoots up with larger leaves and flowers.

Photo by Srtg CC 3.0 Wikimedia

Is Garlic Mustard Weed Edible?

According to Wikipedia, Garlic Mustard was “one of the oldest discovered spices to be used in cooking in Europe”. You can use the leaves and flowers in salads. I make a really nice pesto with the leaves, watch my video here. In France the seeds are used to season food. So yes, garlic mustard is edible.

This weekend I saw some growing along a stone wall near the house so I pulled over and took these photos, then pulled up the plants by their roots. Free food! In a few minutes you have a sharp tasting mustard green for your salads, soups, and pesto. How cool is that?

I pull the leaves off the stems and save the flowers whole to drop on top of the salad. This green works well with a balsamic vinegar salad dressing, as it has a pretty strong flavor. Add in avocado to balance it out. That ying-yang thing applied to foraged and farmed foods. The irony of that being you pulled the greens from the side of the road and the avocado had to be trucked a long way to your kitchen.

To harvest this wild mustard, bring along a trowel or small shovel, and grab the plant by its base and pull out the whole plant, root and all. Don’t feel guilty pulling this out of the ground. In the U.S. this is an invasive plant that is bad for our local trees and fields. It emits chemicals that make the soil hospitable to its growing and everything else dying, basically.

Garlic mustard produces allelochemicals, mainly in the form of the compounds allyl isothiocyanate and benzyl isothiocyanate, which suppress mycorrhizal fungi that most plants, including native forest trees, require for optimum growth. However, allelochemicals produced by garlic mustard do not affect mycorrhizal fungi from garlic mustard’s native range, indicating that this “novel weapon” in the invaded range explains garlic mustard’s success in North America. Additionally, because white-tailed deer rarely feed on garlic mustard, large deer populations may help to increase its population densities by consuming competing native plants. Trampling by browsing deer encourages additional seed growth by disturbing the soil. Seeds contained in the soil can germinate up to five years after being produced (and possibly more). The persistence of the seed bank and suppression of mycorrhizal fungi both complicate restoration of invaded areas because long-term removal is required to deplete the seed bank and allow recovery of mycorrhizae. Wikipedia

In other words, this plant is not good for your local area, so pull it out by the taproot and enjoy it in your salads.

May 10, 2017
Foraging For Edible Wild Plants In The Backyard – GF Video

There are edible wild plants in your backyard that you can forage for and make a great salad from. No need to go to the farmers market, you’ve probably got edible greens in your yard you can eat. Identifying and harvesting edible plants is called foraging, but I call it free food in your yard.

Below are some photos for plant identification, but be sure you know what these plants are. These are fairly unique plants, but be sure, OK? And make sure the area you are foraging has not been sprayed with fertilizers, herbicides, etc. You don’t want that stuff getting into your food. You can buy Leda’s Foraging Book here.

Some Wild Edible Plants:

Dandelion

When harvesting dandelion, you can choose to leave the plant in the ground and growing if you want. Just harvest the outer leaves and the plant will continue to grow. The leaves get stronger tasting when the dandelion flowers, but I think you’ll find the taste pleasing.

Plantain

Plantain grows close to the ground usually. Once it sprouts its flower stem, you probably don’t want to forage for it, as the older leaves are not as great to eat. They can be stringy.

Chickweed

Chickweed grows in nice big bunches, and if you cut off just the top 3-4″ of the plant, it will keep growing. It self seeds if you let some of the plants flower and go to seed. Then you’ll have more free food!

Garlic Mustard

Garlic Mustard is a non-native invasive plant. I see it along roads a lot. Harvest it by pulling up the whole plant with the roots. This plant will crowd out native plants, and most states want to get rid of it. The leaves taste like mustard greens, though not as strong. It has some good vitamins, so eat up.

Violets

Violets grow like weeds. There are some cultivated varieties, but the ones in our yard are wild edible plants, and easy to identify. They are low growing and have white – purple flowers. Harvest the flower and stem for your salads. They look great on a dinner table.

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May 19, 2015
Oyster Mushroom Hunting – GF Video
Here’s a mushroom hunting video about some really amazing oyster mushrooms we found growing along the side of the road right near our house

A few things to keep in mind when you’re going mushroom hunting:
- bring along several identification books we like a couple that we listed at the end of the video here
- learn from someone who already knows what they’re doing take a class or ask if you can tagalong with someone who is a mushroom expert
- Join your local mycological society, in other words your local mushroom group. You can learn a lot from these people and they might even take you long to show you some really cool spots to go mushroom hunting.
When you find some mushrooms you want to harvest, don’t take all of them. Leave one third of the mushrooms there so the mushrooms can propagate they will release their spores and they will grow more mushrooms that you would go in harvest.
After a while you’ll be able to recognize some of the common edible mushrooms in your area but bring along several mushroom identification books anyway. I really like the Audubon guide and there are also several regional guides. We have a few for the Northeast United States or New England listed those below.

Avoid mushrooms that have slugs or bugs in them, yes they are a protein, but many don’t taste that great. You can wash mushrooms, but they usually only need to be brushed off. You can use a towel, I’ve seen mushroom brushes that look like a whisk broom/porcupine thing. So again, if you’re not quite sure don’t eat it or check with your friend who is an expert OK?

Want to grow mushrooms, watch this vid: How To Grow Mushrooms From Plug Spawn – GF Video

Here are more mushroom hunting and mushroom identification videos for your here on GardenFork:

Oyster Mushroom Identification

How To Cook Mushrooms

Wild Mushrooom Risotto Recipe

Click here to see our other mushroom identification posts

Cross check the mushrooms you find with several sources, books are best, I think. I use several books for identifying mushrooms , below are the mushroom identification books I recommend:

Click Here To Buy From IndieBound
Click Here To Buy From Amazon

Click Here To Buy From IndieBound
Click Here To Buy From Amazon
November 14, 2014
Foraging For Wild Garlic : GF Video

Foraging for edible plants in the spring includes looking for edible wild greens like wild garlic, also called spring garlic. This edible wild food is one of the first plants to start growing after the long winter, and is ready for your dinner plate. Wild Garlic looks like a young scallion plant or chives, and is edible. The taste has a slight garlic aroma, but its definitely in the onion taste family. You can find this edible plant growing in lawns and forest edges. Many consider it a weed, however we think it a great addition to salads or meals.

Be Safe In Your Foraging!

Double check with a good plant identification book! At the end of the post are some books we suggest. Always be sure with your plant identification before adding this to your soup.

According to Wikipedia, when cattle eat wild garlic, it can give a garlic-like taste to the milk and beef, interesting. It is native to Europe and considered an invasive here in North America.

I see this edible plant growing in yards a lot. I’m sure the homeowners don’t realize they have food growing in their yard! To harvest the wild garlic, its best to use one of those 3 pronged garden fork hand tools. You have to dig down a bit to get out the bulbs, or you can snip off the green stems and they will grow back. As the plant matures, unfortunately the stems get woody and aren’t good eating. If you pull this plant out of a park or someone’s yard, make sure it hasn’t been sprayed with an herbicide. Not a good thing to be eating that stuff.

Let us know what you know about this plant or any questions below:

June 7, 2013
Dandelion Greens : Info, Recipes, Videos

Pulling some dandelions in our of our raised vegetable garden beds this weekend, I was able to pull some of the dandelion greens out whole, with their taproot. wow. The raised beds have great garden soil in them, and they weed easily; with little work the long taproot came out with the dandelion plant. Dandelions can be persistent if one does not get out the taproot, they will grow back if you just snap off the greens; which can be a good thing if you are growing dandelion for food, no need to reseed, just snap off the top.

These dandelion greens were in the wrong place in our garden, so I pulled them for salad. They were in what was our tomato bed last year, peeking out from the side of the black plastic I use as a mulch and thermal blanket to keep weeds down, heat up the soil in the early spring, and conserve moisture in the soil.

Dandelion Greens are super healthy for you, they are high in Vitamin A, C, & K. They taste great in salads, soups, and whatever else you would toss a hardy green leafy vegetable into. The greens can be bitter, and sometimes people blanch them to get rid of some of that bitterness.

All parts of the dandelion plant are edible, most people think of dandelion greens, and dandelion wine, but what about the taproot?

The dandelion taproot can be used to make a coffee alternative, much like burdock root is used to do the same. The taproot is also used to make a British drink called Dandelion and Burdock, and is used in making root beet. Perhaps this is where the ‘root’ part of root beer comes from.

I’ve got burdock growing the the yard near the woodshed, this year I’ll look into making this english drink.

We’ve made a few videos about dandelion greens and how to cook with dandelion with these recipes:

Harvesting Dandelions Greens & Salad Recipe

Dandelion Greens with Bacon

Here is a good book on foraging to get you started;

Order From An Indie Bookstore Here

Buy From Amazon Here

April 29, 2013
Daylilies – Foraging for Edible Plants : GF Video

Foraging for wild plants starts in your backyard with foraging for daylilies. These edible plants in the yard are an edible wild food. Today we talk about foraging the young shoots of the common Daylily, which are edible and great in salads. Daylilies are a non-native, and can be an edible invasive plant, especially the common orange daylily, which grows throughout the eastern U.S.

Harvest the young shoots of the daylily for one of the first foraged meals of the spring season. The plants leaves will grow back, just be sure not to whack too many of them if you want them to grow again. If you find the invasive plants in a natural area, like a forest or meadow, its ok to harvest with abandon, in my book. Daylilies belong in your yard, not natural areas. Here is some information on the invasive kinds of daylilies from the National Park Service.

You can eat other parts of the daylily, but for this foraging video, we will focus on the young leaves. We’ll talk about harvesting other daylily parts in upcoming videos.

On a tangent, there has been talk of terminology, and that we should not be forarging, but instead wildcrafting. Wildcrafting is fun word, it brings up all sorts of imagery in your head when you say it.

Also there are issues of what and how much of something one should harvest when foraging. On foraging for daylilies, I believe its OK to harvest what you want, as long as its in your yard or you have permission to be where you are, as these are non-native plants in the U.S.

Watch All Our Foraging Videos Here

Buy Foraging Books on Amazon Here

Buy Foraging Books on IndieBound

April 18, 2013
Foraging Blogs Better Than GardenFork

On Twitter, Alexa asked me and a few foraging experts about identifying Mustard Garlic, and at the same time, she introduced me to 4 foragers who have websites and books on foraging.

Full Disclosure: I am not the high priest expert on foraging or edible plants. Like most things, I know enough to be dangerous. But Alexa was nice enough to include me in her question.

Now that my place on the foraging scale is clear, here is a GardenFork video we did on foraging Garlic Mustard and Stinging Nettles to make a great Garlic Mustard Nettles pesto recipe.

This is what I love about creating GardenFork – people who I’ve met introduce me to new people doing cool stuff. In no particular order here are 4 foraging wild food people who I now read thanks to Alexa, please check out their sites and social media feeds:

Tama Matsuoka Wong, @meadowsandmore, is a self-described weed eater, and is a TEDx speaker. She partners with Chef Eddy Leroux on their site, Meadows and More. They also both work with Restaurant Daniel in NYC. Tama and Eddy have published Forage Flavor, Finding Fabulous Ingredients In Your Backyard or Farmer’s Market.

Becky Lerner, @UrbanForager, has a blog on Urban Foraging: Wild Plants for Food, Medicine, and More in Portland, Oregon. Becky has published Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness. I like what Rolling Stone wrote about Rebecca and her book:

If and when the apocalypse arrives, you’ll want Rebecca Lerner by your side.

Go check out her blog and book and ask about the 9 month wilderness survival program she took.

Langdon Cook, @langdoncook, whose blog is Fat Of The Land, Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, also has a book of the same name. His expertise is in wild foods and the outdoors. Langdon hosts foraging workshops like many do, but he teaches about foraging for shellfish, which never crossed my mind before.

This being one of those head-slap moments, because I go surfcasting on the Rockaways, and I bet there are shellfish there too. ( Here’s a video we did on Surfcasting )

Karen Monger, @the3foragers, and her family go foraging, and document their experiences on their blog, The 3 Foragers. Karen lives in Southern Connecticut, I live in Northwestern Connecticut, so we come across many of the same plants. We are lucky to have an abundance of mushrooms at certain times of the year. (Last fall we had a ton of oyster mushrooms in our area, here’s a video we did on them.) I like the posts Karen has put together about foraging for invasives that are prevalent in our area. We’ll be doing a video about one of them, Japanese Knotweed.

Get their books on Indiebound:
Foraged Flavor from IndieBound
Dandelion Hunter from IndieBound
Fat Of The Land from IndieBound

April 17, 2013
How To Cook Mushrooms : GF Video

Learn how to cook mushrooms in our latest foraging – mushroom identification video. We made a oyster mushroom identification video, and people asked us to show how to cook mushrooms, so here is our mushroom cooking video!

The oyster mushrooms we use here were cultivated mushrooms, and you can grow your own mushrooms, here’s post about growing mushrooms here, but we bought these at the food coop. In the growing season you can go mushroom hunting, but be sure to learn from an experience mushroom foraging person, and bring your mushroom identification books with you. Below are a few of the mushroom books we like and use.

To clean mushrooms, I just brush them off with a towel, you can also wash them, but its not always necessary, I feel, but you should do what you want, because you’re going to do that anyway…

Butter, Salt, & Pepper are the key ingredients in this simple sauted mushroom recipe, and the cast iron pan is great for cooking mushrooms, holds heat nicely and its evenly distributed too.

You can store mushrooms in your fridge or a cool basement, I keep them in a paper bag that’s not closed tight. Plastic bags will cause the mushrooms to go bad quickly, I think. Also when you are foraging for mushrooms, bring along a few paper bags, its the best way to store them while you hike around, IMHO.

Below is my favorite book I use for mushroom identification, let me know any other suggestions you have in the comments below:

Click To Buy From An Independent Bookstore

January 25, 2013
Oyster Mushroom Identification, Foraging, Hunting – GF Video

Foraging for Mushrooms this fall, I found a bunch of Oyster Mushrooms, and made this Mushroom Identification Video. Oyster Mushrooms are edible and delicious. They grow on dead or dying trees. The trees can be standing or on their side. I’ve found oyster mushrooms growing out of the ends of cut logs, and the stumps of dead trees.

Oyster mushrooms grow in clusters, and are usually stacked on top of each other, the individual mushrooms are kidney shape. It has gills and doesn’t have much of a stem. Oyster mushrooms are white to tan colored, they are usually darker in color later in the season. The mushrooms in this video were harvested in late November.

When harvesting, I always leave some mushrooms on the tree to allow the mother plant to spread spores to create more mushrooms. So don’t strip a tree of all its mushrooms, you may get a second growth of mushrooms on the same tree, so check back a week later, or after a rain.

Be sure to be very sure what you are doing when foraging for mushrooms! Learn from someone who is a practiced mushroom hunter, or consider taking a class. Do a web search for your state or county or city and “mycological society” and you may find a group offering classes. Also check nearby nature centers.

Click here to see our other mushroom identification posts

Cross check the mushrooms you find with several sources, books are best, I think. I use several books for identifying mushrooms , below are the mushroom identification books I recommend:

Click Here To Buy From IndieBound
Click Here To Buy From Amazon

Click Here To Buy From IndieBound
Click Here To Buy From Amazon

December 6, 2012
Foraging: Staghorn Sumac GF Video

Part of our Foraging and Urban Homesteading Video Series, we show you how to forage for foods in your backyard. This foraging video is about the Staghorn Sumac and the tea or sumac-ade you can make from the seedhead of a sumac tree.

Staghorn Sumac

I remembered this drink you can make from a report I did in 6th grade, it was a cookbook of sorts of Native American foods, I think my teacher was underwhelmed by report I did, but this must have had an influence on me, in some subtle way.

In addition to the tea you can make from foraged sumac, the sumac seed pods are used in middle eastern cooking. The seeds are ground and used as a spice powder, added to dishes such as hummus and salads. neat!

According to Wikipedia, the center stem of the sumac was also used by native americans as pipe stems. Sumac also had medicinal uses in Medieval times.

Sumacs grow along forest and field edges, fence rows and the sides of the road. They are called a pioneer plant, they are one of the first bush plants to grow where a field is turning into a forest, or where the soil has been disturbed.

Their leaves are an easy way to identify the plant, especially in the fall, as they have a great red-yellow color to them.

Be sure to know the difference between Staghorn Sumac and Poison Sumac. The names of the plants are similar, but the plants do look quite a bit different. Staghorn sumac has a very unique upright seed head, usually red in color. Poison Sumac looks much more like poison ivy, and its seeds hang downward.

Poison Sumac looks like Poison Ivy – USDA photo

What can you add to our knowledge of Staghorn Sumac and foraging? Let us know below:

October 31, 2012
Urban Foraging Chestnut Tree Chestnuts

Bitten by the urban foraging bug, I’m always looking at plants and trees in New York City now. There’s lots of food around if you look. On the way to the subway in Park Slope is a Horse Chestnut Tree, and every year the sidewalk is littered with the empty chestnut shells – the squirrels have gotten most of the nuts.

The nuts are called conkers, which were used to play a game in the UK called conkers as well. The nuts are considered slightly poisonous, though deer eat them.

The beekeeper and tree nerd in me was wondering whether horse chestnuts were self pollinated or needed a second chestnut tree for pollination, and whether they were insect pollinated or wind pollinated. According to wikipedia the trees are pollinated by birds and insects, and I found a second horse chestnut tree around the corner from this tree. neat.

“Raw Horse Chestnut seed, leaf, bark and flower are toxic due to the presence of esculin and should not be ingested.” says Wikipedia. There are a number of medicinal uses for some of the compounds found in the Horse Chestnut conker, which doesn’t surprise me for this cool looking plant.

Horse Chestnut in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY

What interesting nut trees have you found in your area? Let us know below:

October 14, 2012
We don’t like candycorn GF Radio

We thank Matt Cuba for fixing the GardenFork site!

Rick and Eric talk about Halloween, moving apartments, boxes from old moves you’ve never opened.

Beekeeping overload has happened to Eric, with the realization that one can only eat so much honey. Rick talks about queenless hives.

What fun we had with Lynne Rossetto Kasper of The Splendid Table! we hope to have her back on to answer more of our questions.

The most recent foraging edible plant identification video about purslane is talked about, and upcoming show on sumac.

Wondering how to remove latex paint from the floor, check out this picture of what can go wrong, and then use windex to remove the paint.

photo by earl53

October 11, 2012
Foraging for Edible Plants: Purslane GF Video

Learn how to forage for edible wild greens and identify edible plants in this Foraging for Purslane video. Edible plants like Purslane are sometimes considered weeds, but you can eat them, watch and learn here in this GardenFork foraging video.

Purslane grows all over the place, ( it grows well in compacted and dry soils ) so all you urban homesteaders rejoice, here’s a free salad green that grows like a weed. Purslane is considered a succulent, it kinda looks like the leaves of a jade plant, that whole family of plants. We have purslane volunteering in our garden, so if I run across it, I usually just let it grow and harvest it before it takes over whatever plants are next to it.

From the Purslane Wikipedia entry, I learned a lot about purslane. Purslane is eaten all over the world, just not here in the states. The leaves and stem are edible, not sure about the taproot. It is eaten raw and cooked, and it has a ‘mucilangious quality’ it is also cooked into soups and stews and can thicken dishes.

Greeks fry the leaves with sage, in Turkey it is cooked like spinach, and again, here, we pull it out as a weed.

What I found cool is that it has high levels of Omega 3 fatty acids, which few plants have. One usually has to eat fish to get high omega 3 levels. This edible wild green also has antioxidant properties.

Do you eat purslane? what is your favorite wild edible green?

September 13, 2012
Surfcasting with Lures How-to GF TV Video
Surfcasting, saltwater fishing from shore, is easy to do, and a great way to learn how to catch fish. In this how-to video we use lures at the beach to fish for striped bass and bluefish. Ocean fishing like this is not complicated, and i’m all about simple is good.

We went surfcasting at Fort Tilden Park, on the border of Queens & Brooklyn in New York City; its pretty wild to be in the city, yet on the ocean, weird dichotomy there between the urban business and the calm of the ocean surf.

A couple of things I learned about ocean fishing on this trip:
- Bring along water friendly shoes like those sandles with big holes in them, or don’t wear shoes at all if its warm enough
- Apply sunblock, the bigger the SPF number the better. Even if its cloudy, you should protect your skin.
- Make sure you have the proper permits and are allowed to be fishing where you are fishing. I’m big on following the rules, that’s why they are there.
- Pay attention to bag limits and eating limits. Around NYC, the fish have accumulated some chemicals in their flesh that you don’t want to eat large amounts of.
- Buy used surfcasting gear on craigslist, our suggestion is 10- 12′ lightweight rod and spinning reel. I used braided line for the first time in this video and it worked well.
A big thank you to my friend Brian and his dad Jack.

We’ll do more fishing videos in the near future, i’m all about eating food that is locally harvested. What are your surfcasting tips? Let us know below:
June 20, 2012
Amaranth Urban Foraging Edible Green

Urban Foraging while walking the Labs, I ran across a familiar sight in urban areas, an edible green, a type of amaranth that farmers refer to as pigweed.

Amaranth comes in several versions, the one pictured here is not one of the more floral ones, but it is an urban edible green that you’ll see in tree pits , parks, and weedy lots and roadsides.

The more visually striking amaranth varieties have names like Golden or Elephant. Golden Amaranth has a huge head of small flowers that lean over from the top of a tall stalk. Elephant Amaranth is purple pink and looks like an elephant trunk.

You can eat the leaves of all these amaranth varieties, and harvest the seed/grain of those that have substantial flower heads. The weedy version I found in the city doesn’t have much of a flower.

You can eat the leaves raw, but most cultures cook the leaves. In New York I’ve heard amaranth also called calaloo, which in Jamiaca is the name of the plant and the name of a dish made with amaranth.

Depending on who you ask, amaranth is a weed or a healthy source of vitamins. Pigweed amaranth fills up farmer’s fields yet cooks use amaranth.

Do you grow or cook with amaranth? Let us know below:

June 7, 2012
Foraging: Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto Recipe : GF Video
Foraging was on our minds this weekend, seeing some edible wild plants in our yard, after listening to this NPR story on eating and cooking wild foods like edible Garlic Mustard and Nettles.

Yes, you can eat nettles, despite the fact that the stems of the nettle plant have tiny barbs that sting if you grab Nettles without gloves. The secret is blanching before eating the nettles.

Garlic Mustard is an edible wild green, its leaves have hint of Garlic taste, though the mustard leaf taste is more prominent. Garlic Mustard is a non-native invasive plant that crowds out woodland native flowers like trilliums, bloodroot, etc. When harvesting Garlic Mustard, be sure to remove the entire root base, so it doesn’t grow back.

Our Wild Edible Plant Pesto Recipe made with Stinging Nettles and Garlic Mustard is inspired by an NPR interview of Leah Lizarondo whose food blog is Brazen Kitchen. A big thank you to Larkin Page-Jacobs of NPR and Leah.

Please tell us about your foraging recipes and tips below the recipe, thanks.

Foraging Videos & Edible Plant Identification:

Here are other plant identification foraging videos we have done:

Dandelion, How to find, forage, and cook Dandelion Video

Lambsquarter, Foraging and Cooking Lambsquarter Video

Click for photos of Garlic Mustard and Stinging Nettles for plant identification.
Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto Recipe

Recipe Type: pesto

Author: Eric Rochow

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 1 min

Total time: 11 mins

Serves: 2 cups

A simple pesto recipe made from foraged edible plants, Garlic Mustard, Stinging Nettles and Dandelion
Ingredients

1 cup Blanched Nettles

3 cups Garlic Mustard Leaves

1 cup Parmesan or Romano cheese, grated

1 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 cup Dandelion Leaves ( optional )

1/2 lemon

1 tablespoon lemon zest

1 cup toasted walnuts

2 medium cloves garlic
Instructions

Wash all greens in a salad spinner – wear gloves when handling stinging nettles.

Take 2 large handfuls of nettles – wear gloves! and blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain in a colander.

Grate 1 cup of cheese using the large holes on a box grater, don\\\\\\\’t buy the pre-grated cheese, it tastes awful.

Toast the walnuts in a fry pan on the stove, keep an eye on them, the burn easily.

Place the greens, walnuts, cheese, garlic in a food processor, pour olive oil over the ingredients in the food processor.

Add lemon zest and the juice from half a lemon.

Turn on the food processor and watch the fun, you want the greens to become a roughly chopped paste, but not turn to mush.

Serve this over pasta ( whole wheat pasta goes well with these flavors ) or in white bean soup, or on bread, its great.
3.5.3208
May 4, 2012