"foraging" news and stories

• Rising up to battle consumer culture: the radical homemaker.
• A local girl makes good at the International Association of Culinary Professionals awards.
• Summer's bounty is still weeks away, but the Pacific Northwest has plenty of spring greens to look for right now.
• Speaking of spring greens, you can forage for some of them in your backyard. (Dandelions are good eatin'.)
• Biscuits and gravy, please -- hold the pork.

Spring brings a multitude of edible delights, and paramount among them are morel mushrooms.

The image above doesn't scream "dinner" to most -- especially those who spent childhood summers grubby-pawed and overheated, plucking them out of the cracks of walkways, driveways and wherever else they lurked.

But as this timely Wall Street Journal story reports, weeds are spreading to places other than just your garden, including the dinner table. Dandelion greens, purslane, burdock and lamb's quarters are becoming staples of both haute restaurants and homespun summer salads. They can now be procured both high-end ($9 per pound in one farmers market) and low-end (via elbow grease).

But can one waltz down a Brooklyn street and pluck a handful of dandelions from the edge of a vacant lot to pop in a pan for dinner? The short answer, says 27-year veteran forager and author "Wildman" Steve Brill, is "no." He quickly follows that it's not as hard as one would think, and that hunting for a free dinner "is like learning how to swim, dance or drive a car. Learning to recognize very tasteful, very healthful wild food is no different than any other skill."

His tips, a weedy poll and an additional "expert" opinion after the jump.

When I was ten or eleven, I read an article in National Geographic World about foraging for food, and it immediately caught my attention. For several months, I made violet syrup, dandelion root "coffee," acorn muffins, and a wide variety of other bizarre concoctions from ingredients that I found in my own backyard. Some of these foods were good and others were horrific, but they taught me a few things about how to survive in the wild, not to mention the underappreciated joys of maple syrup.

In the years since, I've tried cattails and wild walnuts, ramps and rose petals, burdock, sassafras, and a wide variety of other delightful produce. In addition to saving me a small amount on my food budget, they've also continued to bring me close to nature. Now that I live in the city, however, my days of foraging are largely over. While I love the Bronx, I don't know what they're putting on the lawn in Poe Park and have no desire to find out the hard way!

Unfortunately, just as I've settled down in my new urban home, my friend Jen introduced me to Prodigal Gardens, a site that offers numerous recipes for wild produce and herbs, as well as workshops in foodlore and natural medicine. If you happen to be a resident of the upper Midwest, you might want to drop in at one of their classes in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, or ask them to set one up for you!

For reasons I've yet to understand (perhaps in recompense for my obsessive heirloom veggie gardening), the food fates smiled upon me today. I reached into the crisper drawer for a bunch of scallions, and instead drew out (gasp!) ramps -- still viable, even though my last foraging adventure was several weeks ago, and ramp season is gone, daddy gone. They weren't 100% cook 'em up and eat 'em with nothing else fresh, though, so I hedged my bets and went with a fave of mine -- ramp pesto. Should you not be similarly gifted by the veggie gods, garlic scapes work well, too.