Kitchen things

It will be a cooking weekend: I started yesterday by making an aioli with the last of the Koringberg olive oil.

And roasted some peppers to purée for a layered appetizer, served in a small glass, riffed off an idea my mother makes often for lunches under the tree: mine will be aoili, the peppers, a pesto with Harlem terrace basil, and another pesto with terrace Amaranth (pigweed) with preserved lemon.

And I made farmers cheese, inspired by my West Coast foraging friends, Pascal and Mia. Curdled with elderflower vinegar. We are lucky (and surprised, given the dearth of local or organic produce) that Fine Fare on Lenox and 117th stocks Trickling Springs grassfed milk... 

...seasoned with powdered mugwort and smooth sumac.

My friend Eric says it looks like a meteor.

Next up, white garlic soup (ajo blanco, recipe in my book), sumac-marinated racks of lamb, a raspberry charlotte, two roast chickens for a birthday party and a loaf of knotweed-spicebush bread, to take on Sunday's wild edibles walk in Inwood Hill Park (there are five spots left, if you would like a slice!)...

Wild edibles walk, Inwood Hill Park

Inwood Hill Park
7 September 2014, 12pm - 3pm

...one of my favourite spots in the city, with its suprisingly deserted and quiet woodland valley, and contrasting hilly aspects that give way to the Hudson River and Spuyten Duyvil.

Indigenous spicebush abounds here and if we have our eyes open we may spot some delectable edible mushrooms. I am not a mycologist, and I focus on a substantial handful of edibles that I know well. But it's always fun to find new fungi, to photograph, spore print and identify. Spot catbrier to revisit in the springtime for its tender shoots, and see wild blueberries growing in Manhattan's northernmost forest.

Solidago caesia

These urban-green walks are as much about discovering new qualities in overlooked plants, as they are about recognizing the botanical city that hides in plain site, and finding nature under our noses. While we walk we talk about indigenous and invasive plants, what to forage when, how to adapt familiar recipes to new ingredients, and about the non-edible flora whose presence in the city makes this a bearable place to be for those who love the outdoors.

I'll provide an wild edible-inspired snack - in this case a breakfast bread flavoured with Japanese knotweed and spicebush berries.

We meet at noon at the entrance to Inwood Hill Park at Seaman Avenue and Isham. The nearest subway is the A at 207th Street, two blocks away. Additional details mailed upon sign up.

Shiso pretty

...well, in Jar Jar Binks-speak.

But this is the late summer herb worth waiting for. Sweet and citrusy in salads, or wrapped around bites of spicy filling, or slices of soy-grilled shortrib (recipe in 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life).

Only a handful of my seeds germinated. I may have started them too early; Shiso (Perilla) really, really likes warm temperatures. But the five plants in one pot are enough for my purposes.

If you leave them unmolested they make quite interesting early fall flowers, too, which remind me of Plectranthus. However the plant has strong invasive potential and is a problem from Pennsylvania through points south and across to Illinois.

So just eat it.

(Extra points if you ID the weed, er...food, in the middle of the pot.)

Cold, sour, sweet, pink, powerful

It's been my year of fermenting. First the sourdough breads, then the elderflowers, and I have not stopped. The excitement of fizz and wild yeasts and capturing seasonally elusive flavours in a bottle is addictive.

But this time, as (delicious) research for an October food story I'm working on, I skipped the months needed for vinegar-from-scratch, and infused a good red wine vinegar with the Alpine strawberries that grow till frost on the terrace. An ounce of this was shaken up with gin and St Germain, and the result is needing a name. It's good. Edelweiss, said a friend. Bloody Edelweiss, I countered (it's pink). Continental Drift was another suggestion.

Of course, this vinegar-thing taps unabashedly into the current Shrub-mania that has swamped every publication you open or click on. But do yourselves a favour and wait for the real deal, out in October: Michael Dietsch's Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times.

In the meantime...help me think of a name.

Catskills retreat

We drove northwest for a couple of hours. And we stayed a couple of hours. A couple of days would have been ideal; we love this part of the Catskills. 

But we squeezed out what we could. Stopping in tiny Grahamsville I popped into the impressive local museum for a bathroom break. Inside is an interactive exhibit about the water that is led from the Catskills to thirsty New York City - "Tunnels, Toil and Trouble " - worth a visit. In the small shop I bought a biography of John Burroughs, a Catskills man, author, nature essayist and source of dozens of pocket quotes."To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday..."  

The path we had taken yesterday was the road I had last seen in early spring when the trees were bare and the ditches were all leaf litter, dry gravel and the leggy stalks of colstfoot. It had been transformed into a jungling green. Those round leaves belong to the same - Tussilago farfara.

The stream that Vince loves and has photographed in yellow fall and icy April was shaded in brilliant green and a foot or so lower than earlier in the spring.

It was the last weekend of the American summer and we expected this round pool to be packed, but only three men came by, sank one by one into the freezing water, chattered at me as I read my new book, threatened jokingly to skinny dip (they stopped pretty fast when Vince appeared a few minutes later from the trees with the picnic) and then left, shivering and slipping a little on the rocks. I was chilly in my T-shirt.

Fall was apparent not in the leaves, but in the flowers. Asters, everywhere.

I'm not sure what the plant was above - I was sure it was escaped oregano, but it smelled wrong, more minty, and I did not take pictures of the leaves. 

Solidago (golden rod) and asters crowded the narrow verges of the mountain road...

 ...with forests of beautiful jewelweed (Impatiens capensis).

Blackberries dripped from canes suspended from tree branches.

Up here there are still thimbleberries (Rubus odoratus, an indigenous shrub with rose-like flowers; also called purple flowering raspberry).

And rowan berries, or mountain ash, Sorbus americana, a native. Source them at a native nursery and plant them in your garden. Good for birds and people. 

Pass on this one. Creepy doll's eyes on their optic nerve stalks. Actaea pachypodia's spring flower is very pretty, white and fluffy and smells like sweet lemons. The berries will make you veeeeeeeery sick. But a lovely Northeast perennial for a garden with dappled sunlight.

At this point the local sheriff pulled up beside us. He didn't like his narrow road being obstructed by a Zipcar, but was friendly enough. So we moved on and lower into the flatter lands and fields, where I spotted the one fruit I did stop to pick: autumn berry, or autumn olive - Elaeagnus umbellata. (Here's my essay about autumn olives, and what to do with them,  for Edible Manhattan.)

They are super-invaders. So no guilty conscience, there. The ripest fruits taste a little like red currants. I love them. See the tiny silver speckles? Makes them easy to identify. The pale undersides of the leaves gives the trees a silvery-grey appearance from a distance. This could easily be a commercial crop - but I have never seen them sold at market. Have you?

So, that was the day's holiday. The Frenchman is laboring on Labor Day, and I will spend the day thinking about how impossible it is that it is already September.

My first wild edibles walk of the first fall month is next Sunday, the 7th, in Inwood Hill Park. We'll see how New York City's flora compares to the wilds north of us. I'm hoping some rain this week may raise mushrooms.

Mushroom dinner

When I was very little my father and I found mushrooms like these growing under the barbed wire fence on the koppie over the road from our house. The land on the other side of the fence belonged to the state president. But we figured the mushrooms belonged to us. My mother said they were horse mushrooms (Agaricus arvensis) and cooked them for my father's supper. But we didn't eat any. Just in case, she told me, years later.

Occasionally I see perfect large brown mushrooms in local supermarkets. These were at Best Yet, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Delivery seems to be once a week and if you hit them on the right day they are perfect - six inches wide and plump with moisture. Six days later the same poor shrooms lie wizened and gasping and ignored.

We ate these filled with an old fashioned combination of garlic, breadcrumbs, fennel and parsley, with a squeeze of lemon juice. Forty minutes in a very hot oven.

Deserters

We are leaving the city. For a whole day. In a real car. With wheels.

We are leaving behind the lablab beans.

The scarlet runners (see the green pods?). 

The Malabar spinach.

The night-scented Nicotiana. 

Oh, and the cat (he had too many martinis last night).