Happy October, food & foraging friends!
Just like that, there’s good food popping up everywhere… fall fruits and mushrooms especially. Everyone but me seems to be finding maitake, often because they’ve got “a spot.” Despite this newsletter, I’m terribly lazy about tracking my finds to optimize my foraging, but this season I finally came up with a simple system that will hopefully yield future dividends. I’ve gone back through photos and posts to note when and where I found a certain something, and marked my Google calendar with annual recurring events with the item and location. Coming up: cornelian cherries, hawthorn berries, Georgia Ave lion’s mane and gymnopilus (for funsies!)
More methodical foragers will analyze iNat data to yield likely locations for particularly sought-after items, but I’m fairly content to be a haphazard forager (which is also my gardening style). I often like to simply pick a new trail or park I haven’t experienced, and see what I can find.
When you let go of a desired outcome and stay open to the unexpected, you can be richly rewarded. Last weekend, road closures thwarted my original plans, and I ended up taking new walking routes through my neighborhood trying to find the bus detour. I stumbled onto a lady gingko loaded with stinko fruit that disguised its delicious little jade nuts inside, and taking a different route home, found a community garden tree with a new-to-me fruit, Che or melon berry, a brainy looking Asian fruit that tastes like mulberry.
Fall is a time for thanks-giving for nature’s bounty, and to that end, I organized a forager’s feast with a group of fellow wild foodies this weekend, with a kingly meal featuring the season’s abundance, from pawpaws to persimmons.
Left/top: Chicken of the woods parmigiana and pawpaw walnut bread went over well for a dinner party. Top right, Che berry, followed by native persimmon and the many stages of gingko processing.
Right/bottom: Our forager’s feast featured tri-fungal ramen featuring matsutake, with homemade kimchi as a perfect condiment. Below, chicken of the woods nuggets with morel soy sauce and pawpaw hot sauce, and for dessert, pawpaw hummingbird cake and pawpaw foster with buckwheat waffle.
Steal this menu!
Welcome snacks & light bites: We broke the fast with some che berries, which were new to all, and a simple plating of gingko nuts with a drizzle of honey from my community garden and some Maldon finishing salt. I plated the gingko nuts (which are frankly a bit laborious to de-fruit and de-shell) not just to be fancy, but also so no one would hurt themselves. Gingko nuts are full of micro-nutrients, but also contain a not-so-imaginatively-named gingkotoxin that can send you to the hospital if consumed in large quantities (the victims I read about had put down 50-80 in one sitting). Gingko is one of the most ancient trees on earth and its nuts enjoyed by many Asian cultures, so fear not, just enjoy in moderation. They have a sort of chestnut flavor with a slightly bitter aftertaste and a gummy texture I find pleasant.
Our other appetizers included Chef Julian’s panko-crusted chicken of the woods nuggets with pawpaw hot sauce, and my tofu bites crisped up with a double layer of autumn olive BBQ sauce and a flour coating, which went great with Julian’s morel no-soy sauce. Oh, and a light wild salad with chickweed, violet leaf, and marigold.
Drinks: The weekend prior, I had processed a few pounds of native persimmons, which spoil quickly, so I blended and froze the pulp. That was a mistake, Chef Julian taught me, as the blending does something to the pectin that leads the pulp and liquid to separate when thawed and give it a yucky texture. We managed to salvage it for persimmon margaritas by siphoning off the liquid with a dab of pulp. Our host Aaron squeezed wild maypop fruits for a little citrus shot, which I think could have gone great in the margarita.
I had also roasted chicory and dandelion root and persimmon seeds for tea, but that was a minor disaster, as the roots apparently were not well dried and were growing something on the surface, and the persimmon seeds were hard as rocks and would not break down in a coffee grinder. I still managed to boil the seeds for a nice mild tea to accompany our very heavy dessert course (more on that in a minute). I learned last weekend during Warren’s foraging meetup in Boyds that the persimmon seeds were used as buttons in the Civil War, but heck if I know how they managed to attached them given how impenetrable they are. Oh, and we had a nearly 10-year-aged apple scrap cider that was Julian’s first cidermaking attempt. Pretty sweet!
Main Course: Chef Julian outdid himself with a beautiful Ramen bowl of soba noodles topped with Maitake, Matsutake and wood ear mushrooms and turnip greens and a quick-made kimchi of mustard greens. This was my first time having the rare and treasured matsutake, or pine mushroom, which is especially sought after in Japan.
Dessert: We had pawpaw two ways: in a hummingbird layer cake topped with pawpaw cream cheese icing, and Susan and Tony’s delicious self-assembled pawpaw foster with buckwheat pancakes, whipped and ice cream, and a decadent walnut rum sauce. With this kind of eating, I’ll be taking on Grazer for next year’s fat bear contest!
Blessed be to have this community to share my food & nature passions with!
If you’re in DC on October 28, join me and my fellow gardener Mohamed at 11am for a free walkthrough of the interesting wild and cultivated edibles of Bruce Monroe Community Garden, of which I am a proud founding member. He’s grown some interesting Asian vegetables like bitter melon and Malabar spinach we’ll be hearing about. Or if you don’t have plans tomorrow, there’s MAW’s free annual mushroom fair. Carpe diem!
Wildly yours,
April
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