Swamp saxifrage (Saxifraga pensylvanica) is a little-known edible spring plant that doesn’t get a lot of attention in foraging literature. I own a lot of foraging references, but the only one I have that describes the plant comes from Sam Thayer. Saxifrage is something to look for in early spring around April or early May,…
Stalks and Shoots
The Forager’s Guide to Cup Plant (Silphium perfoliatum)
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…
Foraging and Cooking 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…
Rainbow Trout with Fiddleheads 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,…
Simple Fiddlehead Fern Salad with Mint
This simple salad is a go-to fiddlehead recipe for me. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to cook fiddles: 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 as…
Foraging and Cooking Goldenrod Shoots
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…
Foraging and Cooking Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica)
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) kimchi makes a great hosta recipe. It’s easy. To prepare them for fermentation, you don’t even need to cook the hostas before you first, just cut them into 1 inch pieces, macerate in a bit of salt water, drain,…
