Edible Plant Walk, Central Park

Cornelian cherries

Central Park's North Woods

23 August 2014, 11am-1pm

The last summer walk!

In the shorter days of late summer stone fruit and edible weeds flourish in Central Park. If we look up, there are Cornelian cherries (actually Cornus mas, a Mediterranean dogwood), black cherries, and perhaps hackberries, too.

Weed, or herb?

In the North Woods, jumpseed, pokeweed and mature stands of Japanese knotweed carpet the woodland floor, while plantain and burnweed pop up opportunistically beside paths. Burdock and lambsquarters are in bloom, and the cooler season's dock might be beginning to show itself after our unusually mild August. 

American burnweed

As we walk, learn to spot these and many other wild edibles, and how to use them. And enjoy a brunch scone along the way, spiced with mahlab - the powdered kernels of wild cherries and stuffed with black cherry jam.

Mahlab and black cherry scones

We meet at 11am.

WALK COMPLETE

_________

Shoo, fly

I had been wanting a fly net forever, despite being married to a man who is able to catch flies with his bare hands and relocate them. But neither of us likes flies buzzing around our meals.

So one day in July, waiting in the rain at the traffic lights to turn into Constantia Village, our local shopping mecca in Cape Town, I was delighted to see the fly net lady standing on the traffic island, selling her wares to passing cars. (You need nerves of steel to drive in South Africa. Everyone comes to the traffic lights. The lame, the halt, the blind, the ancient, the children, the hopeless and helpless, the heartbreaking, the chancers and the syndicates, the vendors, the entrepreneurs, and the occasional, genuine craftsperson. If you followed your heart you'd be bankrupt within a few days. So you put your heart in a cage and drop ice in all around it and wrap it in plastic sheeting to prevent drips. But sometimes it still sees out.)

I digress.

I pulled into the parking lot across the way and went over to see her things, and I bought three, each for R80, or about $8. They are three feet long by two feet wide, with pretty beading all along the edges to weigh the net down.  I think they are beautiful.

And now our cheese is safe in Harlem.

Rich pickings at the dump

On a perfect Saturday we walked into Dead Horse Bay. We wandered the paths, finding mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), wasabi-hot poor man's pepper (Lepidium virginicum), young dandelions (Taraxacum officinalis), pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) and smooth sumac (Rhus glabra). The Phragmites - the monoculture of invasive weed reeds - were in bloom. 

So were the bottle trees. This was an old bayberry.

Tide was high. The beached Sandy boats gather more graffiti every year.

We spread out our picnic on a beached log. Field garlic butter, sumac butter and sumac bread. I found some sea rocket (Cakile edentula) leaves to top mine.

By the time we had eaten the high tide had retreated enough to allow us to walk along the littered shore.

The steam punk tree lives on.

As we cut back in to the old dump, the reeds closed in again.

This sumac is Rhus copalina. Winged sumac (glossy sumac, dwarf sumac), as its leaves' axes (below) told me, soon enough. I have never paid it much attention but I have also never seen it in bloom as profusely as this. It was heavy with bees carrying even heavier loads of pollen.

Bless botanist's carrying plant bibles. Fortunately, I did not know until the end of the walk that Eve is a botanist, or I would have got the jitters.

                                                                  We found ripe blackberries.

And trees dripping with fat black cherries, the best I have tasted. Sana, a fellow walker, pointed out guava notes. Yes!

Goldenrod is early, I think. A funny botanical year.

We paused for a good bit, here. Now I have jam to make. Or perhaps chutney. Then again, the black cherry fizz I bottled last week is incredibly delicious. What to do?

I limited myself to one bottle from the beach, but a good deal of sumac, super-sour and moistly fresh. Now bathing in jars vodka, gin, and water with sugar.

The next walk is this Saturday, in much tamer Central Park.

More here.

There was light

The lamp. The one we went across the water to buy. Someone asked.

(And yup, that's a Meuschke above the bed.)

El barrio meets the hood

We walked. East. Way east. To find a toaster at Costco, or perhaps at Target. We passed The Urban Garden Center, newly recovered from the Harlem gas blast. It promised a pig, but it was a long way from 5, yet, and we moved on.

Toaster in hand and some startling, culture-shock fast food later (tiny dish of $3.95 pasta Alfredo, 600 calories? No wonder people get fat), and depressed by the awful, giant pet store we saw - it was the cat's birthday and he needed gifts - we turned west once more, walking towards Lenox Avenue.

At 117th and Lenox I found a surprise farm stand, and cheered up. It is there every Saturday. They say. It sold us the nicest corn I have ever eaten. We grilled the ears over coals that night (45 minutes), still in their husks, then rubbed them with butter and sprinkled some ramp salt and parmesan cheese over the top, with a squeeze of lime. The upstate stand (Marlboro, NY) sold a startling selection of eggplants too, and we ate those the following night, with our guanciale sourdough pizza.

Then we found a hole. This is the WHOLEfoods hole at 125th. Get it??? At last something is happening inside it. Three concrete trucks stood churning at the corner, sandwiching (it was a club sandwich) a flattened street sign.

The hole is betternTV.

Finally we crossed the Depressing Intersection, which actually looks OK in this light.

...and were back in our hood. Past the corner social of old men on crates and fold out chairs, past the pee- smelling corner opposite, past the neat front gardens and the boarded up brownstone, past the new condominium and the house with morning glories to the roof, down the sidewalk towards the little fat kid who plays outside every afternoon with the skinny boy and the girl, till their mother shouts at them through their building's intercom, and up our steps, and home.

Evening, to contemplate

...how much mint makes a good mojito.

The sunset pink on the next door building.

The mystery of the hole. Who keeps digging it, between the marjoram and the unhappy strawberry?

Several mornings in a row. I don't think the squirrel. I think a bird, for a sort of dust bath - it's so smooth.

And it throws all the soil down into the neighbor's deserted backyard. We even set up a time lapse camera, to catch it. But that time it did not come.

And how long it will be before the Nicotiana decides to snap at the waist?

Waiting to eat

In late May there was a bunch of mugwort, picked in Prospect Park. 

There was a pork jowel. I decided to turn it into guanciale, with mugwort, and spicebush.

I hung the pork from the cathedral ceilings, where it had nice airflow and some company, and where it upset esteemed readers, like Clark.

And then last night, after two months, it was time. 

I wanted to make a very simple pizza, using sourdough. Slices of the pork. Sage from the terrace. And a flurry of fine parmesan.

So that's what I did. 

And we ate the best pizza ever, on the day that Robin Williams died.