Leda’s Urban Homestead

The past month I’ve been busy teaching foraging, writing about foraging, and, well, actually foraging for edible wild plants. I love it that I rarely have to actually buy a vegetable at this time of year because there are so many delicious ones ready to harvest for free.

I’ve also started sharing some brief tutorial videos about foraging, food preservation, and other urban homesteading skills on my youtube channel. Here are  my first three (be kind; the learning curve is steep!):

Japanese Knotweed: Eat the Invader

How to Make Violet Flower Syrup

How to Harvest Wild Ginger Sustainably

I’m going to be putting up more food preservation videos soon (in case you wished you could be peering over my shoulder while I test for that elusive jelly gelling point, etc.)…stay tuned (and thanks for putting up with this shamelessly self-promoting post!).

Busy, but yay! In all good ways. Hope you are having a glorious Spring.

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes

You can see my fingers through the recently unfurled linden leaf (Tilia a.k.a. basswood tree), right? At this translucent, young stage they are one of my favorite wild salad greens. Soon they’ll be offering their honey-scented blossoms that make exquisite tea and can also be used to flavor homebrewed wine.

The garlic mustard is already at its most delicious, “broccoli rabe” stage right now in BK. Tomorrow I’ll sautee it up with some field garlic and red pepper flakes.

Garlic Mustard

Ramps!!! Be careful if you’re foraging for these. As exciting as it can be to find a ramps patch, they are overharvested in many places. Even if you find them in abundance, graze rather than decimate. A few here, a few from there, leaving plenty in between.

The violets are at their peak. I made violet blossom syrup a couple of days ago, might get around to a candied violets project, and have been enjoying the leaves in salads. The color of the syrup is amazing:

Tonight’s dinner is going to be creamed oyster mushrooms and ramps with scalloped Adirondack red potatoes and a salad of linden leaves plus violet leaves and flowers. The ’shrooms are from a previous haul that I dehydrated. Sounds fancy, but that’s no cred to the cook: with ingredients like these, it’s easy to impress.

I can’t vouch for elsewhere, but in Prospect Park this morning the redbud blossoms were at the “any day now” stage.

Shameless plug for upcoming foraging tours and classes - hope to see you at some of them, and if I don’t I hope it’s because you’re out foraging delicious, healthy wild foods.

This spring has been on the chilly side, especially compared to last year’s warm temps. But the last of the crocuses are blooming,

the daffodils are kicking into full swing,

and my neighbor’s apricot tree is in bloom.

The early spring crop of dandelion greens and crowns, what my friend Melana used to call “yard squid,” are perfect this spring.

Last year the plants went from just starting to grow to flowering and bitter in a blink. So I guess the extended not-so-bitter harvest season is the consolation prize for the cold start to spring.

Time to go foraging, yes? There are still a couple of spots left for tomorrow, Sat. 6th, and for Sun. 7th. Can’t do the short notice on this weekend? Plenty more classes, tours, and events coming up!

We’re so close to spring, and yet still looking at the same few wild winter crops like winter cress and evening primrose plus cold-hearty cultivated greens and root vegetables from last year’s harvest. But that’s not necessarily boring.

I had some friends over recently and the feast included initial nibbles of fermented cherries with goat cheese, watermelon radishes, and bread made with locally grown grains and sunflower seeds (yay, local sunflower seeds! Wish you’d been here when I was doing The 250), plus some very non-local za’atar from my most recent trip to Israel. Oh, and some good ol’ refrigerator pickles.

There was also some beet risotto that used the greens as well as the roots.

And of course, we needed some wine to drink with all of that. My guests brought decanter-deserving and decanter-needing wine. Alas, I do not possess a decanter (now you know what to get me for my next birthday). We made do.

My guests that night included Anne Fifield, who took these pics except for the first one, and Melina, her mom, and Jim. Melina did an awesome interview with me  recently, and if you haven’t seen her Valentine’s dinner pics, prepare to swoon.

Upcoming Classes and Events

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes

1. Never run out of onions or garlic. Too many recipes require them, and the local harvests of them are available in many places year-round. But if you don’t have any and it’s freezing outside, you might opt for the non-local version at the corner store. So stock up. Oh, and foragers take note: there’s field garlic out there right now even when there’s snow on the ground.

2. Prep a bunch of veggies right after you shop or pick up your CSA winter share:

Wash and spin dry the leafy greens. The best way I’ve found so far to store these is in green produce bags in the crisper drawers of the fridge. Peel and slice carrots and radishes to eat as snacks, with or without the dips I mention below. Store the prepped root veggie snacks in water in covered containers in the fridge.

3. Always Have Cooked Beans Available:

Every week or two, cook a pot of locally grown beans. Do this in the slow cooker overnight or while you’re out working. Make twice as many as you need and freeze the extras for when you really don’t have any time to cook. Make bean dip. Add them to soups. Make Mexican-style recipes. Basically everything you would do with beans out of a can except the local beans have much nicer textures. Plus protein, fiber and other good stuff even on the days you’re skipping the (expensive) pastured meat.

4. Have lots of different dried herbs and spices on hand. If you’re not a cook but more of an assembler, have a few seasoning blends such as herbes de Provence (for anything remotely Mediterranean-style) or curry powder.

5. Treat root veggies as your staple, and learn different ways to cook them. A potato is a potato is…but a mashed potato is different from one roasted, or fried, or steamed, or…often the cooking method changes the ingredient more than the seasoning.

6. If you are into food preservation, even just throwing some berries into the freezer, now is the time to use up what you put up last year.

If you’re in the NYC area and want to learn more ways to make a locavore diet in the Northeast yummy, doable, and affordable, come to this local food event the night of Monday, Feb. 11th. All the proceeds benefit Just Food.

P.S. - There’s a storm going on here in the Northeast in case you haven’t heard. Ella briefly considered going outside:

Yesterday I took a plane from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam, then one to JFK (where it felt very strange not to be going home from the airport to Brooklyn), and finally one here to San Francisco to visit my dad. Can you say jet lag?

The day before, while Ricky was working, I took Jessy for a walk in the woods

and bid farewell to the lush patches of mallow and white mustard I’ve been harvesting from, the pine ridge where I found the Suillus granulatus mushrooms, and the trails along which I learned some new-to-me edibles: milk thistle (Silybum marianum) -

I’d used the seeds as medicine but hadn’t tried the leaves as a salad green; navelwort (Umbilicus rupestris)

and Eryngium creticum, those last two introduced to me two days earlier by a new foraging buddy I met via FB.

It was a balmy morning, far too warm for the winter jacket I’d put on. Hard to believe that less than a week before we were romping in the snow.

There were several odds and ends of kitchen projects to wrap up:

The shelled and ground acorns that had been cold water leaching in the reservoir tank of one of the toilets for a week needed to be dried out and turned into flour. I didn’t have enough time left to make anything with the acorn flour, so it traveled with me to San Francisco. I feel bad because I think the tannins from the acorns permanently stained R’s toilet bowl with a dark brown stripe. I’ll spare you the visual.

There was the heap of firm baby cucumbers that we’d bought the day before at the souk. I followed through on my promise to turn them into refrigerator pickles.

I made lamb stew.

I checked the olives I’d foraged and started dry salt curing 5 weeks earlier and they weren’t quite ready yet. I packed them in some fresh salt.

I ran out of time before showing Ricky how to turn the eggplants (yes, they grow there even in January) into baba ganoush. Maybe I can do that via Skype video? Definitely not the same as in person, but maybe better than nothing.

And then it was time to go.

Ricky and Jessy

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Upcoming Classes and Events with Leda

Okay, folks, this is a shameless promo post: I finally got around to updating my upcoming classes and events page. Very cool stuff coming up, if I do say so myself. I’ve got a class on herbs and herbalism that includes a viewing of the centuries-old herbals in NYBG’s rare books collection, a workshop on how to eat a tasty and healthy local foods diet even in a cold winter climate in February, and  just before Valentine’s Day, two classes on herbal aphrodisiacs. Here are the deets:

Upcoming Classes and Events

For my diehard foraging buddies who want to know what’s still out there in NYC at this time of year, I just wrote this one about evening primrose a.k.a. Oenathera biennis:

Down the Primrose Path

And if, like me, you’re still jonesing for fun food projects even though it is the middle of winter, well…Is it weird that I made five different kinds of mustard recently? Okay, maybe it is. But they’re really good.

Christmas Eve found me far from my Brooklyn stomping grounds. I’m in Jerusalem again, and yesterday evening Ricky and I had guests.

Cesar and his beautiful wife, Marina, are Russian. They are foragers and gardeners and make their own pickles, sausages, and other food preservation recipes. I’ve had the privilege of eating in their home, and so I knew that A) they’d be appreciative of homemade preserves and unusual ingredients in that way that only my foraging buddies and extreme foodie friends are, and B) I had to come up with something interesting.

I’d brought a jar of homemade jellied cranberry sauce with me from NY because you can’t really get cranberries here (except the juice,) and also because I thought I might be jonesing for a Christmas dinner.

So at my request, Ricky roasted turkey legs in the oven on a bed of salt, along with fennel bulb, carrots, and sweet peppers. I made mashed sweet potatoes with some of the maple syrup we bought in Massachusetts last year, a salad of steamed cardoons (an artichoke relative that we picked up at the market), tomatoes with herbs from the terrace garden, the olives I cured back in October, and refrigerator pickles.

Dessert was homemade lemon curd with store-bought gingersnap cookies. My dad and I came up with that combination - lemon curd plus gingersnaps - and it never fails to please. Homemade cookies would’ve been even better. Next time.

Christmas morning found me walking between pine trees and poking around in the pine needles. My hunt was rewarded with these darlings:

Suillus granulatus and S. luteus are bolete mushrooms that are good eating once you peel the slimy skins off their caps. They’re not the best for frying, but are delicious in soups, stews and such. Here’s what today’s haul looked like once I’d cleaned and trimmed them:

I also collected some olives, the last of this year’s crop. I’m going to preserve this batch with a dry salt cure.

Other Christmas day food projects include making stock from the bones of last night’s turkey legs, cooking chili con carne, and mulling wine.

I wish you a warm and wonderful Christmas!

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes

My boyfriend has a saying, “No brag, just fact.” Maybe that will get me out of sounding overly smug in this post.

It starts humbly. I got slammed with some kind of bug this week that had me either voiceless or sounding like Lauren Bacall on an off day. This week I was teaching and rehearsal directing, a.k.a. speaking at full voice nonstop for hours. Lousy time to lose my voice.

Last night I had to call in sick. I missed opening night of The Yorkville Nutcracker that I’ve been rehearsal directing since September. That sucked.

But since I was home, with time to cook, I hoped that something hot, something soupy, something spicy might blast through the sniffly nose and hoarse voice. I thought of the hot and sour soup I love at Chinese restaurants, and looked up a recipe.

Here’s where the brags, I mean facts, show up. Really I’m just pleased with myself for having a few unusual ingredients on hand and improvising my way around the ingredients I didn’t have.

The recipe called for wood ear mushrooms. Check - Jeremy showed me where to find those in Prospect Park a few months ago, and I dried a bunch.

It also called for lily buds - check. In this case, daylilies that I dried in early summer. Okay, actually I didn’t dry the buds because I don’t like the texture of the whole dried buds. I just dried the petals.

Instead of the optional chili pepper oil in the original recipe, I used the last of the recently harvested hot peppers from my garden. I picked them a couple of days ago, knowing that temps were going to dip down near freezing this week (and that meant the end of this year’s pepper plants).

I didn’t have the bamboo shoots called for, so I used some lightly steamed broccoli stems that I’d cut into a shape like the thin rectangles the bamboo shoots usually come in. I also didn’t have the pork tenderloin the recipe specified, but I did have homemade salt pork in the fridge, so I used a little of that.

It was good. And, as is the way with soups, the leftovers were even better for lunch today. And I am feeling much better (no brag, just fact).

Here is the original recipe from a colleague at About.com. It’s really good and very forgiving of substitutions, as my experiment with it illustrates. For my tastes, it needed more vinegar, so I added a splash extra. I will make this again.

Food Preservation

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

The Locavore’s Handbook, Kindle edition

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes

My freezer is less of an avalanche threat than it was a month ago. I’ve used up some of its stored haul of locally grown and foraged ingredients by making food gifts for the holiday season. Seriously, a month ago it was so jammed full of food - and it’s an old top-of-fridge model - that you risked a deluge when you opened the freezer door.

Raspberries were one of the items in my over-stuffed freezer. The raspberry patch in my garden was super-generous this year, so I had plenty for making raspberry curd as well as raspberry jam. Note the spoon hovering over the jar. Yes, I happily eat this straight out of the jar.

Actually (she said, showing off a little), I even had enough raspberries to share with last night’s holiday gift food preservation workshop participants. We made the raspberry curd, as well as a classic whole cranberry sauce with apple and orange, and a jellied cranberry sauce that is like the stuff that slides out of a can, only better.

I’ve also got lots of red currants in the freezer, and that’s a fun gift because currants aren’t supermarket regulars and so homemade red currant jam is something even your foodie friends may not have in their kitchens. I grow mine and wholeheartedly recommend that you do the same if you have any kind of growing space. I have just a few plants in partial shade and I still get at least a couple quarts of fruit each year.

Quince jelly and quince paste (membrillo) are pretty, tasty, and the fruit is in season now. These are show-off food gifts that, like the cranberry sauces, you can make now from fresh late fall fruit even if you didn’t preserve a lot of other fruit crops earlier in the year.

Rose hips are in season now, too, and even tastier for having withstood a frost or two. Rosehip freezer jam is a good and unusual holiday party offering.

…and on and on. This is one of the best parts of growing, foraging, cooking, and preserving food - sharing it!

Food Gifts for Gourmet Tastes

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes