About a decade ago now, I was walking through a park looking for mushrooms, not finding much. I knew a plant or two, but mostly everything that wasn’t a mushroom seemed to be part of an undecipherable wall of green. I remember coming across a giant, handsome colony of plants, with beautiful toothed leaves and…
Stalks and Shoots
Solomon’s Seal Shoots
Solomon’s Seal shoots (Polyganatum biflorum and Maianthemum racemosum covered here) have to be one of the most under-appreciated wild vegetables out there. If you like fiddleheads, asparagus, or just tasty green vegetables in general, you owe it to yourself to find this plant if it grows near you and give it a try. I read…
Trout with Spring Shoots and Pheasant Backs
Last week we had a couple over for dinner and the woman, a friend of my girlfriend I’d met many times before, was, unbeknownst to me, a fly-fishing apex predator. I still have trouble catching anything but rocks with my rod, but she showed up with an entire cooler filled with 8 whole brook trout,…
Fiddlehead Salad
This simple salad is my go-to recipe for eating ostrich fiddleheads. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to cook them: blanch five minutes, blanch ten minutes, sauté afterward and cook them to death in oil, put them in lasagna and bake them to oblivion, then pull out long, soft and stringy noodles…
Goldenrod Shoots and Tips
For a lot of people, Goldenrod probably conjures up images of brilliant yellow blooms in the middle of summer. I like seeing goldenrod flowers too (for their color-not culinary purposes as the flowers are tough, with the exception of the well-known goldenrod tea) but the shoots and young growing tips are actually a vegetable that…
Virginia Bluebells
There are lots of spring ephemerals I love, but, Virginia Bluebells might just be the prettiest of them all. As you’re probably gathering, you can eat them too, and, they’re delicious! They’re one of the very first ephemerals to come up in the spring, and one of the most beautiful harbingers of the green landscape…
Hosta Shoot Kimchi
It’s hosta shoot season, and besides just throwing them in a hot pan (which is great) the shoots are a bit like rolled-up lettuce, and they take really well to the kimchi treatment. It’s a great recipe to add to your repertoire for this common, delicious garden ornamental. It’s easy. To prepare them for fermentation,…
Marinated Hosta Shoots
It’s hosta shoot season, and marinated hosta shoots make a great spring appetizer or side dish to help you enjoy your edimentals (edible ornamentals). Here’s the jist: go get the plumpest, fattest hosta shoots you can find, get a pan or grill really, really hot, char them on one side only, add a splash of…
