Leda’s Urban Homestead

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

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.

Vegetarians may want to skim past this first bit and pick up again near the tomatoes.

Today was Day One of Northeast Organic Farming Association - New York’s (NOFA-NY) month-long local eating challenge. Each day has a featured ingredient or challenge that they email out, and today’s was…drum roll, please…bacon.

I found the choice of bacon for day one amusing and wondered if NOFA-NY would take any flak from disgruntled herbivores. I also wondered, why bacon?

Well, it turns out that the Royal Bacon Society dubbed September 1, 2012 International Bacon Day. I swear I’m not making this up. In honor of the occasion, I’m reposting my recipe for homemade bacon.

But seriously folks, DIY is one way to keep costs down while you’re keeping it local. Pork belly from a local farmer is way cheaper per pound than already cured bacon at the farmers’ market.

Vegetarian friends, I hope you didn’t abandon this post by yet. The same principal applies to “value added” fruit and veggie products.

For example, it is now possible to purchase frozen locally grown tomatoes in winter to use in sauces and salsas. These products cost around $5 lb. Right now local, organic tomatoes are $1.50 lb at the markets near me, and I’ve seen them elsewhere as low as $1 lb. Granted, it takes more than a pound of fresh tomatoes to end up with a pound of home-canned, but I still come out ahead if I preserve them myself.

Even better and cheaper if you grew your own.

So can, dry or freeze some produce now, and save some money while sticking to your locally grown convictions this winter. And don’t get me wrong - I’m not knocking the farmers who are offering the value added preserved stuff. If you can afford it, go for it. But if, like me, you need to keep costs down, make your own.

Sounds great but you don’t know how? If you’re in NYC and want some personal instruction, I’m giving a food preservation workshop on Sept. 16.

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

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

This post is going to be a quick sharing of food preservation and foraging recipes and info because, well, that’s what I’m up to in these final days of summer. There have been some beautiful wild mushroom finds recently, including oyster

and cinnabar chanterelles

and more chicken.

In case you’re blessed with similar abundance, here is how to dry shrooms in your oven or (better) in a dehydrator.

I need a small mule or something to carry my weekly Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share home at this time of year, and this year does seem more abundant than last. Stuff I’ve been making with it:

Cantaloupe - Peach Preserves

Home-canned Roasted Tomatoes

Naturally Fermented Pickled Cherries

Okay, gotta get back to it. I still have green beans, beets, and peaches to can before next Tuesday’s CSA distribution!

Join me for some foraging tours and food preservation workshops if you’re in the neighborhood.

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

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

Looking for something fun and different to do this weekend? You can get a $5 discount on tomorrow’s foraging tour (Sat. June 30) by entering the promo code garlicmustard when you sign up.

The tour is from 10am - 12pm, so we’ll be finishing up just when the heat starts to be too much. It’s been an amazingly abundant year for wild edibles, and I expect the abundance to continue tomorrow!

Can’t make this weekend? No worries. Extend your 4th of July holiday week to include my tour on Sat. July 7th! (Sorry, but the discount only applies to the June 30th tour)

Both foraging events are in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

If you were walking down the street with me this afternoon in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I was that woman with a silly grin on her face and a definite bounce in her step. There are several things that have that effect on me. Maybe I was thinking about my boyfriend. Perhaps I was listening to fabulous music through my earphones.

Or maybe that backpack I was toting was full of just-foraged goodness.

Today’s harvest included mulberries,

juneberries, elderberry flowers, linden blossoms that I’m hoping Ellen will make into wine,

honewort,

burdock “cardoons,” milkweed florets,

and sassafras. There was more I could have collected (the lamb’s quarters is especially lush right now), but I was eager to get home and play with these free, superb ingredients.

So what’s for dinner? I think I’ll start with an idea for a scalloped potatoes and milkweed floret concoction, and then improvise from there. It may not quite match this menu that Chef Anthony Paris of Crosby Street Hotel and I collaborated on,

but it will be good.

Foraging Tours

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

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

Comfrey growing wild near Mullheim baden, Germany

I spent my day off visiting fellow forager Kat Morgenstern in Germany. It took several trains to get to her from where I’m staying in Switzerland, but it was worth it.

Despite a few rainy hours, we got in two good walks out in the hills, past berries-to-be,

Salsify blooming amidst dandelions already gone to seed,

Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum multiflorum, not the P. biflorum I’m used to back home),

wild garlic (Allium ursinum, a close cousin to ramps or A. tricoccum)

and tons of nettles. We picked some of the garlic flowers and some nettle leaves to add to a casserole-style “bake” that Kat made. She’d already harvested lots of immature burdock flower stalks for it (one of my favorite wild vegetables).

Kat also shared some of the elderflower syrup she made last year, which was wonderful with strawberries and yogurt for breakfast. I’m really hoping I won’t totally miss the elderflower season back in Brooklyn.

The food was delicious, and the company was wonderful. It is always a pleasure to spend time with Kat, and on this visit I got to see her husband Tino as well. Here’s to the next time!

Upcoming Foraging, Cooking and Gardening Workshops

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

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

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This past Sunday The Farm on Adderley hosted a two-part event inspired by wild edible plants. Part one was me leading a foraging tour in Prospect Park. In the evening, the participants reconvened at the restaurant to feast on Chef Tom Kearney’s wild foods-inspired dinner.

He started us off with a clear soda infused with lilac flowers and bishop’s elder. There were some unusual wines on offer from Enlightenment Wines that included ingredients such as rosehips and black currants.

The six course meal started off with grilled spring onions and a harissa yogurt (okay, that part wasn’t so “wild.” But it was delicious). Then came a beet salad with walnut puree, chickweed, and elm samaras (apologies for the funky lighting in the pics - it was pretty dark in the restaurant).

After that came pan-seared skate with fiddleheads and trout roe (yum!), then pasta stuffed with nettles, ricotta, and miner’s lettuce (very good, but it made me chuckle because it was the third day in a row that I’d eaten nettles).

We were all starting to feel full by that point, but the next dishes were too good to pass up.

The final savory offering was a poached egg on top of farro grain with a pistou of foraged herbs. I couldn’t quite tell which foraged herbs, but the overall combination worked. (Remind me to ask Chef Tom).

Dessert was a wonderful elderflower panna cotta with wood sorrel granita.

Foraging Tour This Friday!

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

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