Picnic like you mean it

 

The water comes up, and then it goes down, and then it does it again. This is high tide, and we perched on the edge to picnic. But at low tide we have walked across the shell-crunching wet sand to that island with the trees, to picnic, there. Once, we watched a mink swim across the water to explore the rocks. There are sometimes seals, poking their faces up to look like whiskery buoys tethered on the water. And almost always we see a loon, patrolling offshore.

I don't know when last we took wine on a picnic*. A day picnic. I carried it as a surprise for the Frenchman, who that morning had told me about a couple at the local co-op: They exited with a bottle of rosé. They took it back to their car, opened it, tossed some stale coffee out of a mug, and poured the wine into the mug before driving off, sipping. "It wasn't even chilled!" he said, unsure which act was more outrageous - drinking warm rosé or driving and drinking.

So we each had a few swigs (Tortoise Creek Zinfandel), straight from the bottle. It was completely delicious in the cold air, after the hike, between bites of sourdough sandwiches with tomato and prosciutto, a Chebris (sheep and goat cheese), and a fennel saucisson, all from the very appealing Blue Hill Wine Shop. 

Then we walked a couple of miles back to our own car and drove (in a straight line) home. 

*I grew up with wine at day picnics, brunch picnics, wine at lunch, wine at dinner...well, a lot of wine. (Also, not much water. But that is another story.)

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Instagram: @marie_viljoen

Easy tomato soup

We picnic in most weather. And when winter rolls round we need something hot to heat our frozen, mitten-wrapped paws. An easy tomato soup is one of my winter picnic staples.  

It is quicksoup, cheapsoup, cheatsoup, and it is goodsoup. It is also thrifty, nourishing, satisfying, and comforting. Take care of yourself, your family, your soul and your heart. All in one soup! (I sound like the eccentric Dr. Bronner's soap label - it's our pandemic handsoap so I know it by heart.) 

I use canned tomatoe because that is what winter is for. The fewer ingredients on the label the better. Hopefully just "tomatoes." I am partial to the Muir Glen brand, especially the fire-roasted versions.

Jazz up this basic recipe with optional extras: grated cheese (cheddar for gooey cheese-strings, or microplaned Parmesan for punch), fresh herbs, and different seasonings: Urfa biber, Aleppo pepper, East African berbere, freshly cracked black pepper, or cumin each make it interesting. 

Fast Tomato Soup - Serves 2

1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, very thinly sliced
1 large can - (1 lb 12 oz) - crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup water or broth
1 teaspoon chile flakes
1/4 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of salt - more, or less
Freshly snipped chives or field garlic

In a saucepan over medium heat, warm the oil. Add the garlic, stirring a little every few minutes. Cook for about 5 minutes until the slices turn translucent - do not brown.

Add the contents of the tomato can. Rinse the can with broth or water and pour that in, too. Stir, and allow the liquid to begin bubbling. When it does, turn it low enough to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook for another 10 minutes. Taste, and add the sugar, and the salt. Add the chile. Taste again. It is ready. If you used a chunky blend of tomatoes you may now want to whizz the soup around in a blender to make it smoother. Up to you. 

When it is ready our the soup into a waiting thermos. Head out for a winter picnic. Or stay in and sip quietly.

Catching the leaves

When we drove out of Brooklyn, under the East River, and north up the length of what used to be Manahatta, we didn't know what we would find, in terms of fall foliage. But as soon as we had crossed the George Washington Bridge and put our (new, electric-powered!) wheels upon the tarmac of the beautiful, tree-flanked Palisades Parkway, we breathed happy sighs. The maples were blazing in New Jersey, and the oaks were all still green. Maybe there would still be some color in the old, cold Catskills Mountains.

There was. Almost three hours north of New York City, the oaks held onto their leaves, turning rusty and red in the process. Maples were mostly bare. Beech and alder filled in the gaps.

Our favorite rock was as deserted as ever (except for a bald eagle standing sentry on a high branch over the water), and the place as beautiful. We stumbled onto this spot over ten years ago, one cold autumn when my mother was visiting from Cape Town. This was a lunch stop, with warm fried chicken from a roadside joint and cold apples from a farm stand. Since then the Frenchman and I have returned in every season. An hour beside the water is a restorative infusion.

I go through phases, with picnics, and this late autumn it is on the theme of a wild greens pie. The recipe for the pastry and filling are in the dandelion chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast - but in this picnic's iteration there was no cheese, and I did include ramp leaf oil, from leaves collected nearby much earlier in the year. Those ramps are now sleeping, dormant until next year. The soup was a quick and delicious one: blewit mushrooms sautéed with bacon and garlic, and then thinned with red wine and mushroom broth. Still piping hot, poured from the Thermos.

Drink the season

I was tinkering recently with drink ideas for a walk. The advantage of smaller groups (10 people rather than 15) during viral times is that I can tote drinks more easily. Liquids are heavy!

This was a test that never made it to a forage walk, as everyone was happy to be served a seasonal vermouth - but sometimes someone doesn't drink and then I either include a no-alcohol variation, or make them all non-alcoholic. This rather delicious forage-inspired mocktail called on one of my fruitier vinegars, from last spring: wisteria blossoms! Spiked with spicebush, and cut with plain, cold water. Perfumed, tart, sweet, and very refreshing.

The catkins surrounding it belong to Turkish hazel (Corylus colurna). This year has been my first of noticing the fascinating flowers of hazel, and I was playing with their pollen. The catkins are male, and the tiny female flowers are separate, and a deep burgundy.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

Not-quite-spring snacks

For a recent forage walk on a colder-than-forecast afternoon I made some canapés to accompany small glasses of chilled PandemicVermouth, infused and blended in April 2020. 

On the right are buttery salmon and field garlic (Allium vineale) tarts, with a savory custard filling. To serve them I added more slivers of salmon and extra, snipped field garlic. In the rear? Fir sugar shortbread cookies. Bottom left are toasted rounds of field garlic cheese bread. 

I topped those toasted rounds with garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) pesto and pickled chanterelles, from an epic mushroom hunt in the woods upstate two summers ago. The chanterelles - incredibly - still have that magical apricot aroma that traveled back with us that day.

And there were eggs, not quite deviled. Cooked in boiling water for eight minutes before being peeled and covered in miso, overnight (chilled). The miso flavors them but also draws out some moisture, so the texture becomes firmer. Onto their yolks I dripped some powerful, bright green ramp leaf oil, Aleppo pepper, and the peppery leaves of bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta), a maligned but exquisitely pretty edible green in the Brassica family - like tiny watercress. 

Socially distanced walks and picnics are a challenge but everyone is well-trained, by now, and very considerate. (At least, the people who sign up, are!) There will be more, and it feels good to be creating wild food treats, again.

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

The journey to a sandwich

In mid-May of 2019 I met a tree crowded with bees and panicles of fragrant flowers. Each bloom looked a lot like those of Styrax japonica (snowbell), but I had never seen them arranged like this, or smelled that intoxicating perfume. It was Styrax obassia, fragrant snowbell.  

I like to catch scents and flavors. And so after as much research as possible, I collected some of the flowers and decided to preserve them in the form of vinegar, fermented from scratch. Just flowers, water, sugar, and time. 

After the first fizzing happened, and the flowers were strained out, I left the sweet, fragrant liquid in loosely covered jars to invite the lactobacter to do their work. They did, in a remarkably short time. The sweet ferment turned into a deeply fruity and complex vinegar in just four weeks. I bottled it.

It is one of the best vinegars I have ever made, good enough to sip, which I did. Here it is in September 2020, with a dash of baby pine cone syrup, a lemon slice, and chilled sparkling water. Because of their depth of flavor (good) vinegars are ideal and healthy mixers if you don't want to drink alcohol.

Fast forward to last Saturday, as I prepared a forage picnic for 10 walkers. Carrots quick-pickled in the last of the fragrant snowbell vinegar. Destined for Wonder rolls - slices of crustless Wonder bread spread with chickweed and field garlic mayonnaise, and stuffed with the carrots, black radish and garlic chive flowers (I could write a treatise on my reason for making these with That Bread but we don't have time right now).

There they are, top left. Clockwise from there, watercress tartlets, black currant and juniper hand pies, and quails' eggs with a ramp leaf salt for dipping.

So if you'd like a sandwich in 2023, you'd better plan ahead. 

The next walk is What's that Bud? This Wednesday, with drinks and canapés, on a pretty-weather day in Prospect Park.

Book Here.

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The Wild Book

Winter, with wings

          Photos: Vincent Mounier

I give you: gratuitous bird-feeding pictures. A February pleasure, apparently. It has been over a decade since I fed North American birds from my hands. And that was in Stanley Park, Vancouver. (There was a weaver, in South Africa, inbetween.)

Titmice and chickadees in Brooklyn. (Why not the song sparrows, hopping at my feet? Or the bold cardinals?)

It is precious, the minute pressure of tiny bird feet on your skin.

And it feels for a while as though this is the only thing.

The pictures above were taken in Green-Wood Cemetery. The monarch butterfly mask is from Society 6. The artist who makes this one is  Eclectic at Heart and I like their other masks, too. They are all double-layered, with space for a filter-insert. But they do get loose after a lot of wearing and washing. So (after six months of daily wear) I will order some more. (For grocery shopping we now wear double masks: a surgical mask under the cloth. Yay.)

Pensive chickadee. These pictures (different jacket! Maskless!) were taken up in Pelham Bay a couple of weeks ago, in the Bronx. Then, as now, we walked into the city wilds to enjoy the snow. There were very few people, so I was relieved to de-mask. (Although, an hour into our walk, post-picnic, we bumped right into our friends Stephen and Chad on a narrow, snowy path. Which seemed surreal and perfectly normal, at the same time. We re-masked to greet one another with sounds of muffled effusion.)

I want my own chickadee.

Look at the two birds. It doesn't seem real. Very fast shutter speed on that long-lensed Canon of the Frenchman's.

We saw a family of deer in these woods, sitting in the snow, and chewing whatever deer chew in snowy February. Their coats looked thick and warm. 

Mostly, there was silence. We are becoming connoisseurs of where to find it.

Tomorrow, we will look for some more.

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Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Walk into the weather

Ahead of the inauguration of a person who appears to be sane, we went for a walk. It was a cold day but we needed a horizon. In New York, there's usually something between you and the horizon. Not at Breezy Point. 

The tide was out.

Flocks of sanderling were very busy, probing the wet sand with their clever beaks.

We used our much-less clever beaks to eat smoked salmon sandwiches (in the car!). I had committed the bread baker's cardinal sin of slicing into my sourdough while it was still warm from the oven. (Don't tell.) But life is short. So I sliced.

The sandwiches were seasoned with fresh field garlic, finger lime (from our little windowsill tree), and spread with cream cheese.

And now we can breathe, again. 

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Forage, Harvest, Feast

 

Daylight Savings Walk - Jamaica Bay

Snow geese at Jamaica Bay. Photo: Vincent Mounier

The Good, the Bad, and the Berry 
Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
8 March 2020
12pm - 2.30pm
Tickets: $52

Today the clocks are set an hour forward. Come and celebrate the end of dark afternoons with a brisk plant identification walk followed by a picnic featuring the flavors we have seen.

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is where New York's contradictions of populated skyline and free range nature meet in a fascinating intersection of estuary, wetland, beach, field uplands and woods.

Late winter and early spring show us undressed shrubs where tempting drupes and berries persist. Some of them are delicious.

Some of them are not. What are they? Friend, or foe? 

Learn to tell the difference between native and Asian bittersweet.

Edible and poisonous fruits. Which is which?

Photo: Vincent Mounier

The refuge has a wild and exposed western side. Waterfowl like snow geese like to overwinter here, and if we are lucky we will spot them.

A viewing platform allows access to the wetland's edge.

The quieter eastern side of the refuge is where woodland and swamp meet. 

On our walk we will meet a range of Northeastern native shoreline plants, like pine and juniper, and in our post-walk hot toddy we will taste them.

Fragrant male eastern red cedars will be bursting with pollen.

And spring's luscious shoots will be disguised in winter's skeleton forms. 

This is the time to identify common edible plants for future forages.

Our wild-inspired picnic will feature a hot and fragrant toddy as well snacks checking the invasivore and native flavor boxes. (Yes, in a wild food world, such boxes exist.)

Despite the date, March can be the snowiest month in the city, so be ready with boots, mittens, and ear warmers, in case.

The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge is reached by car (lots of parking), bus, or by the A train (to broad Channel - a 15 minute walk away). Thanks to the National Parks Service (and our tax dollars) there is a very civilized bathroom on site.

Jones Beach - Owl Watch

We went to the beach on Long Island that in summer is crammed with thousands of roasting bodies.

It was cold and empty, and the dune grasses were beautiful in their rufous, early winter color.

I saw tracks and found scat (rabbit?), and scanned every hump and hollow for the snowy owls we were hoping to sight.

Solidago, gone to seed.

And then we found her, between hell and high water. Not perched on a dune, but surveying her landscape sleepily from a rusty fence above empty handball courts. A New York owl.

Below her the courts were crammed with rusting barbecues and stacked picnic tables, detritus from summer, corralled by the dozen and locked up behind chainlink until next season.

They belong to the barracks of empty cabanas.

Much later we realized we could have found her via the road, rather than on a long beach hike, and so we parked the car there in the vast and empty parking lot named for the resort - Malibu - and ate hot tomato and chile soup with field garlic sprinkles and watched the owl. She's about at two-minutes-to-twelve above the cup on the left. Faraway, on the fence:

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New Year's Walk