Summer, bottled

Red? Scarlet? Rose? Pink? 

Today, in the luxury of 78°F air-conditioning (Central Park recorded 100°F, JFK 102, La Guardia 104), I strained and bottled two different batches of common milkweed flower vinegar. It is hard to describe, but it helps if you have smelled the heavy, lilac umbels of Asclepias syriaca. Wildly fruity-flowery and bracingly acidic on the edges of the tongue. Also a honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and elderflower vinegar, where the soft fragrance of the honeysuckle still lingers. I gathered the flowers in early June.

The vinegars began in large jars, the flowers mixed with sugar and tap water, stirred and allowed to fizz (these methods are in Forage, Harvest, Feast). At this point they are what I call cordials - sweetly concentrated, and naturally effervescent thanks to the wild yeasts at work. I serve them on picnics, diluted with tonic or chilled seltzer. Or booze, more rarely.

But because I sip and cook with vinegar more often than I drink sweet things, I decided to let them all ferment (much) longer, until acetic acid bacteria had produced the sourness that tells you vinegar has arrived. 

They are nothing like a commercial white wine vinegar, for example. There is acid, yes (their pH hovers around 4 - commercial vinegar may be 2 or 3), but also many layers of fragrance and sweetness and a sense of very ripe fruit. They are quintessential sipping vinegars, more like shrubs, made for quaffing on heat-blasted days like today: a tall glass, filled one quarter with the wild vinegar, ice cubes, and then water. Swirl. Quaff.

To the right (in the image above) is the black currant gin that has been steeping since last Saturday, when I pounced on the first - and not cheap - black currants at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. I'm going to use the leftover fruit, still packed with that musky, tart flavor, to make my favorite jam. 

There they are, from the other side. True color. Left to right: black currant gin x 3, the common milkweed vinegars x 6, and the honeysuckle-rose-elderflower. Times four.

Don Kirkwood gave me the bottle with my name etched on its side. I joked that one day his bottles and upcycled lab jars (more etching) would tell me who I was, one day. Maybe they will. I don't know where he found the time to do this. He was a kind, kind man. 

So there it is. Summer, its flowers gathered, their scents and flavors captured, and the sticky, intense heat reminding me of the time we lost Don, in his springtime in the mountains outside Cape Town, hunting for a flower that likes cliffs. Almost a year ago. 

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

Forage kitchen and the politics of information

Picnic prep in the forage kitchen. Two focaccias (focaccie, I suppose) - mugwort and serviceberry - cooling. Tartlet cases flavored with yellow sweet clover (Melilotus officinalis) just out of the oven, also cooling in their pan because they are shatteringly brittle while hot. 

The leaves on the foreground are bayberry, Morella pensylvanica. 

Pickled eggs. The brine is magnolia vinegar softened with some water (too much vinegar and the eggs become very hard) and tinted with some slivers of beetroot. I was tempted to leave them at this pretty, sliced-open stage, but the yolks are destined for deviling. Maybe next time.

Keeping up a blog in the age of AI makes little sense. Bots scrape these posts daily, gleaning, gathering, learning, and then offering it all back to you. In the past I only had to think about unscrupulous content creators appropriating and publishing my images or writing without credit or permission. You know, old school copyright violations. 

AI bots make that kind of theft seem laughably ineffective.

Blogger is a very old blogging platform (this blog is one year shy of its 20th anniversary) and does not have built-in anti-bot measures. You know how, when you open many websites now, you often first see a page that says something to the effect of Security Verification, possibly with a box you need to check? That's an attempt at preventing the scraping. 

Guaranteed original content might become a commodity, like gold. 

Change must come. I mean, for this blog, if I am to keep it. I have been self conscious about its vintage looks and interface for long time, anyhow. Tick, tick.

Boom.

Gathered flowers

This is June. Flowers and shadows. The longest days.

Linden flowers for drying, for later teas and toddies. Earlier in the month I included them in a fermented serviceberry/juneberry (Amelanchier) syrup. 

Daylilies, their bright petals added to salads. Soon, I'll pick the day-old limp ones to dry to add to soups, stews, sautés, and dirty rice dishes. 

And common milkweed in the back, now fermenting, too, in a simple solution of Brooklyn tap water and sugar, tinted deep rose-purple.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

Puffs in the woods

The Frenchman, posing with perfect puffs (young giant puffballs, Calvatia gigantea) that we discovered on a walk in the woods. 

We left most of of the surprise patch and alerted other foragers to their location - too delicious not to share. 

These mushrooms are one of my favorites, with a surprisingly strong mushroom aroma and a texture like very delicate tofu, although also...not quite.

At home, I skinned one and cut it squeakily into into snowy white cubes that were added to last night's butter chicken. Very delicious.

Left alone, these puffballs can grow huge. But I love this small, neat stage, and anyway, there they were, despite only a whisper of rain in the last week.

Tiny, tiny white orbs an inch or two in diameter might be the so-called eggs of Amanita species, and potentially exceptionally toxic. So don't collect puffs unless you absolutely know how to tell the difference. Cutting those Amanita eggs in half (they have very different texture) reveals the silhouette of a mushroom inside - you most definitely do not want to eat that. Giant puffballs are pure white, and firmly spongy (unless old, in which case they turn yellow and more mushy.

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Fall Walks and Picnics

Pawpaw Cake with Spicebush Streusel

Recently, I served this Pawpaw Spicebush Cake - coffee-cake style, with spicebush-pecan streusel - after a plant walk at the Queens Country Farm Museum, a small but remarkably rural-looking farm in the heart of Queens. Because I needed to feed about 16 people I double my recipe and baked it in a big rectangular pan. It worked!

The pawpaw purée for the recipe was from my frozen stash, circa September 2024. The pulp freezes beautifully, and I keep it in half-cup portions for later baking or ice

cream.

And in case you are in doubt, we're talking the native American fruit, Asimina triloba, a custard apple relative, not papaya, which is also called pawpaw in countries with Commonwealth ties, past or present.

And pawpaw season is coming. And the hunt will be on. 

This recipe is in the pawapw chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast (of course). The streusel in the original is for hazelnuts, but I think pecans work very well indeed. 

Outside, now

Evenings have moved outdoors, again, and if we are very lucky, Pirelli joins us. 

Beyond the terrace the horse chestnuts are in bloom, and all around us black locust* trees are dripping with scented white flowers. At flower sellers outside bodegas,  bucketsful of peonies have replaced cold-weather tulips.

Black locust is North American Robinia pseudoacacia. In New York it is a sturdy street tree, and very welcome to bees and foragers. 

Behind the cat and the man, the calamondin tree is loaded. Today, the little, aromatic and very sour fruit will be picked, halved, and laid in salt. 

Feral Goddess Dressing

A posy of garlic mustard. One of its common names in the UK is sauce alone. Which gives one ideas...

I was reminded of green goddess dressing by Winner, a local restaurant where we sometimes order a chicken dinner on nights when I have been preparing a multi-course picnic all day, for a plant walk the following day. Their rotisserie bird comes with a slew of sauce-choices, and their green goddess is one of the best. 

Adding invasive plants and handful of ramp leaves turns it feral: tingling and singing and vibrating with fresh green herbs.

You'll find my recipe here, for Gardenista: Feral Goddess Dressing - Rewilding a California Classic.

...or just pour it in a tall glass and drink it through a straw!

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My Books

The ramps have risen!

The ramps on the tiny terrace have broken their long hibernation. They made flowers last year, in summer, long after their leaves had disappeared in the heat. Several seeds formed and matured and I dug them back in. I wonder if they will germinate?

It takes around, give-or-take, roughly, approximately, more or less, seven years for a ramp grown from seed to be able to make its own flowers, and seeds. 

Don't encourage vendors to sell mountains of ramps. Do ask them to sell ramp leaves only. They can be packaged just like delicate leaves like chicories and salad. And do soak some of the rooted plants overnight before planting them in pots or in the soil where they will get spring sunlight and summer shade. They are an Eastern US native, and appreciate cold winters. Compost, leaf litter, and slightly acidic soil help, too. But mine just grow in potting soil, with some of their woodland neighbors. 

Many of my overwintered bulbs did not make it and turned to mush: lilies, alliums (the ornamental kind).  It's not the cold that bothers them, but a repeat freeze-thaw cycle, and wet feet. Ramps like wet feet, for a bit. And here they are.

Read all about how to grow ramps in this story. And what ramp habitat looks like in spot we visist every spring, in the Catskills.

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Forage walks for spring

New spring Plant Walks and Forage Picnics are ready. Find them and book your tickets via the link.

Pictured above? Bloodroot, and ephemeral native wildflower, doing battle with English ivy. Who are your rooting for (sorry...)?

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What and How to Eat Now

Here's a quick round-up of some seasonally appealing Gardenista pieces I have written. Follow the links to read: 

First up, Forest Toddies. On the cold-weather walks I lead, I sometimes make a hot toddy to warm frigid fingers. (It stays steaming in Thermos flasks.) It's alcohol-free but manages to taste grown up and complex. Everyone asks how it is made. My current hot toddy recipe is based on fresh apple cider, with the addition of citrus and herbs, a whisper of fir, and sometimes even a beneficial mushroom. 

When I've made the toddy and allowed all the flavors to infuse, it is strained and bottled, to live in the fridge. For the last month the Frenchman and I have been sipping a version of it (it welcomes improvisation) every evening, to see what life is like without a 6pm cocktail (no surprise, life goes on, without a hitch, but it's a useful experiment). But you can also drink it cold, shaken up with the hooch of your choice. I recommend bourbon. Good for parties.

Here is the Virgin Hot Toddy recipe.

It's yuzu season, and the aromatic, golden citrus are a highlight of my growing and eating year. Our own little tree had it's first proper crop this year (last year it produced three, I think), and it still has some plump fruit ripening on its branches. 

Yuzu are the essential ingredient for yubeshi, a cured, savory-sweet Japanese confection, intended to be sliced and nibbled with hot black tea. 

You can buy high-quality yuzu fruit online (they make a special gift) in the US from Flavors by Bhumi, New Jersey-based growers who also source unusual citrus fruit from other growers in the country. 

Are there still rosehips, where you live? They tend to become sweeter with cold. But sweet or astringent, here is my recipe for rosehip syrup. No boiling at all, just sugar, fruit, and time. The leftover hips make a very appealing candy-like snack, if they are large enough for the seeds to be scooped out easily.

What is the hardiest of citrus fruits? Clue: It is also the thorniest. Trifoliate orange, also called hardy orange, and more lemon than orange (very sour), and more yuzu than either (its skin is very fragrant). 

It makes a very good fermented syrup or cheong - transliterated Korean for marmalade, except the marmalade is is not cooked, and is traditionally stirred into boiling water for a therapeutic tea. The best-known cheong may be made with yuzu, but I use hardy orange in exactly the same way. 

Finally, dark afternoons, long nights, cold weather? We need bright colors and beneficial microbes to sustain us through winter. It's time to make fermented red cabbage (aka sauerkraut) with fresh juniper (Juniperus virginiana, but yes, you can use store-bought). 

The tangy kraut is good to eat as soon as five or six days (above) after the process has begun, and is then still very crunchy. I like it best around the three-week mark, by which time it has moved to the fridge...

Happy reading, and bon appétit!  

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Find me daily on Instagram

@marie_viljoen

October

Is one morally bound to discuss acts of war, if one is a(war)e of them, while walking in the autumn woods of a Maine shoreline, Downeast? Disaster stalks us. 

Last night the wind let loose as a storm moved in and poised above us, and water rained so hard on the roof that clear rivers formed round the cottage that we are renting for a few days. Pools grew outside and I sent the Frenchman into the deluge to check our EV. Batteries and flooding don't mix well. We're just a week out from the flash floods that drowned our block and nearby neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, thousands dead; the story so complex, and terrible. And what is to come? War. What is it good for? It's good for politicians. For people in power. For certain kinds of business. For the makers and innovators of weapons and the technology that supports or thwarts them. For the contractors of conflict. And, rarely, for freedom.

The woods here are wet and very green. In some places the moss is elbow-deep (I know, I measured). Weaponless but for eyes and intuition and and not a little reading, we have hunted mushrooms, with success. 

Our suppers have been matsutake-filled, and tonight the stuffing for our little organic chicken, raised by a local farmer, is rice with girolles (yellow-foot chanterelles). 

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I'm mostly not here, but at Instagram:

@marie_viljoen

The chanterelle stream in the woods

In the middle of the summer-humid woods in the Hudson Valley is a stream where we picnic after hunting for chanterelles. Above: August, 2018 - the first time we saw it, water tumbling. There are crayfish in the water, with blue pincers.

2021 - Baskets of chanterelles collected.

2022 - in a months-long drought. The crayfish were still there. Not a mushroom to be seen. 

2023 - a recent weekend, after some small chanterelles (and lots of other mushrooms) were sighted, and the day before historic flooding in the Hudson Valley. What does it look like, after?

As sticky and physically uncomfortable as these muggy hikes are, they are like a mesmerizing wonderland of interesting pale plants that coexist with the fungal world. The story, and a chanterelle rice recipe, are up on Gardenista.

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25 July - NYBG class: Summer Edible Plants

10 August - Queens County Farm: Wild Edibles Walk

American burnweed - a herb to eat

We lurch from apocalypse to apocalypse. Choking wildfire smoke, and now, unprecedented rainfall. Brooklyn escaped Sunday night's flooding rain; in fact, it has been drier than usual, while just an hour north, where we hunted chanterelles over the weekend, mild creeks and tame streams turned into torrential monsters, and cliffs into cataracts.  

It is very hot, and meals have been cool. Above? Slivered baby cucumbers atop labneh, with Palestinina olive oil, New Jersey peas and...an indigenous plant foraged in Brooklyn.

In season now is an unheralded aromatic herb of North America: Erechtites hieraciifolius - known commonly as fireweed, American burnweed, or (ahem) pilewort (it has a long history of traditional medicinal use) is a soft, annual herb of deep summer. It is ultra-floral, very strongly herbal, and slightly bitter. I love it.

You can read all about American burnweed in my story for Gardenista (and snag a cooling-zinging mango salad recipe) and I hope you pounce on it when you see it, soon.

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Find me on Instagram

@marie_viljoen

Apocalypse forage

Some likened our apocalyptic skies this week, and the pervasive smell of smoke, to 9/11. But the smell of the Canadian wildfires was misleadingly wholesome and pleasant, like woodsmoke. Even through my N95 mask, from our Covid stash.

9/11 was a terrible smell. Like burned wires and bone. 

I went foraging, masked. 

The air grew progressively worse; it hadn't been too bad when I set out. So the world was sepia. A few days before 9/11 I dreamed that my mother and I were hiding in a bombed-out building in lower Manhattan. This was the light in the dream. In the dream three old WWII-type bombers flew low over us.

9/11 was a beautiful day, crystal clear and blue.

I collected good things in the smoke and have many projects, now, most to fuel future forage picnics. The cones will be blanched, then pickled or/and turned into jam.  The bayberry will be turned into a vivid green oil, to be frozen and scooped when needed. Also poached with summer fruits. The green peaches will be salted and fermented. their leaves will infuse white wine. The sweet clover will be dried for future biscuits, breads, and cakes.

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 Walks and Picnics

Chickweed

Chickweed, a luscious, cool-weather green, has a unique flavor. Read all about it and get my super-easy chickweed recipe on Gardenista.

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May Day

On May Day, when the spoiled citizens of France took to their streets to protest their president's decree that they should retire at the age of 64, and not 62, I walked in the woods at the northwestern tip of Manhattan. 

It had rained all weekend, and in the old hills, untouched by the grid that flattened so much of the island, water was running, everywhere.

I visited a vast nettle patch and collected a bagful to blanch and freeze, for tarts and breads and biscuits and as-yet-uncreated mid-spring stews. Field garlic was at its fattest, too, and easy to pull from the sodden soil.

On logs obscured by fallen branches, in swathes of Japanese knotweed and emergent jewelweed, wood ears proliferated.

I saw a small handful of other people, mostly women, jogging, and walking, and the sounds that surrounded us for two hours were running water and singing birds. 

As I left a man placed his large backpack on a rock in the forest and unpacked it, possibly to spend the day in contemplation of the million shades of spring green. But as I walked down my last hill I heard from his rock the fatal sound of flat bleating. The peace was shattered by his sack of bagpipes, playing a penetrating flaccid scale, each ascending note more defeated than the last. 

My timing had been perfect.

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Find me on Instagram

@marie_viljoen

Forage picnic fare

Spring is packed with foraging, with picnics, with forays into green spaces, either alone or trailing two to 15 people, like a slow-moving, plant-obsessed comet. At the end of the group adventures, I spread out a picnic, sometimes on a bench, or on a slightly too-uneven log, or on grass, on a step, and everyone dips in, at first a little shyly, to taste some wild things. 

One of the regular features of these forage picnics is a focaccia, baked the night before, or that morning, and versatile enough to be able to convey the flavors of a season. 

In April's case those flavors have been Japanese knotweed (first cooked gently in olive oil), dandelion flowers, ramp leaves, and lately, nettles - all pressed into the jiggly, bubbly dough just before I slide it into a blazing oven.

Blanched muscari flowers are fun, and their flavor distinctive (more flowers in the dough).

Although the ones atop the focaccia did lose their color...

I manage to snap pictures of them, briefly, for my notes - time is rather tight: Picnic prep takes about eight hours, not counting the actual foraging, marketing, or route-planning. (Or the planning, the posting, the emails, the weather-watching...) 

So these are the snaps.

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Find me on Instagram

@marie_viljoen

Wisteria Syrup and Sake Popsicles

You need sake popsicles... 

One of my more inspired ideas, I made them for the first time back at 1st Place, where we had a huge old wisteria vine. To make them you need, well, sake (I like a cloudy one - so look for Nigori). You also need wisteria syrup for the flowers' unique perfume and flavor. They're still a month off from blooming in Brooklyn, but in this long, crazy country, they are already in bloom further south.

Find my recipe for wisteria syrup and the popsicles on Gardenista, and also (a slightly different version) in Forage, Harvest, Feast. 

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Wild Walks and Forage Picnics

Choose field garlic

It's field garlic season, where we live, and perhaps where you are, too. This chive-like wild onion (Allium vineale) is a winter-through-spring weed in North America, but a very tasty one. And infinitely more sustainable than ramps (Allium tricoccum).

Eggs deviled, and destined for a picnic. Their yolky stuffing is laced with fresh field garlic, mustard, and mayonnaise.

And a deeply soothing soup. You'll find its recipe in my story about field garlic for Gardenista (and yes, you can substitute chives, or scallion greens).

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Classes:

4 March, Winter Foraging at the NYBG

11 March, Sugar Moon in Inwood Hill Park

20 March, Vernal Equinox Social, Prospect Park

25 March, Bud-Break at Historic Green-Wood