Happy December, food & foraging friends!
I don’t know about you, but these long dark days make me sinfully slothful, and I’ve been sleeping like a bear. I’m usually not much of a television watcher, but I’ve been binging a few shows recently, including Chefs vs. Wild — at last, a food challenge show for foragers! The show pits two teams of chef-foragers against each other in British Columbia, where they fish and forage from the forest and sea to create a five-star, three-course meal over an open fire for the judges. I was psyched to see Alan Bergo, whom I interviewed last year for this piece, win his challenge with oysters with nettles and wild crab hollandaise, lacquered elk ribs, chanterelle-rose-hip conserve and thistle roots, and acorn crepes with huckleberries and alder-smoked pastry cream. Alan writes about his experience on the show in this post.
Yes, the West Coast boast madrone berries, licorice fern and other wild delicacies, but there are plenty of intriguing edibles you can find right in the city. So I enlisted my forager-chef collaborator Julian Fortu to do a mini Chef vs. Urban Wild of our own.
Our original plan, to check a blewit spot I’d discovered a few years back, then pop by the Arboretum for cornelian cherries and end at my community garden for edible weeds was stymied by DC rush hour traffic and the slim window between my end of workday and sunset.
Instead we rooted around with my iPhone as makeshift flashlight before my community garden gates closed, gathering mallow leaves, chickweed, spruce needles, wild onion, wild mint, juniper berries, arugula, and chive and fennel seeds harvested from dried flower heads. Chef Julian’s challenge also meant working with my paltry pantry, though as done in the Chefs vs. Wild show, I gifted him a protein for our entrée, steelhead trout.
An hour later, we were feasting on the trout pan-fried in spruce needles on a bed of pesto made with fennel, wild onion, arugula, sesame seed, mint and macadamia nut, topped with a fluffy chickweed salad dressed with pine infused vinegar with a side of sautéed bok choy and arugula from the garden. The showstopper for me was slow cooked potatoes wrapped in mallow leaves and seasoned with allium seeds and crushed juniper. For dessert, we enjoyed a yuzu meringue ice cream I’d made the night before with chestnuts foraged from Julian’s car and candied – that counts as urban foraging, too, right?
We didn’t have the choicest of ingredients, but managed to have a fine meal with buying a single extra item. Stay tuned – I want to try this again in spring with a group!
Left/top: With a mere hour of daylight to scavenge for winter-hardy ingredients, we managed to pull off a delicious, nutritious meal of wild pesto, mallow-wrapped roasted potatoes and pan-fried trout with topped with chickweed salad. Right/bottom: Late fall is the perfect time to harvest dandelion root for peak medicinal benefit.
Alas, I continue to be hamstrung by chronic illness (six months post-COVID, but who’s counting?), so I’ve missed out on hunting for hens and other fall mushrooms. Still, there is a common fall medicinal plant right in every backyard: dandelion roots!
While we often think of dandelions as a spring thing, their taproots are actually at their most nutritious in late fall. Dandelion root is high in antioxidants and vitamins K, A and C; and can help fight cancer, liver damage and high cholesterol. It can be tinctured, but I decided to dry the roots we dug up from the garden for tea.
Oops: I forgot I had the root choppings in the oven and cranked it up to roast vegetables, and discovered I had toasted it to a crisp rather than lightly dried as planned. Eureka, dandelion root is actually sweet, starchy and downright delicious! It tastes something between a potato and a Jerusalem artichoke. I’m adding this one to my list of top ten foods for the Zombie Apocalypse!
I’ll be spending new years burning off my bad juju of 2022 in the Brazilian Amazon, where I’m sure to encounter some interesting new-to-me wild things… I’ll report back on that in January!
Until then, I hope you have a joyful, restful holiday season. May oyster mushrooms, wood ears and other hardy edibles reward your every winter walk!
Wildly yours,
April