Happy February, food & foraging friends!
Personally, I am more a fan of Groundhog Day than Valentine’s Day – especially since it means that, according to Punxsutawney Phil, spring will come early this year. It’s hard to know whether winter is coming or going, with this whiplash weather (gazing out on two inches of snow this morning, after a spell of 50+ degree days).
Most of us would rather be loving on spring morels and ramps, but as a minimalist, I get a perverse joy out of creating from scraps, discards and lesser-loved things. This month, I’ve scraped the bottom of my nearly-bare pantry to make several tasty things from wild ingredients: from pumpkin walnut muffins with leftover spruce sugar (the pumpkin itself leftover from making pumpkin miso), to black trumpet scalloped potatoes with dried mushrooms collected last summer and snips of wild onion grass as a proxy for chives. Winter juniper berries also got thrown into pickled onions, sauerkraut, and my first attempt at beet kvass, an Eastern European fermented beverage.
I also used up some pantry scrapings for incense I got to make at the Japanese Information and Cultural Center this month. We learned all about Japan’s 1,500-year-old history of incense, participated in a Kōdō ceremony (where our answers to an odor sensitivity test corresponded to a snarky fortune), and then made our own take-home incense. I ground wild herbal tea I made in Newfoundland last summer (more on that adventure here) along with pine needles left over from a workshop for one of three “flavors” I made. It takes a while to dry before it can burn, so I’ll test that out next week!
Left/top: Dried black trumpets reconstituted and pureed were a great filler for potatoes au gratin (pictured next to an all-mushroom MAW potluck plate and juniper pickled onions). Bottom, pumpkin puree was mixed with spruce sugar for muffins and ground wild herbal tea made its way into Japanese incense.
Right/bottom: Three stages of oak leaves – so fun to grow! Bottom row, miscellaneous kitchen experiments, witch hazel flowers, and a branch loaded with hawthorn berries (good for wines, jams and more).
I love this time of year for kitchen counter-growing experiments; and the bacteria harnessed in ferments count too. I’ve been growing a baby oak tree in water from a sprouted fall acorn, fresh herbs in my AeroGarden and tons of microgreens, just in a used takeout container. I’m also cranking on ferments like kombucha from spent coffee grounds, vinegar from apple cores, and kimchi with savoy cabbage from the Dupont Farmer’s Market.
One wild goodie I’ve been enjoying lately I usually have to wait for spring for is chickweed. With recent balmy days, I’ve even seen its tiny white flowers blooming. I’ve talked this prolific weed up many a time for its versatility — from taco topping to pesto — but this month decided to dig a little deeper in its natural and medicinal history.
Work by a pair of Nigerian researchers recently demonstrated the plant’s “bioactive metabolites displayed diverse pharmacological activities such as anti-obesity, antifungal, antibacterial, antioxidant, anti-proliferative, anti-inflammatory, analgesic, antidiabetic and anxiolytic activities.” Pretty cool for a garden-variety weed (which, when Googled, yields results about how to get rid of it)! Stellaria media, one of various chickweed species, is native to Eurasia but now established all over the globe. It was found in pre-neolithic dig sites in the UK, having been preserved in the stomachs of those ancients. These ancient Europeans’ last meal could be your next one — look out for it once this snow melts!
If you’re impatiently waiting for spring to begin, I encourage you to look more closely at the plants around you on your next walk. Many are on time to bloom now, like the flamboyant witch hazel flowers and Japanese plum trees (sometimes mistaken for cherry blossoms), while the buds of edible-bearing trees like figs are fattening up.
Wildly yours,
April
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