Monday, April 26, 2010

Baby Steps Into Foraging

This MooseBoots journey can sometimes be influenced by external forces ... timing ... seasons ... impulses ....  I want to start foraging more of our food.  I have talked about it for years, but (insert excuse) ....  This week, we have taken a step forward.  If any of you are interested in foraging, I highly recommend The Forager's Harvest as a good place to start. The guy who wrote this book forages a good percentage of his food and wrote this book based on his lifelong passion for foraging.


Our last outdoors class was a pleasant review of foraging some of the native foods in season now.  So, since then, we have been eating dandelion greens with at least one meal a day.  Most often, we eat the green mixed in with leaf lettuce and basil for a delicious salad.  Tonight, we ate dandelion greens sauteed with butter and garlic, which we grew ourselves last year.



Yesterday, I told Wendy that we needed to go foraging.  But, other tasks won out ... ducks need a house, the yard needs to be cleaned up, wood needs chopping.  Tonight, while Wendy was preparing dinner, Little Fire Faerie, Precious, and I went for a walk with the dogs.  It was a quick foraging trip.  We walked and gathered some Japanese Knotweed and some dry, standing dead wood for a fire.  Big Little Sister lit the fire by herself, including splitting some wood with a big knife.



The knotweed was washed and chopped up.  This was added to some sliced apples and strawberries.  Then, it was heated over low heat.  Incredibly, it turned into some very delightful applesauce. 



Who knew that this, my MooseBoots journey, could be so delicious and enlightening at the same time?  This is a great time of year!

3 comments:

  1. That girl is pretty talented ;). But I noticed she wasn't brave enough to try the "enhanced" applesauce ... which was delicious, by the way. Good call!

    So, tomorrow, we need to have Yankee pot roast with deer meat, a mixed greens salad and knotweed sauce sweetened with maple syrup and call it our "foraged dinner." Talk about eating local, eh? *grin*

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  2. I'm just like you. I have been wanting to forage for some of our food for a long time now. I even have few foraging books. I think the best book I have is called Bill Joe Tatum's Wild Foods Cookbook & Field Guide. I got mine on ebay. It is a older book from the 70's. You have inspired me to try harder to find time to go forageing this spring and this whole year.
    Kelly

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  3. Wendy, I am always up for meat....

    Lilac, I have realized lately that accumulated knowledge without application is fairly useless. So, I have been really trying to apply that which I have learned, or will learn, on this path.
    April 26, 2010 10:41 PM

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