#wild food

[bekkathyst]

Hoping that the captions are easier to read this time! Trying to get better at editing and making these 😊 also I ordered a mic for voiceovers but I chose the wrong one because it sounds worse than just using my phone lol

Anyways - here’s to a year full of nature’s abundance 🍃

[mushroomgay]

Cambridge, UK, September 2024

Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

Found some surprise chicken of the woods on the cycle home from work! It was at the perfect stage for harvesting, and I of course had to immediately make my favourite chicken nuggies of the woods. Some more is in the fridge and will likely become a stew and a risotto.

[los-plantalones]

I wanted to highlight this because I knew it would come up as SOON as I mention common milkweed (asclepias syriaca), which is a milkweed from the Eastern and Central US.

Indigenous peoples, respected ethnobotanists, and veteran foragers eat milkweed by the bucket! If other people knew how amazing of a plant it is – there is something edible and delicious about it at every stage of growth, it is very easy to plant / spread its seeds, and it grows almost like a weed – they would love and cherish it.

If more people were encouraged to utilize it, they would be less likely to get rid of it in their yards. They might even start growing a whole patch. It’s a sustainable food source. We would be helping its insect friends who are HARMLESS to our gardens but important for the environment.

It’s not like, say, ramps that are overharvested every year and have disappeared from huge stretches of land where they were once abundant. Ramps grown from seed take SEVEN years to mature. Milkweed grows and matures the same year.

People eating milkweed don’t contribute to monarch butterfly decline. The use of herbicides, Big Agro, cities just mowing down whatever the hell they want are to blame.

That said, it’s still important to forage in an ethical way. Never strip a plant of all its flowers, leaves, or fruit. Never harvest an entire patch of plants from a single area. Check for beneficial insects and leave them alone. If a native plant has gone to seed, help spread those around.

This is NOT a callout — this is important information that I want everyone to know. Eating milkweed will NOT harm the monarch butterflies.

Learn More:

The Forager’s Harvest

Learn Your Land

Part 1 | Common Milkweed

[ahedderick]

Crabapples are kind of an extreme fruit. Sour and sometimes a bit bitter, they take a lot of sugar to be edible. Wild rosehips are nicer; you can eat them as-is if you like intense sweet-tart flavor. This fall I decided to make a small batch of crabapple-rosehip jelly.

The thing with crabapple jelly is that you don't need to add pectin (such as Surejel or Pomona's). I simmered the crabapples and rosehips in a 50/50 mix of apple cider and water, strained it twice, then cooked the resulting juice with an equal measure of sugar. I can't quite describe the very old-fashioned 'jelly test' I used, except to say that my mother taught it to me and it involves pouring a few drops of the mixture off the side of a large spoon until it drips "correctly."

Crabapples produce a jelly with a very different consistency. It's honestly more like pine tar. My uncle, who loved foraged foods and unusual jellies, called it "the La Brea jelly." I'd have been mad about that, but . . he wasn't wrong.

I ended up with a small quantity of extremely sticky, rosy-amber jelly with tons of sweet-tart flavor.

[ID: A small dish of jelly held up to the light to show its color. Also the same dish of jelly sitting beside a plate with a piece of bread and jelly.]

[morethansalad]

Old-Fashioned Elderberry Jam (Vegan)

[neolithicsheep]

Public post over on Patreon

[andulkaphoto]

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Wild rosehip foraging

I was supposed to be wood cutting and instead went tromping off into the thorn bushes to go find snacks. Fortunately I'm an American of the LargeBeverage persuasion and Sunshineman is of the RidiculouslyLargeBeverage persuasion so I had a container to fill with 24 ounces. The sippy cup top made it easy to pull the flower ends off as I gathered, which in turn made cleaning easier so I'll probably do the coffee cup again, though I'll have to get a bigger bucket to empty it into.

Wild roses are a colonizing species so they pop up in recently disturbed areas that have lots of sun exposure, like a fire clearing or a logging road. They also have a built-in handicap to overharvesting because if you try to strip the whole bush you will end up with fingers full of thorns. This plus the recognition factor makes rosehips a very beginner friendly forage.

These did technically come from the side of the road, but since we seemed to be the only traffic the area had seen this year and also we're really stretching the definition of the word "road", the plants weren't subject to the usual stresses and as a result don't taste like tar. The summer has been cold and very rainy and the weather is reflected in the condition of the fruit, so these are large, squishy, rosehips that are a bit bland in comparison to other years. Late August is fairly early for this harvest. Last year I was significantly further north and an entire month later harvesting rosehips that were much tangier, after a sunnier summer.

I did have to go help with woodcutting, so I don't have as much as I would like, but I'm going back tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get enough for jam and can make a follow up post.

[umiagawa]

Butter fried Scarlet Elf Mushroom

These bright red mushrooms tend to grow on the dead woods and branches, near rivers and mashes. They are slightly firm in texture, with a layer of skin on the grills that need to be removed in order to clean off the dirt.

I simply fried them with a teaspoon of butter, and pinch of sugar and salt over high heat, until til they shrink. Fry them in bacon fat is also very delicious.

Hope you enjoy this recipe.

[multidimesionalbrainism]

[bekkathyst]

Some of my favorite meals I’ve made this summer, most with either food from my garden or foraged!

Here’s what everything is:

Mushroom “pot roast”, chile verde rice bowl, squash blossom quesadillas, breakfast tacos, wild green pesto pasta with stuffed and fried squash blossoms, honey baked filo wrapped feta with garden salad, our birthday party feast (lots of fruit, big salad, garden focaccia not pictured, a birthday cake made with himalayan balsam blossom raspberry jam not pictured, and blackberry rolls), roasted veg mix with Bärlauchbutter, falafel with rice and cucumber salad, and my latest creation which is squash blossom mac and cheese with crispy garlic green beans. I’ll probably do another post with things that didn’t fit in this one!

Oh, this has been so fun! I’m now ready for many stews and soups and chestnuts and wild mushrooms, please 🌰🍄‍🟫🍄

[mushroomgay]

Cambridge, UK, July 2024

Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus)

I'm finally back to posting!! This is from a few months ago - after a devastating absence of CotW last year, this year I found loads in all my regular spots, and feasted on it plentifully.

Lots of it topped my favourite meal for several nights: udon noodle soup. I also made chicken nuggets of the woods (with chips and veg) and a vegan chicken risotto with it.

[los-plantalones]

black cherries should be ripe in a week or two!

[ahedderick]

Green briar

I'm too tired to tell y'all about the greenbriar pizza, but I'm posting so I remember to tell you in the morning. Smilax rotundifolia

It's delicious.

[morethansalad]

Rose Petal Sugar (Vegan)