Happy September, food & foraging friends!

Freeze the nuts, they said, to kill the bugs. What they didn’t tell you is that the bugs would start running to try to escape freezing to death, a traumatizing sight to open your massive bag of black walnuts to.

This month, I finally got around to testing out a recipe for black walnut ink — decidedly easier than extracting the nuts themselves. I’d forgotten it was black walnut season until I was leading a walk for blind athletes in Rock Creek Park recently. I’d brought various non-visual aids to pass around to illustrate the many plants and fungi whose identifying characteristics were largely odor- and texture-based — things like the anise-scented polypore, candy caps, spicebush and turkey tail. The black walnut, still green in the hull, fit right in. Most participants pegged the freshly fallen nut fruits as having a citrusy aroma, but the blackened nuts simmering in my kitchen now smell like dirt, in a good way.

The nuts were a consolation prize, having gone out in search of the hen of the woods that everybody and their brother seem to be finding right now, and come back empty handed. With the help of my chef friend Iulian, I’d harvested and hulled them before, a messy, laborious process as their hulls are tougher than teeth enamel. Unlike their English cousins, which easily come out of their shells, black walnuts have to be pried from their crevices. But there is nothing so delicious as the native nut, the perfect addition to a fall ice cream flavor.

So, back to that paint job. I opened the bag of nuts to find dozens of little white grubs frozen on the surface of the hulls. Now, I had actually tried the grubs on a trip to Asheville, and learned that they are quite sweet, spending their short lives eating nothing but walnut. So being a zero-waste-of-lives kind of forager, I dethawed them and threw them into dinner.

Just kidding! I fed them to my cat Ninjette — who eats everything, except apparently grubs. She could neither see nor smell them and put her head right back down on my laptop and waited for something more interesting to be offered.

Being an impatient forager, within moments of cooking, I dipped my paintbrush into one of the crushed black hulls to test the waters. The recipe said to simmer for a good eight hours, but less than eight minutes in, the pigment was already dark enough to pen a greeting card!

There are many historical references for walnut ink (both our native black walnuts as well as European varieties) being used to ink medieval maps, drawings, manuscripts and more. The most intriguing reference I found was to mark the hands of ancient Roman prisoners, as the ink is so hard to remove.

The other paint I made this month was with pokeweed berry – one the best and brightest in nature’s palette. Unlike most botanical inks that need to be cooked down, poke ink is as easy as smashing the berries through a colander and adding a little alcohol or vinegar to preserve it. Pokeweed berry got the moniker inkberry from Civil War soldiers and other early Americans using it in their inkwells. Just don’t lick your fingers afterward — pokeweed berries are quite toxic.

I’ll add both of these fall paints to the growing collection in my fridge, along with beautiful summer washes from sunflower, mallow flowers, marigold, and more.