Happy May, food & foraging friends!
In the insect cooking class I took last month with Gastro Obscura, someone asked our chef instructor about some entomophagy fails, and he couldn’t really come up with any — maybe because he thought of every culinary experiment is a valuable learning experience. I on the other hand can think of lots of failures: the acorn falafels that were so acrid I couldn’t even get the dog to eat them, the strawberry wine that disagreed with my stomach so badly you’d think the yeasties were having fistfights in my GI tract.
I recently discovered Japanese knotweed growing rampant on the perimeter of my community garden, and harvested some of the young fat stalks to experiment with. One of my favorite foraging chefs suggested knotweed pickles for a first go with them, and as a pickle lover, I went for it.
After day in the fridge, I ventured a bite: sour to the 10th power, Mr. Yuk face! The sour flavor of the Japanese knotweed combined with the vinegar overpowered even the raw garlic, and the stalks felt too tough to boot. I saw nothing redeemable about them, but as a zero waste foodie, I left them in the fridge to decide whether I would just compost them or somehow salvage them later.
A week later, I was making egg salad when it hit me: knotweed relish! I strained the vinegar from the pickles– now a beautiful pink color from the knotweed — and finely minced the knotweed, which had softened a bit in the vinegar brine. I cooked briefly with a little water and sugar, diced up the now-pickled garlic, and voila — a perfect topping for deviled eggs. My next thought was to harvest more to make a huge batch of relish for the coming MAW DC 4th of July cookout – this would be the ideal condiment for the oyster mushroom burgs I was planning!
The vinegar, too, got repurposed. I steeped it in chive blossoms to make its blush color even pinker and lend it an oniony flavor that will kick ass in a yogurt ranch dressing.
As with art, before you declare something a failure in the kitchen, ask yourself, has it finished its metamorphosis yet? Sometimes a culinary project does just need to be transformed into compost. But happy accidents can be borne from things that started out disastrous, as any artist can tell you.
Left/top: Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica, in the buckwheat family) is known as Godzilla of the plant world as it takes over landscapes and towers over everything in its path. It has a sour flavor many chefs used in lieu of rhubarb in desserts. Get it at the young shoot stage, pull out the entire rhizome so it does not continue to proliferate, and do not compost, as it can regrow from a shoot. I found its sweet spot in a relish for egg salad.
Right/bottom: Chive buds and blossoms are a versatile edible flower. Infuse in vinegar, sauté in an omelet, or dry the flowers for a fun purple sprinkle you can use year-round, as a source for my upcoming Natural Awakenings piece on edible flowers suggested. The pollinators love them too, so leave some for the flies, bees and butterflies!
In other news, I’m excited to share a deal I worked out with foraged food purveyor Arcadia Venture for you all! Its proprietor Iulian (a master chef who worked at the world renown noma in Copenhagen), sells an array of special foraged goodies direct from farm and field to restaurants and select consumers. Get 10% off your first order through the code PRILLY10.
Iulian will be working with me on a Folklife Festival wild mushroom cooking demo and doing a special dinner for our weekend forage event in the Northern Neck this summer, so stay tuned!
Wildly yours,
April