Pheasant Back Mushrooms

Such a beautiful mushroom!

On warm, early-spring days when I’m out hunting for Morels, most often I’m likely to come across Polyporus squamosus, aka Pheasant Back, aka Dryad’s Saddle Mushrooms. As much as I love Morels, I’m never sad to find these instead.

Pheasant Backs grow directly on dead hardwood, particularly Elms, and they love super wet areas. As you can see in the photo, the topside of this shelf mushroom has a feather-like pattern to it. The bottom has small pores rather than gills. It is thick and meaty, and dry to the touch, not slimy or wet-feeling. The smell is really interesting – not mushroom-y at all, more like cucumber or watermelon rind!

Underside of Pheasant Back mushroom.

These mushrooms can get quite large, and contrary to advice I’ve seen from others, smaller isn’t always better. For the best eating experience, you want this mushroom to be tender, and while it does tend to get tough as it gets older, size isn’t always the best indicator of tenderness. Rather, take a knife and touch it to the edge of the mushroom. Put just a small amount of pressure on the knife to push it into the mushroom. As soon as you feel resistance, stop there and cut just that tender part around the edge. For some mushrooms, it’ll be the whole thing up to the little nub that was connected to the wood. For others, it’ll be just a half-inch or so around the edge. Those tender bits are absolutely delicious when fried up in some butter. Make ’em crispy and salty to resemble bacon bits if you’d like. 🙂

Now don’t throw away the tougher part – use that to make soup stock! Either make the stock and freeze it…..or….cut up that tougher part, put it in the dehydrator, and save it to make stock later.

Another thing I love about this mushroom is that it’s not just around for one season – I’ll find it throughout most of the growing season, though it’s most abundant in Spring and Fall.

I hope you find whatever you are hunting for this year. And I hope you find and try some Pheasant Backs, too. 🙂

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Dandelion

I swear they are smiling!

What if you had the world’s most nutritious food growing in your backyard? What if you didn’t even plant it there, it just grew by itself with no tilling, tending or watering? What if you could harvest as much of it as you wanted, and it would just keep coming back? And…..What if it actually tasted good?!

Yep, that’s all true about Dandelion. Did you know that Dandelion was brought over with European settlers as a food source?? My how things have changed, lol!

Easy to recognize, easy to harvest and the entire plant is edible. What a good friend this sunny little flower is!!

If I could only have one Wild Food forever more, it would be this one. It never gets boring, it is so versatile:

Roots: use fresh for medicinal tinctures to help with digestion. Chop fresh roots and put into a stir-fry or into soup. Dried and roasted roots make a delicious tea, it tastes deeply nutty with a sort-of-chocolatey undertone.

Leaves: Use fresh to toss in salad, soup and hot dishes. Yes, they are bitter, so chop them small and mix well with other foods. Bitter foods are great for our digestion! Make pesto. Make tea. Dry them to use throughout the winter in soups and teas.

Flower buds: Saute in butter and eat it just like that. So yummy! You can pickle or ferment these, too, to use like capers. You’ll want the smallest, tightest buds for that.

Flower stems can be cooked and used like noodles, topped with your favorite sauce, or just eat with salt and butter. (Salt and butter are like magic, aren’t they??? They make everything taste good!)

The flowers themselves are so versatile – my favorite way to eat them is as a fritter: dipped in batter, fried and eaten with a bit of maple syrup. Or salt and butter. You could also chop them up fresh and toss in a salad or soup. And of course, let’s not forget Dandelion Wine.

The whole plant can be steeped in vinegar to use in a healthful delicious salad dressing, or any other way would use regular vinegar.

I haven’t personally eaten dandelion fluff before, but I’d bet that the fluff would just kind of disappear when mixed into a salad or soup – then you’d be left with that tiny little seed, bursting with nutrients.

Let me leave you with a couple of links with recipes and more information. Happy Spring, my friends. 🙂

• Learning Herbs is a great resource.
• Alan Bergo, aka The Forager Chef, never disappoints.
• This link is a surprise. You will like it, I’m sure of that. 🙂

Creeping Charlie

Oh, Creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea), how this poor thing gets a bad rap. As a member of the Mint family, it spreads easily and prolifically, populating lawns, gardens and driveways with it’s bitterly-minty-smelling leaves and petite purple flowers. Try as you might, you aren’t going to get rid of Creeping Charlie, so you might as well eat it, right?

It’s easy to throw some of the leaves into a salad, whether it’s made from fresh greens, or a tabouleh-style salad. You’ll likely want to chop it into small bits since it is fairly bitter tasting, but pleasant when mixed with tastier stuff.

That teeny-tiny purple flower is surprisingly delicious, and not bitter at all. It’s a bit tedious to pick any significant amount, but fun to nibble on them while harvesting the leaves. I like to toss a few of the flowers on top of a cream cheese veggie dip, to make it pretty.

My very favorite way to use Creeping Charlie, though, is to make tea. It is very mild, with the bitter note in background and more of a sort-of-sweet flavor than you’d expect. I’ll use fresh or dried leaves and stems to make tea in the summer, and of course just dried ones in the winter.

There are a couple other plants that look very similar to Creeping Charlie – Purple Dead Nettle and Henbit. They are both in the mint family, and both are also edible. Here’s a great article with details about how to tell them apart.

Don’t you love it when a ‘problem’ plant turns out to be something really good instead?? 🙂

Garlic Mustard

They are pretty, but………..

Garlic Mustard is considered invasive in Wisconsin, as are many other plants. It also happens to be delicious to eat.

Right now as I write this, it is flowering, and it really is pretty. But…….you can easily see how it crowds out all the other plants that like to grow near hardwoods: trout lily, spring beauty, ramps, etc.

Conventional methods of controlling invasive plants include poisoning them with weed killer. The trouble with that, of course, is that other plants and critters we WANT will also be poisoned, and that poison will stay in the soil for longer than we want to admit.

Pulling and eating Garlic Mustard is a great way to give it some boundaries and force it to share the space with other spring pretties in the forest.

Usually when we forage, we want to harvest carefully so the plant can continue to grow, but that’s not a concern with Garlic Mustard so we’ll pull the whole plant up, roots and all. The roots are shallow, so it isn’t hard to pull at all, even when it is tall and flowering. I don’t want to eradicate ALL the Garlic Mustard….the whole plant is edible and delicious, after all. It is so tenacious, though, we don’t have to worry about it not coming back.

If you are pulling flowering plants, be sure to either use the flowers in your food prep, or put them in the garbage. Those flower heads will continue to mature and set seed after harvesting, so if you compost them, you’ll be spreading the plant around, opposite of what we want to do!

Once you get your bag full of Garlic Mustard plants, here are some delicious ways to prepare them.

Roots: They taste like horseradish! Put them in a blender, mix with a little vinegar and salt and use like horeradish sauce.

Leaves: Use in your salads, chop up and add to pasta, make delicious pesto.

Flowers: A pretty garnish for salads, soups or dips.

Baby Garlic Mustard. Yum.

Ostrich Fern Fiddleheads

Ostrich Fern Fiddleheads

Quite often, people will ask me what my favorite thing to forage is. Every time, I think hard……….and come up with the same answer. Fiddleheads. There are so many things to love about foraging for this yummy food:

• They come up early in the spring, when I’m chomping at the bit to get outside. In my journals from the last few years, I’ve noted the dates that I’ve seen and picked all kinds of wild foods, and I’m already scanning my fern spots for signs of life.
• It’s easy to pick enough for a few meals – Ostrich Ferns are prolific spreaders, often forming large colonies with the plants fairly close together. Snapping a fiddlehead or two from each plant fills up my bag fairly quickly.
• They are SOOOooo yummy! I like them cooked simply, just steamed and served with butter. The taste for me is like a cross between asparagus and green beans.

All ferns have fiddleheads – that’s the term for the curled up frond as it emerges in the spring. Not all fiddleheads are edible, though, so it’s important to know what to look for. Ostrich Fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) has the most commonly eaten fiddleheads, and here are some key points for identification:

• The “Nest”: See that large brown thing at the top of the above photo that looks sort of like a spider? The ‘legs’ of the ‘spider’ are last years’ fronds, and the lumps in the middle are baby fiddleheads about to emerge from a cup-like structure that I call the Nest. Other ferns grow in clumps, but lack that cup-like Nest Thing.
• The Paper-like coating: Those brown baby fiddleheads at the top of the photo are covered with a brown paper-y stuff that breaks open when they emerge. You can see a tiny bit of green poking out of the one on the top right. At the bottom of the photo, the fully emerged fiddleheads are nice and green, and you can see the remnants of that papery coating around the bottom.
• The Celery Groove: No, not a cool dance – not that I know of anyway. 🙂 You can see how those green Fiddleheads at the bottom of the picture have a groove toward the inside, like celery does. Other ferns have a slight groove, and Ostrich Fern’s groove is very pronounced.
• Smooth Stems: Lady Fern looks pretty similar to Ostrich Fern in my opinion, even having a slight groove, but she has little brown hairs on her stems, while Ostrich Fern stems are smooth. Sometimes that paper-like coating will break up into pieces, stick to the fiddlehead stems and look like hairs, but up close you can see that it’s not.
• Habitat: Ostrich Fern prefers a bit of shade, and moist, rich soil. I usually find them in the woods, sometimes with a river or a lake fairly close by.

Happy Hunting!! If you’d like some help identifying wild edibles, check out my class schedule or consider a Bountiful Backyard Gathering.

Sheep Sorrel

Sheep Sorrel is a summer delight.  Those interestingly shaped leaves – are they sheep heads with little tiny ears and big fat snouts? Or electric guitars? Or Arrowheads?  Whatever they are, they are tart, tangy and delicious.

I rarely cook Sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella), though it can add a nice tang to soups and hot dishes.  I prefer to eat it plain as a snack when I’m out in the yard, or else in my salads and smoothies.

 

Sheep sorrel  grows in sunny spots, and I see it flowering along country roadsides everywhere.  As a member of the buckwheat family, it has a tall flower spike with tiny florets adorning it.  Unlike other plants, the leaves of Sheep sorrel stay tender and tasty even when it’s flowering.  It is hardy, too – it grows in our yard and gets mowed down over and over again….only to keep popping back up, over and over again.

Advice from Sheep sorrel: When life mows you down, dig your roots deeper and come back stronger.

Chickweed

This is such a pretty little plant, and delicious, too.  Chickweed (Stellaria media) is one of those nice wild greens that never gets bitter and can be good to eat all through the growing season.  The flavor is mild and tastes like summer.  I see it in a variety of places – alongside an old barn, out in a pasture, on the edge of the woods.  The long, leafy stems like to lay down, but if they get crowded with other plants, they will grow upright.

At first glance, the Chickweed flowers look like they have 10 petals, but a closer look shows that there are really 5 deeply lobed petals.  This is a common trait in the Pink family, which Chickweed belongs to.  You might see a very small, sort of fuzzy plant that looks just like this, with the same kind of flower – that would be Mouse-ear Chickweed.  That one is edible, too.  Fuzzy food is not my favorite, so I just leave that one be.

I usually eat Chickweed raw in salads and smoothies.  I’ll go out and snip some stems with a scissors, then pull the leaves off the lower, tougher end of the stem.  The stem tips are usually tender enough to use.

I see you there, baby Chickweed, growing in my strawberry bed, lol!!  It’s okay, you will make a nice ground cover, and since this is right out my back door, I won’t have to walk very far to pick some tender leaves for my salads.

 

 

 

Wild Violet

Did you know that Wild Violet (Viola sororia) is Wisconsin’s State Flower?

I love this little flower, and it’s a good thing, because it grows ALL OVER my yard and property.  It is delicate and beautiful and it makes me happy to look at those sweet blossoms with their heart shaped leaves.  And they taste good, too.

The blossoms have sort of a nutty, raw-pea kind of flavor, and the leaves are just nice and mild.  I like to chop the leaves and put them in salads and fritters (my current-favorite way of using wild greens, recipe down below).  The flowers I’ll leave whole and put on top of salads and dips as an edible decoration. They make a nice presentation when bringing stuff for a pot-luck.

These delicate, innocent-looking little plants grow very robustly, so I’m not worried about over-harvesting at all.  They are related to pansies and johnny jump ups, which are also edible flowers.  They grow around the edges of buildings and woods, where they get some shade for part of the day, and are happy no matter how much or little rain there is.

Okay, here’s the recipe for my current-favorite way of eating wild greens: Fritters!

• 1 cup grated fleshy vegetable like sweet potato or zucchini.
• 1/4 cup flour of choice (I like garbanzo bean flour)
• 1 egg

Now here’s the fun part – chop up whatever wild greens you’ve got on hand, throw in about 1/4 cup (more or less, depending on taste) and mix it up good with the other ingredients.  Spoon onto a hot griddle with plenty of oil and flatten into a disc shape.  Fry until golden, flip and repeat.  These are delicious hot off the griddle or cold so they are great to pack in lunch boxes.

Enjoy!

 

 

Tap, Sap, Syrup, Sugar

Boiling Sap, it’s mesmerizing to watch

The Sap Moon is full as I write this, and the Maple Sap is flowing.  We’ve got 40 taps out right now, and the First Boil happened March 24 when our sons came and spent the day in the sugar shack while we were out and about.  They turned 55 gallons of sap into 1.5 gallons of syrup – it was a good day.

Second Boil happened March 29 – hubby boiled 50 gallons of sap down to 5 gallons for making Wine – an even better day!

Third boil happened April 1 – hubby went out to the sap buckets and poured out the tiny bit of sap that was trapped under the ice.  It was super concentrated, VERY sweet.  We had about a quart, and boiled it to 259 degrees, then stirred it into a cup and a half of Maple Sugar!  First time we’ve ever made it, and it was very fun and satisfying.

Maple Sugar Goodness!

I’m enjoying drinking some Maple sap straight from the tree – it’s really sweet!  I’m using it to make tea, and to flavor my coffee, too.

Clear, cold and delicious!

 

Did you know that you can tap trees other than Sugar Maples, and make sryup with them, too? Walnut, birch, hickory, sycamore, ash, basswood and butternut all have sap that contains about one percent sugar. And other types of maples can be tapped too, like box elders, silver and black maple. Sugar maple’s sap is The Boss, though, because it contains 3-5 percent sugar, so it takes less sap to make syrup.  I’ll bet a person could drink the sap from those other trees, though, and it would taste yummy…………

Happy Spring

Just a little collection of spring photos from other years, to get us through this snowy transition…….

Trillium

Spring Beauty

Sheep Sorrel

Ramps/Wild Leek

Nettles

Chickweed