Senses of Summer

Chanterelles are my favorite wild mushroom, and raspberries my favorite wild fruit, and in both cases it’s the aroma as much as the taste that I’m drawn to. In the case of the wild raspberries we find at Bide-A-Wee, I’m fortunate to find pleasure in a bowl full of splendid smells, because it’s right difficult to gather any quantity of berries. While we have raspberry canes in abundance, those canes don’t tend to bear a lot of fruit. We don’t have this problem--well, not a problem, exactly, more just a situation--with black raspberries or blackberries, but our red raspberries rarely seem to be well pollinated. Many blossoms simply don’t turn to fruit at all, while others form only partial berries. Here I must note that I was about to refer to the many individual sub-berries that make up a single raspberry as “dem little doots,” but mindful that my friend Teresa Marrone might be reading this, and with her splendid tome Abundantly Wild close at hand, I can report dat dem little doots is properly referred to as globular drupes. Which actually doesn’t sound all that different, when you look at it.



Anyway: When picking raspberries from our Bide-A-Wee patches, one is rarely dropping full berries into the bowl, but rather is usually gathering dem little doots--er, dem glopular droops, I mean, oh, skip it…. Even so, even with the doot-drupe situation of unfulfilled berries, I can collect a small fragrant bowl in just a short while; not enough for jams or such, but plenty enough to appreciate that wonderful smell, and to cook down a bit to mix with some of my friend Mala’s rockin’ homemade whole grain mustard as a glaze for grilled chicken, a condiment to enliven a sausage--mixed grill for another Bide-A-Wee bachelor dinner. Mary’s been subsisting on Maid-Rites this past weekend at a family reunion in, well, where would you expect to find a Maid-Rite, a.k.a., "loose meat sandwich" (Look out! Meat on the loose!)?

Has to be the great state of Iowa.

Oh, and the other thing I like about raspberries: It’s the red.



Raspberry Mustard

1 cup raspberries
1 Tbsp honey
3 Tbsp grain mustard
Pinch salt
Espelette or cayenne to taste, optional

Wine or raspberry vinegar to thin the glaze, if needed

Combine the raspberries with about one tablespoon of water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer, stirring for two or three minutes, just until the berries become soft. Press the berries through a strainer, scraping the bottom of the strainer to get the thicker pulp. Return the juice to the saucepan with the honey, bring to a boil, and reduce by half. Pour the mixture into a small bowl and let cool. Add the mustard and a good pinch of salt, and the chili if desired.

For a glaze for grilled meat or fowl, thin with a little vinegar (or wine, or beer) if it seems too thick. Brush on at the very end of grilling and watch carefully to prevent burning.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Fruitful

A few weeks ago, on a warm September morning, I took a pleasant amble around the land out at Bide-A-Wee. The meadows were full of glorious color, goldenrod and asters, and nearly every tree and shrub I saw held some tasty, brilliant bit of fruit for me to taste. Before noon I had sampled wild black cherries, blackberries, chokecherries, apples, crabapples, wild plums, hazelnuts, grapes, nannyberries, haws (the fruit of the hawthorn tree). The last three weren't ripe yet. The grapes were especially, tremendously, mouth-puckering (so maybe the fox was right!).


After lunch I felt I still had a little rambling in me, so I drove to a nearby woods, a small piece of state land where we hunt grouse and woodcock in the fall. Just a five-minute drive from our cabin, the terrain could hardly be more different. Where Bide-A-Wee's acreage is nothing but up and down, and the soil is heavy clay, and there's no water on the property, this pleasant woods is flat, sandy, wet and low, with boggy forest and a couple of small streams running through. A nice change of scenery. I found some mushrooms under a stand of jack pines, and to my fruit tally I added highbush cranberries, elderberries, and rose hips.


It has been, needless to say, quite a fruitful year in west central Wisconsin. We've been somewhat frantic trying to figure out what to do with all of it. Apples have gone to cider, crabapples and plums to jelly, blackberries to jam. We have sacks of black cherries in the freezer, waiting for the calm of November to be processed.

Many of these fruits I had never tasted before--notably nannyberries, which ripen to dark, shriveled, sugary nuggets that remind me mostly of dates; and haws, which taste absolutely awful before they ripen, but once ripe take on a fascinating, complex flavor, mildly sweet, slightly astringent, with a perfume which--I swear--reminds me of roses, to which they are related. More about those two fruits later.


And highbush cranberries: Well, I'd heard of them but had never seen or tasted one. Then over lunch that day between rambles, I was scanning my main resources for wild fruit identification, our friend Teresa Marrone's books, and Sam Thayer's Forager's Harvest , paying particular attention to highbush cranberries (which are not actually related to cranberries, but are a type of viburnum). And dang if I didn't go out that afternoon and find some, in a wet area in the woods, bright red berries on a leggy shrub. Their flavor was tart and vibrant--easy to see why they're compared to cranberries.


I didn't get a lot of them, just enough to cook into a bit of syrup, adding some sugar, which I then stirred into iced vodka, thereby creating the first ever Bide-A-Wee Highbush Cran-Tini (or, perhaps, a "Bide-A-Wee-Breeze"?). Just the thing to refresh a weary forager after a long day in the woods.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Grilled Duck with Promiscuous Berry Sauce

I should begin with a clarification: In no way should the title's "promiscuous berry sauce" be taken as a condemnation of the moral character of Bide-A-Wee's berries, which are just as forthright and upstanding as any berries could be, I assure you. Nor does it refer specifically to the sauce, which, though saucy, as is to be expected, was likewise found to be of sterling character, admirable in every respect.

Instead, the adjective describes the forage that resulted in the sauce (but not the foragers, indeed not...). The Random House dictionary (in an online form)gives these definitions of promiscuous:

–adjective 1. characterized by or involving indiscriminate mingling or association, esp. having sexual relations with a number of partners on a casual basis.
2. consisting of parts, elements, or individuals of different kinds brought together without order.
3. indiscriminate; without discrimination.
4. casual; irregular; haphazard.
Synonyms:
1. unchaste. 2. hodgepodge, confused, mixed, jumbled. See miscellaneous. 3. careless.

Here we're taking defintions two through four as our guide, and #2 in the synonyms list. On one of our first days out at our Wisconsin land during a recent baking break, we took a walk, and on our walk we took a basket. Casually, without discrimination, we gathered what berries we found along the way. It's late in the year for our raspberries, but we found a few of both the black and the red. The gooseberries, which in their hard green form taste unpalatably sour, yet make a tasty fool, had begun to ripen, darken, and take on a slight dusky sweetness, not unlike black currants--a few of which we also found in an adjacent tangle.

And the first of the blackberries were just coming ripe. A couple of handfuls of those dark, juice-packed beauties rounded out the jewel-like bowl of berries that graced the Bide-A-Wee table at the end of the day.



We were in no hurry at all to turn the product of our promiscuous forage into anything more refined, whether jam, sauce, or syrup. The fragrance of the over-ripe raspberries did not fill our little cabin, but you would catch the scent of it when the breeze came your way, a fleeting, cheering sniff. And that hodgepodge of berries in the bowl, all the various colors, shapes and textures, glazed with the juice of a few berries that got squished at the bottom of the basket, was a delight to the eye every time we looked at it. Haphazard though it was, it couldn't have been more pleasing.

And, like all the joys of summer, and of the forager's world, be it a mayfly hatch, a fruiting of fungus, the moment of the berries' perfect ripeness, this pleasure was perfectly ephemeral. By the second day our lovely bowl of berries was practically begging to be puréed--indeed, some had started to take matters into their own hands (recognizing that berries don't exactly have, uh, hands...).

There's a time for everything, they say, and when it's time for dinner, and there's a duck on hand, and a bowl of berries ready for their next adventure, we know just what to do.


Grilled Duck with Berry Sauce

I feel this should be descriptive, rather than recipe-quantitative. This dish came about just as haphazardly as the berry forage. We had a whole duck, purchased at the Country Lane Farmers Market just north of Barron, Wisconsin. It was about a four-pounder, I think. I took it apart into its constituent parts--boneless breasts, separated legs and thighs, wings, carcass, skin. There's a use for every part of the duck, and I'll discuss more about what I do with them in my next post.

On a big fat duck like the ones that produce foie gras, the breast, or magret, is sometimes big enough to feed two, and I mean just one, single side of the breast. This duck was more of an Audrey Hepburn sort of duck, rather than a Dolly Parton type, so I decided to grill the thighs, as well (now I'm sorry I just gave you the mental image of Audrey Hepburn's thighs on the grill; try to focus on them pre-grilling, just resting lithe and elegant in a delicate marinade...).

From the carcass I made a stock--brown the chopped-up bones, add aromatic vegetables, herbs, water, simmer a good long while. But you could use chicken stock if you like. You'll need some good strong stock for the berry sauce.

The berries we just dumped in a saucepan, promiscuously, and we added a little water, brought it to a boil, and simmered until the berries gave up their individual identities, and now, no longer mixed, jumbled, or miscellaneous, came together as one, as a mystic surrenders ego to meld with the universal spirit in ineffable ecstasy.

And then we added sugar to taste. Not too much. We left it fairly tart, much less sweet than any jam you would buy, because I wanted that tartness to balance the rich stock, and the richness of the duck itself. But if you're using regular jam--blackberry, raspberry, or black currant (or a promiscuous melange!) all would be good--add an equal amount of dry red wine to your jam. I had meant to add wine to our sauce, but forgot, and I'm glad I did; it had more berry qualities without the wine.

Quantities: For two servings, reduce about a cup of unsalted stock to one-half cup. Add a good pinch of salt and a grind of pepper, then two tablespoons lightly sweetened berry purée, or 1 1/2 tablespoons jam and 1 1/2 tablespoons red wine. Simmer a couple of minutes, and at the end taste for salt, then swirl in a tablespoon or two of soft butter.

For the duck: I just seasoned it with salt and pepper and grilled it over hardwood coals. There's a lot of fat in duck skin, of course, but if you grill it over a moderate fire and turn frequently, you'll be okay. The thighs will take a couple of minutes longer, so while they finish just move the breasts to a warm part of the grill away from direct heat. When the skin is nicely crisp and evenly brown, the duck should be done. Moderate heat and frequent turning, I repeat, are the keys to successful duck grilling.

The result of successful duck grilling.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Fool Me Twice

"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me," the old saying goes. But there's no shame in enjoying the old-fashioned dessert called "fool"--well, it's a shame when you've spooned up the last creamy bite and your bowl is empty, but that's about as far as that goes.

Gooseberries: What the hell? Little hard, green, sour, unappetizing globes that dangle from inhospitably thorny branches--sometimes the berries are armed with thorns, too. You often hear that it was a brave man that first ate an oyster, but to me it's a marvel that anyone bothered finding a use for these odd little knobules that make raw rhubarb taste sweet by comparison.


I mean, take a look at those raspberries, the red and the black, and the gooseberries, and tell me: How is it we call both of these things "berries"?

But in fact, whoever first ate a gooseberry discovered something very good. They need sugar, that's certain, but when you cook them down with about one part sugar to every four parts gooseberries, strain out seeds and skin, and blend the resulting purée into freshly whipped, good, rich, local cream ( Cedar Summit for us, of course), you get something sweet, tart, lush and bracing at once--a wonderful, wonderfully simple, seasonal treat.

The raspberry fool provides a rather gaudy color contrast (and I'm red-green color blind, so I can only imagine how it looks to you "normal" folks!), and another sweet offset to the tangy gooseberries.

The raspberries we picked on the land out at Bide-A-Wee. The gooseberries I gathered on a fishing outing when rain chased me off the water and into the woods for shelter. There I came upon a nice patch of gooseberries, and I set my rod aside and picked a good cup of berries to the gentle drip-drip-drip of raindrops on the greenery, with a fine damp stillness all around. A splendid memory. The foraging life yields so much more than fare for the table.

Gooseberry and Raspberry Fool
serves two generously

1 cup gooseberries
1/4 cup sugar

Wash the gooseberries and place in a small saucepan with 1/4 cup sugar and a splash of water. Bring to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and simmer, covered, until the berries are very soft, 8 to 10 minutes.

1 cup raspberries, black or red or both--or blackberries, mulberries, etc.
2 Tbsp sugar

As with the gooseberries, but the cooking time will only be 4 or 5 minutes.

Strain the berries separately through a sieve or food mill to remove seeds. The resulting purées can be made several days in advance.

1 cup heavy cream
1 tsp sugar (or a little less, or none at all, depends on how sweet you like things...)

Whip the cream with the sugar if desired, to until quite stiff. Divide the whipped cream into two bowls, and fold the gooseberry purée into one, the raspberry into the other. Garnish with a sprig of mint, a few whole raspberries. A cookie on the side wouldn't hurt, piece of shortbread or a ginger snap--or the same crumbled over the top.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Strawberry Days

It seems as though strawberry days were a long time coming this year. All spring long the weather was noncommital, leaning back toward winter as often as it strained ahead toward summer. Now summer is having the same problem making a stand--a few hot, humid days had us adjusting our expectations to July, and then today we're wearing sweaters and wool socks. Go figure.

But there has been summer enough to bring berries to market these last couple of weeks. The best I've had were those we bought from our friend Alvin at the market. I think I'm the only one who got any of these perfectly ripe, sweet and fragrant berries, though, because Alvin was hiding them in the back of his van. Since he doesn't grow them himself, but rather distributes them as he does with honey, maple syrup, wild rice, and various other things, he didn't want to put them out until the other berry growers at the market had sold out.

I told Mala about it after the market, raving over Alvin's hidden cache. "God, he is so principled," she said, disgustedly....

Well, you can't eat principles, but having some standards about local, seasonal eating means you can enjoy these first fruits of summer to their fullest. While the berries are fresh, ripe, and local (and preferably organic, like Alvin's, and like the excellent berries that Jackie had at the market last week) we indulge, we exult. When they're finished--and the strawberry season looks to be a short one this year--we don't buy those giant, pink, flavorless berries from California, but look forward to raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, melons, pears, apples....

The classic strawberry shortcake made with Mary's magnificent buttermilk shortcakes, whipped Cedar Summit cream, and market berries, is wonderful. Equally good was the impromptu berry breakfast pictured at the very top, made with leftover scones that we didn't sell at the market. We just broke up the two-day-old currant scones, sliced berries over the top, a sprinkle of sugar, a good pour of cream. Great day in the mornin'. I would eat that.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Black/Gold

Not, indeed, that Texas tea, the bubblin' crude that Jed Clampett came upon while shootin' at some food. Rather, the morning and afternoon of a fortunate forager.



When we purchased our Wisconsin land we knew we were getting several dozen long-neglected apple trees, and maybe a couple of plums. We didn't know quite how generally fruitful the land would turn out to be. The raspberries and black caps were delicious though not especially abundant. We're watching grapes slowly ripen on the vine, lots of those. There's a nannyberry bush (also called "wild raisin" and black haw) which will provide a new wild treat next month--if the birds don't get to them first. The birds are welcome to whatever they can find: they are one of the great delights of the land, and they consume a lot of potentially troublesome bugs, as well.


But what we have in spades right now (befitting their inky hue), is blackberries. Big, fat, juicy, sweet blackberries. One morning this week, in the midst of preparing to return to the city, I discovered a burgeoning patch just down the hill from where our new cabin sits. They'd been hiding in plain sight, and we had walked right past them, somehow, on our way to pick berries on another hillside, berries that went into a breakfast of french toast and apple syrup.

I planned to stop at a favorite foraging spot on the way home (that's where the gold comes in) so I didn't want to let the morning slip by in the berry patch. I set the timer on my watch for fifteen minutes, and I made my leisurely way through a section of the patch, plucking the biggest berries from the tops of the canes, enjoying a few in the process. When I got home I found that my fifteen minute harvest was nearly a pound-and-a-half of berries.


I closed up the cabin and drove to my favorite mushroom woods. This is chanterelle time, if the mushrooms decide to cooperate. Two years ago I found pounds of chanterelles in these woods; last year I found not a one. I was a little late to the woods this year, and found quite a few mushrooms a bit dried, mud-splashed, or bug-bit. I pick them all, regardless, and make the best of them. If we get some much-needed rain there may be another burst of them--I've found them into October in past years.


Chanterelles are my favorite mushroom, and one of my favorite foods, period. Part of it goes back to my sheer joy and amazement at first discovering them in a local woods, four years ago, I think it was. Seeing those glimpes of gold in the leaf duff induces a sort of "forager's high," an exhilaration hard to describe. And then the hunt is on, and you rarely find just one chanterelle, their habits being generally "gregarious," as mycologists put it, which makes them seem not just abundant but fun and sociable, as well.


And part of it is the aroma of freshly picked chanterelles, which is often described as being like that of apricots, but which also reminds me of raw squash or pumpkin, of sweet corn meal, of berries, a bit. But what they really smell like is chanterelles, an aroma I find so enticing that I have to lift each and every chanterelle I pick up to my nose, to take in that scent at its most potent. For this reason, and others, it takes a long time to pick a modest portion of chanterelles.


And part of it, of course, is that they are delicious. Better than morels, to me, more subtle and yet more potent at the same time. I've tasted truffles and fresh cepes, but I would take chanterelles over either of those esteemed, expensive fungi. Simple is best in preparing them (though in that abundant year I recall a dish of lobster and chanterelles in espelette cream sauce that went down pretty nicely). Saute gently in butter and serve with a plain omelet of good fresh eggs. A splash of cream at the end won't hurt them, and then you nap that over toast points and indulge. A nice light burgundy like a mercurey, or another pinot noir wine on the fruity side, that would be my choice to accompany them. In a white I might go for a dry vouvray, a pouilly-fume, or a pinot gris. That's a little academic: the 'shrooms are the thing.

I love foraging. I have always loved just wandering around in the woods, and when one is able to bring home rare and exquisite things to eat in the process, I wonder why everyone isn't doing it. At the same time, it can be really hard work, and until you're lucky enough to find a chanterelle woods, or a haunt of morels, or a stand of hen-of-the-woods-harboring oaks, you need to enjoy walking around in the woods finding nothing whatever of note or delectation.

Even the blackberries, obvious and abundant as they are, extract a price. Their thorns are the most wicked of all the brambly berries, like pointy razors, and no matter how careful you are, you are going to get a little torn up picking blackberries. My dogs are wirehaired hunters built for just this sort of terrain--grouse and woodcock favor thick and thorny coverts--and I have heard them yelp in pain when a blackberry thorn caught a nose or ear.

And as for the mushrooms: It would take any number of plates of lobster and chanterelles in cream sauce to replace the calories I burn off trudging up and down the hills of my favorite chanterelle woods. I'm in long pants and long sleeves for this outing, as well, since I have to go through thorn bushes and nettles on the way, and it's August. I am sweating profusely, and twisting my ankles on steep and rocky terrain, straining my foggy eyes for a glimpe of yellow in the oak leaves. There is a lake down below me, and I can hear the slap-slap-slap of motorboats bouncing over the waves. From the swimming beach I hear splashing and laughing; the voices of the children sound like happy geese from this distance. I stop on the rocky slope and think: What is wrong with you, slogging around this dismal dark woods, drenched in sweat, exhausted, looking for bizarre organisms that live underground and feed on decaying leaves and wood? Why can't you be a sane and normal person, out there enjoying the sun and breeze and water on a beautiful summer's day, getting a tan, taking a cool dip when you please?

Then looking up the hill I see something glimmer gold: could be a leaf, or just a trick of the light, but no, that tone, that density of yellow is unmistakable. Who needs beaches when you've got chanterelles?

Text and photos copyright Brett Laidlaw 2008

Impromptu Orchard Forage

This was not a serious outing to fill the larder or explore new territory. I had some business to attend to out near the orchard, so I stopped by our land to let the dogs run, pick a few berries, see how the apples were coming along. Down by The Troll Bridge (it's a big broken limb of a box elder tree that forms a sort of tunnel tall enough to walk under), I had dug a hole a few weeks back, to see if any water would seep in; hoping to be able to build a little pond there. I didn't strike water, but I did create a broken-ankle hazard, as Mary found out while berry-picking last weekend (no broken ankle, just a slight strain, thank you, trolls).

So I took the shovel over to fill in the hole. While I was there I gathered just about the last of the raspberries. Since I had the shovel, I decided to dig some burdock root. I've never tried burdock root. Burdock is in the rhubarb-sorrel-buckwheat family. Its leaves look very rhubarb-like. It's a biennial, and you dig the root from the first year plant, not the second-year, flowering plant that produces the titular burrs that are the bane of dogs and their people. The plants are tall, and the burrs grow all the way up. Just the slightest brush is enough for them to adhere to anything (hunting dogs a favorite target), and then the round burrs break into a million tiny seeds at a touch when you try to remove them. It's because of burdock that we always carry a comb when we go afield with the dogs in late summer and autumn--I have seen Annabel's head so covered in burdock burrs, it looked like she was wearing a mask. She did not like it.

Thus, digging a few burdock roots served the dual purpose of ridding our land of some nasty burrs and trying a new wild edible. According to books I've consulted, the Japanese use burdock in stews and such. You can also eat it raw. It has a mild carrot- or parsnip-ish flavor. I haven't tried cooking it yet. Based on a few tastes of it raw, I'm not won over. Maybe its flavor will be better after a frost, as with carrots.

I gathered me berries while I might, I filled the ankle-breaker hole, I dug some burdock. As I made my way back up the meadow I noticed some tall yellow flowers on a hill to my right, which I thought might be jerusalem artichokes, aka, sunchokes. Hello, I had a shovel in my hand. Might as well check it out. The yellow flowers were growing in a thick patch of blackberries. I was wearing shorts. I turned back at the first encounter with the canes, yet today I look like I got into a leg-wrasslin' match with a barbed-wire monster. I found one of the tall yellow flowers at the edge of the bramble patch, and dug it up. There was a bit of a swelling to the root, but nothing very substantial. It was a smallish plant, and I didn't persevere with other, larger ones, so the jury's still out.

But while I was there, I noticed on the steep slope above me the distinctive, delightful shape of green hazelnuts in their husks. Here they are, on the right, with a better look at the burdock, as well.I will have to be extremely vigilant in order to harvest any ripe nuts--all manner of woodland creatures find them as delicious as we do. Inside those husks you find fully formed hazelnuts, their shells pale green, and you can crack them open to extract a green nut, which is tasty but small.


The last thing in my forager's harvest wasn't wild fruit, but sour apples. We have a lot of these, and I'm trying to find uses for them. So far I've made sour apple juice which, sweetened with some honey from "neighbor" Talking Oak Farm (Sandy and Rich Hall), has made the base for some excellent cocktails and aperitifs. I'm also thinking about chutney or a similar relish. Any ideas are most welcome. In a couple of weeks, when sweet apples are readily available, I'll show you how to make small batches of fresh apple cider at home, without a juicer. It's incredibly easy and gratifying.

Twenty acres isn't a lot of land by some standards, but it's more than 200 times as big as our lot in Saint Paul, which is usually a mess. Fortunately, no one expects 20 acres of woodland and meadow to be tidy.... Twenty acres is a universe when you start to explore it in fine. For a forager there's remarkable abundance in every acre. So far this year I've identified these edible plants: fiddleheads, nettles, dandelions, wintercress, wild ginger, garlic mustard, wood sorrel, lamb's-quarters, milkweed, raspberries, black cap raspberries, gooseberries, black currants, nannyberries, burdock, hazel nuts, plums, grapes, apples (!), crab apples. The oaks will yield nutritious acorns; we could get syrup from the maples and birches. I've found a few boletus mushrooms, but all either slug-or-bug-eaten or attacked by white fungus. Puffball mushrooms lie ahead, perhaps sulfur shelf and hen of the woods.

All that in due time. This impromptu forage report is just an early indication of the adundance ahead.

Text and photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw