Happy May, food & foraging friends!
Everyone has their kinks and quirks, and I think mine is novel sensory experiences served up by Mother Nature. I’ve written about the mouth-numbing jambú in the Brazilian Amazon, and the Lactifluus piperatus mushroom, a teeny taste of which will make you feel like you’ve bitten into a chili pepper. And then there are nettles. While they can be harvested pain-free, I find the slightly irritating, prickly sensation a roller-coaster kind of fun.
And that is why I stuck my finger right in a wild nettle patch behind a punk concert in Freetown Christiana, Copenhagen’s old hippie-anarchist commune. Two days later, I woke up and gleefully declared to my stepdad, “I can still feel it!” Despite being double-dog-dared, Don had declined to participate in my multisensory foraging experience, and yet he took on a 9 million Scoville pepper at a museum in Malmo, Sweden featuring disgusting and dangerous foods. To each his own!
To my delight, nettles and other favorite wild foods popped up on menus and street food carts throughout Copenhagen. (For the record, nettles are extremely good for you as food, despite the little hypodermic needles on the leaves and stems that inject histamines under your skin.) I sampled herbaceous nettle lemonade popsicles, mouth-puckering hawthorn berry kombucha, green garlicky ramps threaded through layers of buttery pastry, elderflower liqueurs and wildflower IPAs. Purple oxalis — a sour flavor that pairs equally well with sweet and savory — garnished gourmet hot dogs with chervil mayo as well as rhubarb mousse-topped brownies.
Honestly, the food was just one of many elements that shot Copenhagen straight to the top of my favorite places on Earth. The design, the architecture, the fashion, the people — it all made my proud little Scandinavian-American heart swell.
Many of the wild plants that grow with abandon in urban soils stateside originated in Eurasia, but don’t make them any less of “weeds” in a place like Denmark. I saw mugwort and garlic mustard framing graves in one of Scandinavia’s largest cemeteries, chickweed blanketing abandoned flowerpots, lambsquarters pushing through the Vesterbro pavement, and pineapple weed flanking canals. (Pineapple weed is one of several wild edibles you can find in DC now. Look for this wild form of chamomile, featuring sunny yellow centers and lacy leaves like miniature yarrow, in grassy areas or disturbed soil. They make a nice sweet floral pop in salads or teas.)
Left/top: Bottom row, nettles and one of their gourmet applications (goat sausage), and garlic mustard in a Jewish quadrant of Kirkegaarde cemetery. Middle center – white deadnettle is a cousin of purple deadnettle; true to name, it has no sting.
Right/bottom: Bottom middle, closeup of pineapple weed. Top right, mallow with flowers, which made it into soups, side dishes and even ink this month.
This month I also co-organized a spring forager’s gathering featuring the best ingredients of the season. Ramps were one of the dinner’s stars, with potluck items including a rich ramp butter melted on a garlicky green focaccia, a homegrown mushroom and asparagus salad with ramp-tahini dressing, and a ramp and garlic mustard sauerkraut. I got to try wild asparagus, pickled, for the first time, and sipped on a curious mica cap soup that gave my teeth what I call the squeaky spinach feel.
My own dinner contributions included a green soup packed with a few pounds of wild mallow that took over one of our community garden beds, topped with wild Canadian rice, pink mallow flowers and the tiny inner leaves of magenta spreen, a sparkly fuschia-centered cousin to lambsquarters. Mallow soup, known as molokhia, hails from Egypt; Alan Bergo’s Flora cookbook has a great recipe for it as well as bakoula, a Moroccan mallow dish with olives and preserved lemon I brought to the closing potluck of the DC Master Naturalist program I completed this May.
This month I’ve also been experimenting with botanical inks – including the aforementioned mallow flowers! To my surprise, the flower extract (simply boiled in water and strained) dried a gorgeous Robin’s egg blue. I also made dyes from onion skins, purple cabbage, calendula petals and avocado pits, because why stop at foraging your own art supplies?
If you’re hoping to join one of my foraging walks, I have one coming up June 9, organized as a perk for Patreon subscribers of redelicious, a local food waste-fighting, fermentation-and foraging-loving cooperative. Check it out here.
Otherwise, I’ll see you next month, and let you know what’s forageable in Colombia, where I’m headed next!
Wildly yours,
April
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