Posted on 04/18/2017 1:54:35 PM PDT by nickcarraway
"Wildman Steve Brill" served the audience dandelions, chickweed and onion grass during his presentation on edible weeds at the Scarsdale Public Library on March 31. Steve Brill has been foraging, or gathering wild foods, for over 35 years. Early on he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Subsequently, after his educating the New York City Parks Department, they hired him to give public foraging tours in Central Park.
We dipped corn chips into a delightful pesto made with garlic mustard. Garlic mustard (scientific name Alliaria petiolata) came from Europe and parts of Asia and is invasive, aggressively taking over our forests floors by outcompeting the native forest plants that support our local ecology. Perhaps our eating non-native invasive plants can be part of a strategy to garlicmustard
Garlic mustard is great raw in salads, mixed with more mild greens. It's also good steamed, simmered, or sauteed.
help control them.
Steve's daughter Violet provided parts of the presentation with surprising knowledge and poise for a seventh grader. She has her sights on becoming an ornithologist as well as an expert forager.
The Bronx River-Sound Shore Audubon Society brought this delicious presentation to Scarsdale.
For recipes and information about foraging, his website is at www.wildmanstevebrill.com.
coconut
Did the cops dip their punk into the dandelions, taste it, then declare, “it’s pure.”
Ask the average North Korean.
Crops?
Nettles make a good healing soup
Kudzu makes good salad
No, but pine needle tea is good with honey.
And I forgot to mention ramps
Ramps are good if you can find them!
Some park benches are quite delicious.
Grass.
Someone want garlic mustard salad for several hundred, you can eat all you want to pull.
*** “No, but pine needle tea is good with honey” ***
It is good w plain ol sugar too
*** “Some park benches are quite delicious” ***
The Late Yule Gibbons (sp) hadn’t mentioned that particular foodstuff.
[ The NYPD arrested someone for picking weeds in Central Park? OMG that is so insane! ]
He was foraging on the “King’s land”....
Funny how the leftists will say how effing great Woodie Guthrie was, the “This land is your land” song was basically a damned screed about how bad private property is.
But just try Foraging on “Your Land which is My Land” and the Socialist kings will lock your ass up.
In two days I think a lot of people are not going to prefer to do other things with them
Both my parents were born early in the Depression years and grew up eating some wild greens, developed an affection for them and continued cooking and eating them, so I’ve had them myself.
Dandelion greens are very nice in a mixed salad, sort of peppery, adds a little kick. Dandelion makes a decent wine and I’ve heard jelly although I’ve never had the jelly.
The young green shoots of Poke Weed are edible and pretty good, as salad or cooked, just leave the grown leaves that have started getting a little purple and veiny alone, they become toxic at that point so just the young, purely green shoots and leaves.
Kudzu leaves, blooms and root tubers are edible. The younger leaves are decent batter dipped and fried up crispy. The blooms make a great jelly, vibrant purple, the blooms give it that color. The root tubers are sort of like a potato and prepared similarly. They’re also reputed to be something of a hangover cure, with I believe some scientific study to back that up.
Wild mustard is a nice, pungent green. So are “creasy greens” which are actually wild fieldcress, quite a kick to those cooked but they’re good. The name is a corruption of “cress,” they’ve been eaten in the south since colonial times.
Ramps are very strong, like a cross between an onion and garlic. Eating them raw is quite an experience, more of a novelty at ramp festivals in the Blue Ridge, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a thrill seeker. They’re much milder sautéed or fried, and many look forward to ramp season since they’re the first edible greens of the season.
There are a variety of others that are edible but the above are the ones commonly known to the old country folk in the south, with several of them achieving a level approaching that of cuisine at the hands of accomplished restaurant chefs looking for local and wildcrafted foods for their restaurants.
Spring used to bring us to the weed patch to gather Slick Doc, Curley Dock, Lamb's Quarter, Dandelion, and of corse Polk Salad. You eat spinach you can eat those.
... and fried fiddlehead ferns, forgot that one.
So, you're saying that you haven't had a salad in a restaurant in how many years?
Desirable plants are those you want.
Any undesirable plants are weeds.
Yup. Grass in my vegetable garden is a weed. In my lawn it's not.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.