Field to table

Field garlic oil and salt

Some wild food ideas I've been working on.

Field garlic deviled eggs

Last night's menu looked like this:

Field garlic deviled eggs

Nettle, dock and garlic mustard bruschetta with field garlic olive oil on sourdough 

Sweetfern bourbon-infused chicken liver mousse, with fresh field garlic chutney

Japanese knotweed and field garlic greens vichyssoise

Shawarma-style lamb with mugwort and field garlic

Baked potatoes with field garlic greens salt and butter

Orange and treviso salad with pickled dandelion stems and pickled Japanese knotweed***

Spicebush-scented crème brûlée

(***Late last night after we'd done the dishes and were on our way to bed, I discovered the enormous platter of forgotten salad on the large bedroom table where I'd left it to stay cool...)

 Field garlic chutney on sweetfern chicken liver mousse

Spicebush-scented sugar, for crème brûlée

It is a pretty, sunshining Saturday. Outside in the early Harlem afternoon (the sun has just reached the terrace) my alarm bird is calling - a white-throated sparrow. It sounds exactly like the calm alarm on my phone. 

Today I will garden, and tomorrow I will forage some more.

Inwood Field Garlic Walk

Pickled field garlic in sherry vinegar

Got field garlic?

I decided to put off my first plant walk of the spring, because of the deep and lingering cold. 

The Inwood Field Garlic Walk will now take place on Saturday, March 29th.

If you'd like to join us (join us!) for the walk - with picnic break (hey, it's me: you know I can't walk without a picnic) - please sign up via PayPal, below. Or, if you fancy your chances on the ponies, follow the link to Edible Manhattan where they are offering two free spots ($60 value) to one participant in their "what will you be growing this year?" survey.

Dutchman's breeches - Inwood

Inwood Field Garlic Walk
29 March, 11am - 3pm

Late March and the forest floor in Inwood is still crackly with brown winter leaves. But the spicebush may have woken into citrusy bloom,  early violets might have opened, and there may be an owl... There are edible and invasive daylilies here, as well as the notorious yet delicious garlic mustard. It sends out chemicals into the soil that prevent other plants from growing. in terms of conservation, it is awful. In the kitchen, it is yummy.

Invasive field garlic is one of the first plants to appear after winter, and is a versatile kitchen staple for me.

On the walk, learn to spot and identify wild edibles, as well as other native and exotic plants.

This is an interesting and little known part of the city, unless you live in that neighbourhood: On one side, the Spuyten Duyvil, separating Manhattan island from the mainland, and on the other, the mighty Hudson, separating us from Governor Christie.

It's one of my favourite spring walks.

Pack a lunch for a forest picnic. Field garlic snack provided.

Bathroom at start and end of walk.

We meet at 11am sharp at the entrance at Seaman Avenue and Isham, returning there by 3pm or a little earlier. The closest subway is the A to 207th. More details for confirmed walkers closer to the time.

WALK COMPLETE

Field garlic oil

Edible weeds - fugitive cuisine

It is prime day lily time - the "wild," orange-flowered kind. I know these have orange flowers, because I have seen this patch in bloom, before. Hemerocallis fulva. This weekend will be spent cleaning and prepping them.

I will save them for our personal consumption. There are stories of some people being sensitive to day lilies, and so I don't like to feed them to others who have never tasted them, before.

The best practise is to sample a few (one or two), wait a day, and then make some decisions based on the outcome. I like them, and have experienced no ill effects. Then again, I don't stuff myself. I find the cooked tuber to be a little like a cross between a Jerusalem artichoke and a potato. Raw, similar to the raw Jerusalem artichoke (which, interestingly, also gives some people gastric problems).

Day lilies are garden escapees, and originally from Asia. In dense colonies, like the one I found myself visiting recently, no other plant stands a chance. Even the field garlic (Allium vineale) another invasive plant, (southern Europe, Mediterranean) had been squeezed out.

Native spring ephemerals - Cucullaria dicentra, or Dutchman's breeches, below. Their flowers will be open in a few days. They are ill-equipped to withstand the assault of the mad, bad day lilies and field garlic. Another Cucullaria species C. canadensis, called squirrel corn, is occasionally referenced as edible (they grow from corms...or bulbs?). I'd be curious to hear if anyone reading this has tried it, or knows of its being eaten. And no, for the record, I avoid wildflowers altogether when foraging, but I am curious.

Ta-raa! I curse myself when collecting field garlic. It will mean a lot of work, back home, if one hurries, in the field. Much cleaning, sorting, peeling of outer skins, and discarding of tiny bulblets. Better to be very selective on site. The results are worth it, a hundredfold. These are destined to be: field garlic butter, field garlic oil and pickled field garlic. To come? Confit of field garlic (bottled), and plenty of fresh field garlic for a tart I have in mind...

Japanese knotweed. Curse of governments, home owners, gardeners, farmers, developers, railway companies and airports. Have I left anyone out? Polygonum cuspidatum. It is a crime to plant it in England. So why don't we get environmental credits when we lop off the wonderfully lemony shoots, at ground height?

Questions, questions.

It will be at least a week before the knotweed is ready to collect. The shoot above was a freak amongst its brethren, which mostly look like this (the red tips in the middle and lower left - see the old, dead canes lying about):

Who will win? The invasive Japanese knotweed or the indigenous Erythronium americanum (USA! USA!),  aka trout lily - another spring ephemeral.

I'll be watching this spot.

Field garlic stuffing

Field garlic, Allium vineale.

Well-versed foragers and gatherers of wild foods must yawn at it, but out of the whole expedition with Steve Brill, this was the most useful and worthwhile find for me. In fact, as I type, I am full of it. Field garlic, I mean: sweet little organic roast chicken with field garlic, breadcrumb, feta and lemon stuffing for dinner.

The stuffing:

First, having caught your field garlic, wash it it. (Top centre - I abandoned the mustard green roots and burdock root: way too tough).

1/2 cup finely chopped field garlic, mostly white but some green parts
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 cup breadcrumbs
Zest of about a quarter of a lemon
About a 1/4 cup of feta, crumbled

Saute shallots and field garlic in olive oil until translucent. Add breadcrumbs, stir to coat evenly with oil and onions, add zest, add feta. Grind some fresh black pepper over it and taste for salt (feta is salty).

Variation: Adding pancetta at the onion stage is also delicious.

Stuff into your - seasoned - chicken and roast as usual (which is at 425'F or just over an hour until it is brown. No basting necessary, but do add about a cup of water to the pan before it cooks, this will be your jus, later. A squeeze of lemon juice never hurt a chicken, either).

Consume, happily, with some Syrah, I think.

Inwood Field Garlic Walk

Join me this Sunday [originally Saturday but postponed because of wind] in Inwood Hill Park for a three-hour walk and picnic. It is barely spring, but we will be hunting (and eating) field garlic.

Allium vineale is that delicious invasive onion that reappears in late autumn after a later summer dormancy, perseveres through winter as skinny leaves, and fattens up in spring. Call it crow garlic, lawn chives, wild chives, wild onion - but don't call it boring. It has all the properties we love in domesticated garlic and onions.

I make a vivid wet salt with field garlic leaves every year. It behaves the way a bouillon cube does, giving broths and soups and stews (and eggs, always eggs) a foundation of flavor.

Field garlic compound butter is delicious.  On this walk I will replicate the picnic I made in March 2014, which featured a field garlic cheese bread with this butter and a garlic mustard pesto. It's my five-year wild walk anniversary, and the picnics have grown in scope.

The early leaves of potent garlic mustard are beginning to appear (their peak season is late April into May).

And we may see the pink tips of super-invader, Japanese knotweed.

Another intensely herbal (think lovage) invasive edible is ground elder, or bishop's weed. Its early leaves are thinking about appearing.

Will there be daylily shoots, yet? I am not sure! Come and find out with me.

Every late March is different (in 2014 we had a big snowfall). But on their warm slope it is possible we will find the earliest of nettle tips.

And wonderful spicebush. My kitchen's favorite, hands down. There will be fragrant twigs and early buds.

Taste it in our picnic's dessert (chocolate roulade stuffed with sour cherries and spicebush)...

Tickets are $50 and the walk is from 12pm to 3pm, on Sunday the 24th. (If you can't make this one see my Forage Walks and Classes page for many other options).

BOOKING HAS CLOSED

Ramp fever

I committed blasphemy on the foraging Facebook page to which I belong. I said it out loud: I prefer field garlic to ramps. I choose Allium vineale over Allium tricoccum.

Thundering silence. I may be shunned. 

Even Euell Gibbons, the father of American foraging (in print, that is), despised field garlic. He said it stinks. I think it smells good.

I like ramps, and I like their green spring fling. I'm not rejecting them. But they are a pale cousin of the fragrant field garlic. Once cooked a ramp is an unassertive bite. Its leaves are very good, just crisped over the coals (above). But field garlic's bulb turns deeper, sweeter.

Also, it's still free. Ramps appear at farmers markets and high end gourmet stores for about $15 a pound. It's a once a year bonanza and a foodie legend has grown up around it. It's the mainstream foraged plant that most people know, whereas field garlic is still a weed popping up everywhere, ubiquitous, ignored, delicious. 

If field garlic were to be tied in a bundle with an $8 price tag attached to it, it would be the new hit of the season.

How to hide a ramp. Put it under four lamb shoulder chops.

Begone Winter, Welcome Spring!

 It is spring. And here is a gift of quiet hellebores.

And pickled eggs, with a wintercress (Cardamine hirsuta) nest. They are destined for a picnic tomorrow in Prospect Park, and my first plant walk of the year, in the pale sunshine, with the singing of the hundreds of congregating American robins.

Here is our Begone, Winter Menu:

To Eat:

Beet-pickled deviled eggs with field garlic and garlic mustard root

Le grand field garlic aioli - baby carrots, pink chard stems, watermelon radish, Chinese broccoli stems, snap peas and field garlic mayonnaise for dipping

Endive and avocado bites with field garlic

Carrot-spicebush puff pastry vol-au-vents

Cattail pollen garlic biscuits with field garlic butter, juniper ham, and apple-spicebush compôte (from the fizz, below)

Spicebush chocolate truffles

To Drink:

Spicebush apple wild-fermented fizz (no ABV) with forsythia and spicebush ice

Fortified with an optional Calvados shot

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Forage Walks and Picnics

Forager's test kitchen

Well, now, that makes me think about creating a forager's pin up calendar. A manly arm. A handful of field garlic. Riaow!

Our haul: field garlic (Allium vineale), day lilies (Hemerocallis fulva) and garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata).

Day lily tubers, post rinsing. Many foragers eat the cooked shoots and I remain a little hesitant after hearing more than one story about upset stomachs. The tubers had no ill effect on us whatsoever, raw or cooked, nor do the flower buds, come early summer.

Cooked (boiled, then sauteed in butter) the tubers are a cross between young potatoes and sunchokes - more glassy than mealy potatoes. The wilted and olive oil-sauteed garlic mustard was on the good side of bitter, like intense broccoli rabe. Its flowers were not out yet and the buds are milder.

Baby back ribs roasted with lemon on a bed of field garlic greens and bulbs.

Beef short ribs roasted with soy and field garlic. 

Then a momentous curry made with the leftover short ribs. This was killer. I used dried lime - my first time using this wonderful spice - and the meat cooked in coconut milk spiked with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and chile. With field garlic, of course! The recipe will go next door when I've retrieved it from my note book.

And the all-important, now staple pickles. 

And it's only March...

From the woods

Why do I forage? It's an unanswerable question. But I am as curious now about wild things as I was when I was a very small girl. Walking in the woods, or anywhere else, really, is an adventure. A never-ending Easter egg hunt. On a hill in a city park I might suddenly find wood ear mushrooms where two weeks before there was just a big, dry log. Species of Auricularia, wood ears (also called cloud ear fungus) are prized in Asian cuisines and sold dried by the bagful. Their texture is tender, like soft velvet covered with a thin film of cool, human skin. Yes, very strange.

While they are usually used dried and reconstituted, I find their fresh, cooked texture to be very appealing.

The early spring things that accompany them: field garlic, baby ground elder (invasive bishop's weed), lesser celandine (I dislike the leaves' slightly acrid flavor but use them for garnishes), and some horseradish-hot garlic mustard roots.

And then comes the recipe creation. This one-pot chicken, field garlic and cream stew with rustic potatoes was mouthwateringly good. The mushrooms became sponges, their soft black collars plumping up like oysters to absorb the sauce. They combine that oyster slipperiness with a crunch.

Field garlic (the invasive Allium vineale) is like an assertive chive, and I have been using the leaves a lot over the last week-plus. The soup above, veiled by a melting dollop of whipped cream is lamb, red wine and field garlic; the pesto on the cracker is garlic mustard. Both were leftovers from a forage-picnic in Inwood. I have not cooked with cream for a long time but I bought some for that picnic's chocolate spicebush roulade and had to use up the rest. I had forgotten how good it is.

And the faithful field garlic and cheese bread. It's one of the first snacks I ever made for my forage walks, and I think it is delicious. It is a baking powder bread so needs to be eaten within a day of baking to be best, but it does make outstanding toast. The recipe is in Forage Harvest Feast, and works just as well with normal chives or even thinly snipped scallion greens.

The next walk is on April 6th in Central Park's North Woods. What will the picnic be? Come and see...

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Book a City-Spring Plant Walk and Picnic

Inwood Hill Park

We go up to this big park at Manhattan's northern tip a couple of times a year, beginning in early spring, for field garlic foraging. The woods are often empty and field garlic grows in huge clumps under the trees. In previous years the branches overhead have been laced in pale green - on Saturday they were still bare, despite our early spring.

I had never seen all the spicebush flowers, and had no idea how concentrated the small trees are, up here. Lindera benzoin has those bright red berries that I picked last year on Staten Island. They have a strong, citrusy flavour and are good  for baking and macerating.

A couple walking their dog pointed up and showed us a great horned owl roosting on a broken branch (you can see her or him better, here). 

Clearly this was its usual roost as the forest below was littered with droppings and owl pellets - the upchucked wads of feather and fur that constitute the indigestible bits of its dinner and lunch. We assume that the owl is the reason that the "widow maker" - the large, hanging branch - has not been removed. There was much evidence, elsewhere of the sawing of downed limbs, probably from the wet snow we had last October. Many trees down, and woodchips in drifts. 

I was delighted to find many of these pretty early wildflowers, a bleeding heart relative known as Dutchman's breeches: Dicentra cucullaria. In a park where invasives such as ivy, periwinkle, day lilies, field garlic and garlic mustard are going strong it was surprising to see this pristine swathe of ephemeral native flowers.

And a little farther I was stopped by a swirling forest floor.

A man sitting on a log looked up as I stared at the patterns and smiled, so I knew he must have made them. I'll post some more of his work, later.

On top of the hill the Hudson was visible at last. Usually we walk a different route, but on my day lily hunt we ventured deeper into the park, instead of sticking to its watery edges.

A plague of periwinkle choked much of the forest up here.

Day lilies. Hemerocallis fulva. Many. A bonanza of buds in June. I collected some tubers.

And the best looking field garlic, from a new patch. It was easy to pull up, so that we could aim for the fattest leaves and tug, so much simpler to sort, later, when cleaning them for pickling and cooking. Pickled, they are Vince's garnish of choice, now, in his martinis. He never drank martinis before he met me. What have I done? They're not really martinis, with the onion element, so I'll call them field gibsons. Are cocktails proper nouns? Field Gibsons?

What to do with your bag while foraging. Find a branch, of course. It contained our lunch. And paper bags. And more cameras.

These old lamps line many paths. All shattered, inviting one to contemplate a time when the park was valued by the city it served and the lamps were intact.

An altar! Clearly. At first Vince was drawn to this rock thinking a raptor perched high above had fouled it. Another owl? But closer inspection revealed white feathers, wax, coins, a piece of candy and what I am certain was dried streams of dried blood. A sacrifice in the woods. I have seen something similar in Prospect Park, left behind by the only woman I have ever seen in that forest, who left cowrie shells and coins in her wake (cowrie shells - that's another story: How I evicted the beaded lizard from my life, which promptly changed course). Possibly evidence of a Santeria ceremony. The earth around the rock was scuffed clean in the otherwise leaf-cracking forest, so some traffic was involved. Inwood has a significant Dominican population - Santeria  hails from the Caribbean by way of West Africa.

With bags filled with reeking garlic and garlic mustard and lily bulbs we swung back around towards the way we had come, following the Harlem River back east. The bridge connects Manhattan to the mainland (otherwise known as The Bronx).

Above, serviceberry in flower.

And back in civilization, near the ballfields, a decidedly more domestic weeping cherry.

Baguettes and pate and pickles and Chenin blanc.

Two sentinel cherries on either side of the wide baseball diamonds, where bats and balls met and Saturday was in full recreational swing, with Spanish the lingua franca.

We'll be back in June.