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.

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

Some things are weeks ahead of schedule thanks to the warm March, others are the April regulars, and they’re happening simultaneously. Violets, redbud blossoms, Siberian elm samaras, Japanese knotweed, ramps, nettles, garlic mustard…and that’s just for starters.

I’m also using up some of my food preservation pantry to make space in my freezer and on my shelves for the seasonal parade of fruit crops. One “use up” that turned out especially well was freshly foraged Japanese knotweed (tastes similar to rhubarb) plus strawberries from my freezer that I turned into a sorbet.

Confession: I canned way too much applesauce last year. Solution: turn some of it into fruit leathers. These make a handy grab-and-go snack that is much more portable than lugging a heavy glass pint jar of applesauce in my bag.

Fruit leather roll up made from home-canned applesauce

I came up with a semi-wild vegetarian meal that was really delicious. It was nettles and garlic mustard greens on rice with miso and wild ginger glazed tofu. I guess the nettles and wild ginger don’t really count as “wild” since I encourage patches of both in my garden:

The dandelions are in their annual full flush of blooms right now, which means the greens are already too bitter for my palate. What to do? Well, you might feel like trying out the recipe for dandelion wine that is at the end of this piece on wild edibles.

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Violets

The mild winter and warm start to spring have resulted in a foraging bonanza: Some plants I would normally be harvesting in April, such as violets and redbud,

Redbud

are blooming right alongside plants like poke shoots that are usually a May wild crop.

Garlic mustard is already at that most delicious, broccoli rabe-like, just-starting-to-flower stage.

Garlic Mustard

I missed dandelion greens altogether this year. They turn bitter after the plants flower. Usually the main flush of dandelion bloom is about a month from now, but when I got back from my recent trip they were already flashing their sunny yellow hue.

Dandelion wine, dandelion flower fritters, dandelion root “coffee,” dandelion as herbal medicine - there’s still plenty to do with this plant ally. But I’m sorry to have missed the wild greens.

From the pics my fellow foragers are posting on Facebook, Japanese knotweed’s rhubarb-like stalks are ready for collecting, also ahead of the usual schedule.

Nettles are ready now, too. They lose their sting when cooked or dried and are one of the most nutritious and, in my opinion, tasty wild greens.

Nettles

I’ll probably combine them with garlic mustard and toss that with some pasta for dinner tonight. Maybe throw in some of the tomatoes I dried last year, some herbs from the garden, olive oil, and grated cheese.

Juneberry blossoms

The Juneberry Ellen gave me is blooming, as are its cousins in the park. I just checked my foraging/garden log for past years, and usually it hasn’t bloomed in my garden until the 3rd week of April. So I guess maybe they’ll be “Mayberries” this year.

My next foraging tour is this Saturday. Want to join me?

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

I was three years old? Maybe four? Free food was waiting for me like a treasure hunt, and I got to spend hours outdoors in nature even though I was in the city - I still haven’t gotten tired of it.

It was because of my knowledge of wild edible plants that I got my first botanical teaching gig at The New York Botanical Garden (thank you, Gary Lincoff). My interest in gardening, mushroom hunting, food preservation, herbal medicine, and local, organically grown food and sustainable food systems is a sort of bread crumb trail that I’ve followed from that original interest in wild edibles.

Ricky and I got introduced to a fellow forager on a recent trip. She didn't speak a work of english, but we managed to share plant info anyway.

I love it that the New York Times article on foraging last summer sparked a debate about foraging and sustainability. Their original question seemed to be, “If everyone in NYC started foraging, wouldn’t that decimate the plant populations?”

Well, first of all, everyone is not going ot start foraging. Heck, most people in NYC don’t even shop for groceries or cook.

Second of all, which plants are you talking about? Because there are some non-native species that are so invasive Parks tries to weed them out. Foragers collecting those plants are actually working in tandem with Parks.

But there are also slower growing native species such as ostrich fern that would be best harvested someplace they are more prolific. I give these a nod hello when I pass them in Prospect Park, but I don’t collect them there.

This is another thing I love about wildcrafting and foraging - your foraging choices and actions, done right, actually help the plants and the landscape thrive.

Ready to come foraging with me?

April 7th 9:45 - 12:30 p.m. Prospect Park for Green Edge NYC

April 15th 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. for The Farm on Adderley

April 20th for SideTour (time TBA super soon)

Leda’s Foraging Column at 2012 James Beard Award nominee Nona Brooklyn

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

Cyclamen are blooming alongside lupine, red poppies, yellow mustard flowers, pear and almond blossoms, and wild tulips. Truly magnificent.

When I travel, I try to stick to as much of a local foods diet as I can; “local” meaning whatever is local to the place I’m visiting. This is a fun part of the journey as much as it is a compensation for the eco-guilt of travel. I don’t go to France for the pizza, or Italy for the cassoulet, know what I mean?

But not much of the food here is labeled as far as where it is from, so I did a little research and found out that most of what is in the Israeli supermarkets and souks is locally grown.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that only 1.5% of it is organically grown, and most of that is exported to Europe. Monsanto loves Israel.

I’ve done a little foraging while I’ve been here, or at least field i.d. Found some inky caps, and there are lots of wild edible greens about.

I also took advantage of the local citrus and prolific rosemary to make some herb butter, and saved up chicken skins and scraps to make schmaltz a.k.a. rendered chicken fat. The schmaltz is something I make at home, too. Besides being tasty, I like the idea of nothing wasted. If I’m going to eat bird, I feel like I should eat as much of the bird as possible.

Ricky was teaching a workshop in Ein Gedi last weekend, and I got to tag along.

We got to spend some time at the Dead Sea,

including in the hot springs of salty water that pop up in different places along the ever-receding shoreline (the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly, in part because so much of the Jordan river’s water is diverted for agriculture).

I get to spend two more weeks here. I’ll get back to BK just in time for the full spring rush of gardening and workshops to teach and writing deadlines and foraging. BK had just started blooming when I left, and should be putting on the full spring show when I get back: It’s kind of like I get to have an extra-long Spring this year.

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