Quick, Pickle! (Freezer Dill Cukes in Strawberry Vinaigrette)

I got thinking about pickles thanks to my friend Tom's recent post over at marthaandtom.com .  There hasn't been a lot around to pickle so far this year.  I did up a jar of ramps earlier in the spring, and I wanted to do some asparagus, but thought I might have missed the boat.  The Minneapolis Farmers Market came through for me--at the North Lyndale site on a weekday morning I was able to find excellent asparagus, along with hothouse cucumbers, snow peas, strawberries, and green garlic.  All of the above were put to use in a quick pickling session that produced a half pint each of pickled asparagus and snow peas,* and a quick cucumber pickle inspired by my friend Tata's method (see below).

The asparagus and snow pea pickles were quick in that they took little time to make, though they need to cure a few days to develop best flavor.  This is my main pickling M.O. these days, a sort of stealth/guerilla approach that allows me to get some pickles in jars before I realize I'm "preserving" or embarking on a "canning" endeavor. 

Fact is, I rarely process anything anymore (and never much did).  I don't make large batches of anything, prefer freezing my excess tomatoes rather than canning them, and have an extra fridge in the basement, purchased to hold cases of butter and many dozens of eggs during our market baking days.  So the few jars of cornichons, bread & butters, ramps, etc., that I put up go into that basement fridge, where they keep just fine.  If our apple and blackberry crops come through this year, as it's seeming they will, I'll devote a few days to jam and jelly making, for sure, but the processing kettle doesn't really see a lot of use here.

The strawberries hereabove mentioned didn't get pickled, per se, but they did meet up with vinegar and other things in a dressing for a rather oddball, but tasty and refreshing, salad.  We've had really, really fragrant, wonderful strawberries this year, mainly from Wisconsin, and I'd been thinking about ways to use them other than the usual sweet applications--not to say I have anything against strawberry shortcake, strawberries over ice cream, or, in an inspired Bide-A-Wee breakfast one-off, butter-toasted croutons with strawberries, cream, and maple syrup.

The notion of a strawberry vinaigrette intrigued me, but I didn't know what to serve it with.  I thought of blanched English peas, but they didn't seem substantial enough, and I thought the dressing would slide right off those smooth little orbs; snow peas, likewise, seemed too slippery.  I was stymied.  Then I read Tom's post, and I remembered Tata's quick freezer pickles, and I thought, Hmmm....  Seemed dicey, but if I wanted to use the strawberries in a savory way, I couldn't hedge my bets.  I can well imagine that the combination of strawberries, dill, and garlic will turn a few heads, but stick with me a minute. 

I think this hinges on how we think of fruits and their uses, and how we categorize flavors.  I got the idea last summer to put cucumbers and crab apples together in a pickle, and it was wonderful.  I thought then, and I was thinking in preparing this salad, that I was combining disparate elements, fruit and vegetable, but then I thunk again:  I do not know how all this shakes out botanically, but a cucumber is by nature what we widely consider a fruit, to wit, a melon.  It's a pale watermelon without the sweetness.  It's a juicer, milder zucchini.  In Chinese, of which I know a smidgen, and most of it food-related, the relationship is clear:  cucumber, huang gua (yellow melon); zucchini, nan gua (south[ern] melon); winter melon, dong gua (winter melon).  (I don't know what the Chinese for watermelon is, but I'm going to fling out a guess:  xi hong gua, literally "western red melon."  I'll Google it later.)  A salad of watermelon with feta cheese is in danger of becoming a cliché before it's time; strawberries and cucumbers might just work.

In fact, it worked very well indeed.  Combined with tart and savory things in the dressing, the berries expressed their tart and fragrant side.  Napping the chilled, salty, garlicky cukes, the vinaigrette provided a delightful counterpoint.  I think this would be good on blanched or quick-pickled green beans, too.  Perhaps they'll overlap for a week, so I can give that a try.

I tried the combination in a different variation this past weekend at Bide-A-Wee, tossing cucumbers with green garlic, goat yogurt, cider vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper, and topping that with sliced strawberry and salted milkweed flower buds--excellent.

It's worth noting that these quick salted pickles contain no vinegar--the combination of a vinaigrette on a vinegar pickle might be a little much.  Perhaps some intrepid soul will try that out and report the results.

The freezer pickles are good on their own, beside a burger or sandwich (hell, I'm sure you know how to eat a pickle...).  The dressing, too, could simply go over mixed greens--a gutsy salad, with some arugula, cress, mizuna, mustard, what-have-you, would be best, I think.

Strawberry Vinaigrette

1/2 cup chopped very ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon cider vinegar (preferably unpasteurized)
3 tablespoons canola or grape seed oil
1 teaspoon honey
pinch salt
a few grinds of black pepper
a good pinch of espelette or cayenne pepper

Combine all in a blender or mini food processor.  Blend until smooth.

Tata's Quick Freezer Garlic Dill Pickles

1 large cucumber
a few sprigs of fresh dill, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
coarsely ground black pepper, about 1/2 teaspoon
1 teaspoon salt
 Coarse salt, like French gray sea salt, or fleur de sel flakes

Peeling lengthwise, take a few strips of the cucumber skin off with a vegetable peeler, leaving a few strips of skin intact, creating a striped effect.  Halve the cucumber lengthwise and remove the seeds.  Cut each half into three long strips, then cut the strips into two-inch lengths.  In a quart zip bag combine everything but the strawberries, close the top and mix everything together thoroughly.  Place the bag in the freezer for 23 minutes.  Remove the bag from the freezer and mix again.  Leave it in the fridge until you're ready to finish the salad--or just use it as a pickle.

To make the salad, dump the cucumbers into a mixing bowl, dill, garlic, and all.  Pour off any liquid that has accumulated.  Toss with the vinaigrette.  To each portion add a few slices of fresh strawberries and a sprinkle of coarse salt.  Serve.

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*I put up the asparagus and snow peas in the brine described here , except that I made the brine with a little more salt and a little less sugar than that recipe calls for. Also, to the asparagus I added chile, garlic, black peppercorns, and a good sprig of dill (volunteering willingly in my garden this year); to the snow peas I added chile, garlic, Sichuan peppercorns, and a couple slices of ginger. A jar of each was quick to make, though these are not "quick pickles" in the way Tom uses the term. They need to cure for a week or so to be really nicely pickled, and I'll just keep them in the fridge and use them up within a few weeks.


Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

One Odd Apple

The several dozen apple trees (probably over a hundred all together) growing on our Wisconsin land come in many shapes and sizes.  The trees range in size from around eight feet on the small end to over twenty feet tall (guessing, but some of these trees are really big).  Some are compact in their growing habit, and some majestically sprawling, with stout horizontal branches that invite you to climb up and take a seat in the cool shade on a hot afternoon.  Quite a few are composed of many trunks, acquired from shoots pushing up from rootstock in their carefree years before we arrived to harass them, try to get them to make something of themselves, and a few are miraculously kempt, requiring only a few judicious pruning cuts to give them a shape that would be quite at home in a real orchard.

And while most of the trees are found in irregular groupings in the open areas on our property, there are a number of large, healthy trees that now find themselves growing in the middle of the woods--mainly among the younger stands of birch and aspen.  Some of those trees may be wild, seedling trees, or they may have been planted on purpose, and only later in life became isolated in the forest as those faster-growing species colonized the area.

What all these trees have in common is that, regardless of differences in size or posture, they look like apple trees.  The main trunk or trunks rise to a certain height, then branch out to form a spreading crown.  Wild and unruly though many of them are, they are recognizable even at a distance as apple trees.

All but one.  That's the Anomalous Apple, so I think of it, pictured above, as best I could manage--its trunk starts at the very bottom left and angles toward the upper right.  It's growing no more than a couple of feet from the much, much larger trunk of a mature white oak on the north side of our land--that's a limb of the oak visible behind the Anomalous Apple.

I first noticed Anomalous this winter on a snowshoe walk through the woods.  Here was a tree that had to be some kind of fruit tree, and its bark said apple to me, as did the bare wood of the small dead branches which were the only branches close enough to the ground for us to really see.  It wasn't a plum or cherry, the most common wild fruit trees on our land.  It really seemed that it had to be an apple tree, except that the trunk, instead of rising to the usual four to six feet, then spreading its arms to make apples, the trunk surpassed that height and just kept going, straight up, right into the branches of its companion oak, with only minor, twiggy side branches along the way.  It looked like an apple that yearned to be a pine tree, is what it looked like. 

Well, I'm not a forestry expert.  I decided to keep an eye on it and see what it would turn out to be, once it leafed out and, perhaps, even bloomed.  Likely it would reveal itself to be something quite obvious, in hindsight, and certainly not an apple.  Except, it is.  Or, I'm pretty well sure that it is.  It leafed out, and the leaves looked like apple leaves, only unusually large, perhaps to compensate for its sunless situation.  It blossomed, and examined through binoculars, those blooms well over our heads did indeed look like apple blossoms.

You can just make out the fruit in the photo above--it's awfully hard to shoot, aiming upward at the brighter sky from below in the dark woods.  Here's a tighter crop:

The little apples are mostly around the edges of the picture.  It's a curiosity, for sure, and I can't wait to find out what those apples taste like once they ripen.  While we speculate about which of our other trees might be wild trees, unique to our little plot of land, this one, this Anomalous Apple, we're sure about.  Apple trees take a long time to reach full size, but oaks take even longer.  Somehow an apple seed found its way into the old oak and maple woods, managed to germinate, and, against all odds, survive for all these years in what has to be one of the more uncomfortable situations an apple tree could find itself in. 

It would seem, once again, that Great Nature has found a way.  Now we are only left to ponder, Why?  Maybe just because it can.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

At Bide-A-Wee, June 2011

This is the fourth summer since we purchased our Wisconsin property, "Bide-A-Wee Land," just long enough to really start to get a feel for the place.  We've seen enough changes of season to be able to anticipate, a bit, but there's enough variety in those seasonal turnings that we can still be surprised, or find new things to notice, with each progression.

One very broad observation that we've made, starting in the very first year we owned the land, is the stunning transformation that occurs between, say, mid-May, as the trees are just starting to leaf out, the thickets to thicken, the meadow plants to gain momentum, to the end of June, when the real heat of summer comes in, and with it the astounding profusion of greenery that takes what was previously a rather obvious landscape and elaborates it with layer after layer of texture, color, contrast, depth, and life.  It's particularly striking on our very hilly acres, as the elevation compounds yet again all those layers, and the spare scaffold shapes of winter trees fill out and up, turning hills into mountains, modest inclines into imposing cliffs.

It's a little startling in some ways.  Through this long spring, after the winter of deep and persistent snows, we really enjoyed the freedom of movement the flattened brown meadows afforded us--we could walk anywhere we wanted, on our own two feet!  No skis or snowshoes required, and nothing to stand in our way.  Now, within the span of about three weeks, the meadow vegetation is waist-high and still gaining.  You can get through it, sure, but the gopher mounds that cover most of the lowlands make the walking treacherous when you can't see the ground, and the blackberries have sprung up, making long pants and tall boots imperative for any bushwhacking. 

So we tend to keep to a few well-worn paths.  Our friends Renee and Mark Bartz helped us out with that a couple of weeks ago--they brought over a 4-wheeler and a deck mower and cut a swath from the cabin down to the north meadow, where some of our best apple trees are.  I got to try my hand at it, too, mowing the hilltop circuit just above the cabin.  It is a lot more difficult to drive a 4-wheeler pulling a deck mower over bumpy terrain than it looks.  I was pleased with myself for not flipping over, or driving into a tree.  Mark, who's lived in this area all his life, said he'd never seen a piece of land quite so gopher-infested as ours.  A mark of distinction over which I am not sure we should be proud....

When a belt fell off the mower partway through cutting the Bide-A-Wee yard, I was left to finish the rest by hand, with my trusty scythe, which is really an extremely efficient piece of equipment once you learn how to use it.  It's better on some kinds of plant matter than others, and it really pays you back to keep it sharp with peening jig and whetstone, but under the right conditions I can cut a mighty swath in very little time.  And it's an excellent workout, to boot (but one must remember to wear gloves, lest one wind up with weeping sores between thumb and forefinger where the blisters have burst, as I experienced last week).

"Mowing the lawn" (and expanding it a bit) after a two-week absence produced this haystack, and another, even larger one:

In amidst the green profusion, of course, there are fruity things happening, too.  Mainly, the apples:

Blackberries, some still in bloom, while many have already set fruit, and it's looking like a good year for them:

A lesser-known wild fruit is the haw or hawberry, fruit of the hawthorn tree.  I've done a bit with haw fruit in the past, and it's something I'm really eager to explore further.  Last year we harvested exactly zero haws--it was that poor a year for wild fruit.  In a good year the bright red fruits, rather like rosehips, hang on the shrubby trees long after the leaves have fallen.  Not all haw fruit is delicious--you really have to taste around until you find a tree with sweet, flavorful fruit.  Fortunately, hawthorn trees are abundant on our land, and in the region generally.

Also abundant, moreso than I ever imagined, are black cherry trees.  They will grow to 50 feet tall or better, with trunks that can exceed a foot in diameter.  Until you learn to recognize them by their bark, though, you won't know that these mature trees are cherries--the first branching on these big trees occurs way high overhead, and the fruit is indistiguishable in the overall canopy of mixed hardwoods where they occur.  The fruit, therefore, we gather from baby specimens. Serviceberries also in the picture, left, with the green cherries top and right.

The prickly ash spreads and fills in on the old farm road, creating "verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (thank you John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale").  Prickly ash is in the citrus family, I was amazed to learn, and it produces a profusion of tiny berries in the the fall.  The husks of these berries have two remarkable qualities:  first, they smell very, very citrusy, mainly like tangerine, to my sniffer; second, they produce a numbing sensation on the tongue when you chew them, exactly like Sichuan peppercorns, to which--ta da!--they are closely related.  I've done a little cooking with them, but the jury's out.  They don't seem to retain their fragrant or numbing qualities (that's ma in Chinese Pinyin) once dried, so I think I'll try using them fresh come the fall.

Coming back over the hill toward the cabin, Lily went on point in the greenery.  When I let her go she sniffed avidly down the hill ahead of her, and fixated on a particular spot, but there was no bird.  Likely it flushed ahead of us.

The main meadow, and the "Tardis" outhouse:

On the hilltop circuit, an Aldo Leopold bench that Mary built:

A good place to sit and take it all in.  Summer starts to seem long by this time of year, but we know what an illusion that is.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

And the Rest Is Salad....

So for the second longest day of the year, the leftovers from the longest day dinner, reconfigured, did quite nicely.  There was a bit of everything left from our solstice aioli supper--trout, potatoes, beets, asparagus, snap peas.  I picked red lettuce, sorrel, and some smaller purple mustard leaves from the garden, along with a baby turnip.  Mixed the leftover aioli and sorrel-tarragon mayo with olive oil and a little cider vinegar.  Fried off the potatoes and when they were nicely brown added a couple of sliced purple spring onions to wilt, and the beets to warm a bit.  Tossed the greens with the asparagus, peas, and the dressing.

On the bed of greens I portioned out the roots, and topped it with poached trout, the very thinly sliced turnip, another drizzle of dressing, and a superfluous (but colorful and tasty) garnish of a sliced strawberry (picked up at a roadside honor stand on the road to Bide-A-Wee, $2 a quart, fantastically fragrant--it has been a great year for strawberries).

A bowl of steaming soup might have been more appropriate to the weather--the high of 63 matched the "record low high" for the date.  But we were not complaining.  With toasted sourdough and a glass of cider, strawberries over ice cream for dessert, we were content.

Solstice Aioli

Going back to that idea of honing a finer sense of the seasons , I can report that it's the season of setting fruit out at Bide-A-Wee.  Last year was a dismal one for our apples, as well as for most of  the wild fruits, except for the wild plums, which seem to come through every year.  This year the hawthorns, black cherries, chokecherries, and serviceberries are all setting up nice crops.  In spite of a cool pollinating season, the apples look good--the largest are already an inch-and-a-half across, and reddening.  We have one more gallon of sweet cider in the freezer--maybe barely enough to get us through to a first pressing of this year's fruit if we ration it carefully.  A couple swallows in the morning is enough to start the day off on a happy note.

It's haying time, too--our friend Renee Bartz told us this weekend that they'd cut their second crop of hay, and now hoped for a few dry days to get it baled (not looking like that wish will come true).  You see this age-old practice taking place all across the Dairy State countryside.  Where one day there was a field of tall grass, the next there's a shorn landscape looking something like a very rustic golf course, except dotted across it are the cylindrical bales of hay, a lovely sort of order brought out of the unruly growth, entropy reversed.

With the cows out on new grass, the raw milk we get from the Bartz's Bolen-Vale farm is the richest of the year.  Last weekend we skimmed the cream from the top of the jar and spooned it over the first strawberries of the summer, and we swooned.

And at the market, the season is that of the first summer vegetables.  The leafy things were pleasant enough, asparagus delightful, but it's greatly heartening--and appetizing--to see the next wave coming in, in this case young beets, snap peas, and most gloriously, the first green garlic.  That market haul, and a successful outing on the trout stream (oh, really, they're all successful, whether I catch fish or not), set the scene for an aioli dinner to mark the summer solstice.  (For the mayo/aioli how-to click here.)

Please note that no adjective accompanies aioli here, nor ever will, unless to make the derisive point that none ever should.  Aioli is aioli is aioli.  Chipotle aioli?  Nah.  Lemongrass aioli?  Skip it.  Garlic, oil, egg yolk, a bit of mustard, a squeeze of lemon juice, a pinch of salt, that's what's in aioli.  Oh, now I've read that in Provence some local variations omit the egg yolk, using cooked potato or bread as the binder.  I've never tried it that way.  You could call it garlic mayonnaise and not be far off, except that aioli deserves a more prominent place at the table than is commonly accorded mayonnaise.  It needs to be seen and appreciated, inhaled, dolloped out in copious portions for dipping and dabbing--a clandestine schmear on a sandwich or burger doesn't do it justice.

See the two unctuous globs on the plate above?  The yellow one  on the left is aioli, of course, and the green one is sorrel-tarragon mayo, which only had some garlicky undertones because I chopped the herbs in the same place on the cutting board where I puréed the garlic for the aioli.  I did that on purpose.  To half a cup of mayo I added four smallish sorrel leaves and just a sprig of tarragon, the most assertive of herbs, to my taste.  A dandy combination--but not aioli, mais non.

As for the trout, it was poached in a court bouillon flavored with green onion tops, carrot, thyme, tarragon, cutting celery, black pepper, and some Breton bouillon flavoring containing sea salt, algae, fennel, and some other spices.  We picked it up at a small market in Brittany a good while back.  It seems to keep.

The beets (Menomonie farmers market) and potatoes (not local, I'm afraid), I roasted with olive oil, thyme, rosemary, fleur de sel, black pepper, and chopped green garlic, at 375, for 40 minutes covered, another

15 uncovered.  I peeled the beets first.  And then the asparagus and snap peas (stringed) were blanched in salted boiling water for two minutes.

An aioli plate is the ideal sort of meal for long summer evenings, and this was the longest of all.  We sipped a petit chablis, our glasses
appealingly misted in the humid evening.  The monsoon rains came and went, a downpour, a sunburst. I guess you could say it's summer.

Why We Forage (Part II)

Sautéeing bracken and ostrich fern fiddleheads

Why we forage is so as to know our way around this place.

I spend a lot of time flipping through books on wild foods, like those by Sam Thayer and Teresa Marrone (linked at right under "Bide-A-Wee Friends and Neighbors"), and I'm constantly amazed to see how little of  the surface of wild foods I have even scratched.  I don't think of myself as an expert, at all; rather, in this area, as in many things that I enjoy, I prefer to remain the happy amateur, noting that amateur comes from the Latin "to love."

But you do, you know, if you stick with something, come to know a thing or two, and so here's a list of the wild food plants I've cooked with, just running them off the top of my head:

Oyster mushrooms
Watercress
Wood nettles
Stinging nettles
Ostrich fern
Bracken fern
Wood sorrel
Sheep sorrel
Dandelion
Violets
Hen of the woods mushrooms
Black trumpet
Golden chanterelles
Hedgehog mushrooms
Puffballs
Raspberries
Blackberries
Grapes
Plums
Asparagus
Haw berries
Nannyberries
High-bush cranberries
Blueberries
Ramps
Sulfur shelf mushrooms
Tooth mushrooms
Fawn mushrooms
Boletus variety mushrooms
Honewort
Lamb's-quarter
Staghorn sumac
Black cap raspberries
Hazelnuts
Burdock root
Milkweed
Maple syrup
Birch syrup

And I've probably forgotten a few.  My point here is that I never set out upon a concerted study of wild foods, never have devoted myself to eating them exclusively or primarily--though this year I've been making more of a point of it.  I pick up a new wild food item or two each year, and I learn by going where I have to go, as Theodore Roethke put it, so compellingly, in his poem "The Waking."


I am sure that the wild foods trend will ebb down in time; I am just as certain that as it does so it will leave behind, like bright baubles of beach glass on a sandy shore, a few devoted souls who became caught up in it, for whatever reason, and who found in it that compelling something that will have them heading out to the woods again, year after year, and they'll take someone with them, and if it's the right someone, that right someone will lead another newcomer into a woods full of ramps or chanterelles, a blackberry patch or a plum grove, and a lovely and sustaining tradition will endure.

Furthermore, I would say:  See Patrick's comment on the previous post.  He boils a lot of my thinking down far more succinctly than I've been able to do.

Bide-A-Wee Chop Suey: wild asparagus, ramps, bracken and ostrich fern, morels

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I've been working pretty intensely on the cookbook for a good few months now.  The end is really and truly in sight:  one more read-through of the proof-read page proofs, then it's off to the printer and nothing more to be done.  (You can place an advance order alreadly at Amazon, by the way.)  Having spent so much time poring back and forth over what is basically the content of this blog, I'm feeling, for the moment, that anything I put up here is something of a rehash--you might have noticed that I was citing myself in the previous post, which, while amusing in some ways, I do not think is an awfully good sign, over all.  Therefore, so as not to become tedious, I'm taking a couple of weeks off, with every expectation that I will return refreshed.  We've been eating well here, and coming up with interesting preparations of the swell foods of the season, from woods, stream, market, and garden.  I just haven't been able to find interesting ways to write about it.

So happy June; eat well, have fun.  Thanks, all.  Back soon.



Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Why We Forage

I can well recall the first time I encountered ramps.  I was making my way through the woods along the Rush River in Wisconsin, below the 570th Avenue crossing (what used to be called Northview Road).  I kicked through a patch of broad, spear-shaped leaves, what looked like overgrown lilies of the valley, and I smelled something oniony, chivey--good.  I bent down and picked up one of the leaves my wading boots had crushed--smelled even better up close.  I didn't gather any, but I filed the moment away in my mind.  I had no idea then what the plants were called, or whether they were edible.

Probably a year or two went by, and then I started seeing mention of chefs serving wild leeks called ramps in fancy New York restaurants.  There were also articles about ramp and trout festivals in the Blue Ridge region.  That caught my interest particularly.  At the co-op one day, in the produce section, I noticed bunches of some kind of green onion, broad, spear-shaped leaves, an attractive reddish section to the stem, a thick white bulb on the end.  They were ramps, and they were going for three dollars a bunch--I weighed one on the hanging scale, not quite four ounces, over $12 a pound.  Huh.

I took a trowel with me the next time I went fishing, found one of those oniony smelling patches, dug a few up.  Yep, the very same.  I looked around me.  Ramps were everywhere.  Twelve bucks a pound.  I was rich!  Except, they weren't my ramps, I was trespassing, technically (you're only actually trespassing if you get caught, I reckon), and even had they been my ramps, it was a long trip from the loamy streamside forest to cash in the pocket.  I found that out a few years later, when I harvested ramps to sell at the farmers market where we mainly sold bread.  I did it to bring some interest to the market in the very early weeks of the season, and it turned out to be a lot of work for a little money.  Responsible market foragers do not get rich, quick or ever.

From the very beginning I enjoyed ramps--I mean, it's great to bring fresh, free vegetables back from the stream to cook up with my trout, and they are one of the first wild foods to appear in the spring.  But I couldn't wrap my mind around $12 a pound, or quite understand the cachet that ramps came to have with the chefs of fine restaurants, especially those devoted to local and seasonal cooking.  They're a wonderful, seasonal treat, but in the greater world of alliums I wouldn't give up leeks, shallots, or regular old onions to make way for ramps, if I had to choose.

Now those days when we were all just discovering what a ramp is seem like very innocent times, in light of the explosion of interest in wild-foraged foods, the logical extension of the local, seasonal foods movement.  Everyone's a forager, or wants to be--wild foods are the hottest trend in high-end gastronomy, and foraged vegetables like morels, watercress, fiddleheads, and ramps draw crowds at farmers markets and co-ops. The trend worries me a bit, because wild plant communities are often more sensitive than might first appear.  A clump of ramps, it turns out, takes years to grow to size; watercress can carpet a spring, seeming inexhaustible, but if you're not careful to only snip the upper leaves, not disturbing the roots, the patch can be wiped out in short order.  And I wonder if anyone's checking to see that those wild foods in the produce section are being harvested responsibly.  I wonder because, for a time, I was an irresponsible ramp harvester--I would fork out a whole clump, never imagining that it might have taken seven to ten years for it to grow to that size.  The realization struck me one day:  that forest full of ramps, the spring full of cress, well, they look that way because they've been left alone for years and years.  And what Great Nature took years to produce, one ill-informed forager can lay to waste in no time.







Ahem.  Well, I didn't actually set out here to write a sobering lament.  But I find my mind in conflict as I take up the topic, because for me foraging--and cooking with wild foods--is a quiet, personal, intimate activity, full of meaning and ineffable satisfactions; but the burgeoning of interest in wild foods, along with the ability of everyone with a keypad to express their every thought instantly to the whole universe, seem to put the world of wild-foraged food out there in flashing lights, blaring fanfare, Technicolor billboards.

To each his or her own, and I don't hold myself above anyone in this regard.  I will admit I rankle a bit at foraging "authorities" as newly sprung as a spring mushroom, who pompously proclaim upon the topic as if they were the first to discover that you can eat dandelion greens, whose knowledge of the topic is wafer thin and whose interest in it lasts just as long as someone is paying attention to them.  Myself, I'm Socratic in my approach:  All I know is that I know next to nothing, and try to keep learning.  And I know I'll be back in the woods next spring, and the next, and the next.

The pretty picture that heads this post, that is what I really want to talk about.  It's the product of a peripatetic forage at Bide-A-Wee and environs--wild asparagus and ostrich fern fiddleheads picked from the roadside; wood nettles, bracken fern, and morels found on our land.  When you have some familiarity with a few wild foods, and with the places where you find them, foraging becomes every bit the pastoral idyll that it's cracked up to be.  The learning curve can be steep, worrisome, and sometimes painful--the darling little nettle shoots you can pick with bare fingers in May become a formidable, neck-high barrier between you and your chanterelle grounds in July.  Answering the question of why we choose to do it is complicated, and constantly shifting, for it is a different activity depending on the time of the year, and the wild food in question.

With these easily accessible, early spring foods, the answer is easy:  They're there, they're fresh, green, delicious, and free.  Given that one enjoys the taste of these foods, the question becomes not why forage, but why not?  This time of year, we just take our usual walk at Bide-A-Wee land, and I always have a few bags tucked in my back pocket.  By the time we get back to the cabin that empty vegetable larder is magically overflowing.

On the other hand, just yesterday I drove 180 miles round trip to trudge through the southeastern Minnesota woods for a few hours in search of the elusive (to me) morel.  I found, maybe, twelve, got scratched up by currant and blackberry vines, strained my sore left knee, got sunburned, and enjoyed every minute of it--which would seem to point to a certain perversity in my character, and illustrate the masochistic streak not uncommon in foragers, generally.  (In my defense, I also brought home trout from the trip, along with ramps, wood nettles, and ostrich fiddleheads--but I could have gotten all those things with a much shorter drive.)


Why one forages also has something to do with that intangible quality of wild foods, to wit, wildness.  At first this is an exotic aspect of wild foods--who knew you could walk around your own back yard and make a salad from wild weeds?  Who knew that sought-after, expensive luxury foods like chanterelles, black trumpets, and porcini grew wild in our own local woods?  With time and experience the exotic becomes familiar, of course.  Wild foods never lose the allure of their wildness, though it recedes.

I've been reading this rather interesting book lately, Trout Caviar:  Recipes from a Northern Forager, which also includes some thought-provoking essays.  A passage from one seems to pertain here:

Wild foods have been a part of my diet for enough years now that I don’t really make a distinction between wild and cultivated foods anymore. It’s not that I can’t tell the difference between my vegetable garden and wild nature—well, in truth, that distinction does become a bit blurred at times, when weeds run rampant. But I do know the difference between a ramp and a scallion, nettles and spinach. Once they reach my kitchen, though, they’re all the same to me: food, good food, local food. When I look in my refrigerator and see jars of cornichons, pickled ramps, bread and butters, and milkweed “capers,” I don’t think, “Grown food, wild food, bought food, wild food”; no, I think, “Pickles.”

And yet the fact that wild foods are found, not grown in one's own garden or raised on a farm, not bought, is an essential part of what draws us to them.  There is magic in peering into the shadows of an overarching currant bush at the base of a dead elm tree and espying, in the cushion of bright green moss, a morel.  Miracle!  There is magic, too, in the annual return of the ramps, knifing up through the chill loam once the snow is barely gone, even though I know exactly where to find them. 

Wood nettle

There is magic in nature, in a word, and something inexpressible that draws us to it, makes us keep looking at it in stark wonder, makes us feel better just by being in it.  That's how it is for me, anyway, and for many people I know.  In our ever more technologized, connected and yet profoundly fragmented world, I think the greatest danger lies in losing touch with our connection to nature, seeing it as other:  living, breathing, mortal animals, we are in and of nature, inextricably.  It is us and we are it.

What I think one gains from the foraging experience, beyond some interesting things to eat (and, of course, the bug bites), is an awareness that all food really comes from nature, even those products of big industrial farms. The sun above and the soil below, that alchemy I mention elsewhere, pertains in every case, though the sterilized soil that grows industrial crops is a perversion, to be sure. But if you were to leave those dead zones alone for even a little while, Great Nature would make things better.

To be continued....

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Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Italicized sections from Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager, to be published in September 2011 by Borealis Books of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.  Copyright 2001, all rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.