I’ve been getting more interested in foraging lately, hoping to pick up some tips on the free (and freely available) foods that fill our immediate environment. Sure, I can locate the feral raspberry bushes out behind our compost pile, but wouldn’t I be way cooler if I knew how to bake acorn flatbread or stuff ravioli with lamb’s quarters?
Along comes this book to the C-VILLE HQ:
The first third covers wild plants of all kinds–nuts, berries, greens, roots, you name it. I only wish this review copy included photos! But I can certainly find out what these plants look like somewhere else, and the delightful thing is how many of them I already know.
For example, says author Hank Shaw, the tuber of the daylily is the most delicious one he’s eaten–including potatoes. And just yesterday, I was out for a run and noticed a colony of daylilies on a roadside that had to be a quarter mile long.
A couple of other tidbits:
Wild grapes make good jelly and syrup, but not wine.
Wild mustard is edible and (I believe) is blooming as we speak.
Not all sumac is poison, and the berries from the good kind makes a nice drink, what Shaw calls "sumac-ade."
The other parts of the book cover fishing and hunting, for those of you who are down with that. There are recipes for fish, game and vegetable.
Perhaps I’ll go dig up some daylilies and let you know how they taste!
