GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: garlic mustard

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: 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