Even children can go out and easily identify delicious natural treats. Wood sorrel is a great example with its tangy flavour, and during a recent ’survival’ class that we taught for third graders, the children tasted ‘Golden Birch’ (yellow birch), and were delighted with the minty taste of the buds.

Learning wild edibles, however, isn’t always that easy. Field guides can leave you in doubt about identifying plants, and the negative mystique built up around wild edibles (Wild plants are poisonous! They’ll kill you!) has created a culture of doubt and fear around the whole subject.

For us, Samuel Thayer came to the rescue. His first book on edible plants, The Forager’s Harvest, introduced us to a new way of establishing a relationship with wild foods. Samuel doesn’t perpetuate the negative mystique — he not only eats all the plants he writes about, but during his classes he has his students eat them. From notes about where to find the plants, how to harvest and prepare them, and how they taste, his knowledge is based on personal experience. The result is that you become intimate with each plant he describes. The Forager’s Harvest opened new worlds of wild food exploration for us — including introducing us to some wild foods that were right in our own yard!

Now Samuel Thayer has worked his magic a second time with Nature’s Garden. Continuing in the tradition of his first book, he covers less species than conventional guides, but each species is introduced with stories, detailed descriptions, photos of all the edible parts, and personal accounts that leave you feeling like each plant is a new best friend. Prior to the actual plant descriptions, Samuel delivers a wealth of information on poisonous plant fables (including his take on Chris McCandless’s supposed poisoning by wild sweet pea), an account of Samuel and his wife eating ‘wild’ for an entire month, notes on conservation, a wild food calendar, and a chart showing the percentage of plants in the book that grow in each of the states and Canadian provinces.

Each time we open Samuel’s books, we find old myths turned on their heads, and feel renewed confidence in our ability to enjoy wild foods. This year we have a host of new plants to explore, thanks to Nature’s Garden. If you’re interested in edible wild plants and want a truly helpful guide, both of Samuel’s books are a must in your library.

Now, we’re off to see what green things are poking through recently-thawed earth . . .

The most remarkable thing about teff is its size. It’s apparently the world’s smallest grain, as the carefully posed photo below displays.

We soon learned that teff is used to make one of our favorite flatbreads — injera — which we had often eaten at a favorite Ethiopian restaurant in the Twin Cities. The huge plate-sized flatbread is served with a variety of colorful bean, vegetable, or meat mixtures set in piles on its surface, and you eat by breaking off bits of the bread and using this as an edible ’spoon’ to eat the mixtures.

Teff comes in different colors — ours is a dark variety, which has a nutty flavor. We’ve only begun experimenting, thus far having had it only as a breakfast porridge, which was very delicious. We’re excited to discover new ways to use it.

Another wonderful thing about teff is that it’s a species of Lovegrass, and it’s always nice to eat something that has such a ‘lovely’ name. It’s a very important grain in Ethiopia, and it’s interesting to think that even a tiny pouch of this grain would be enough to sow an immense field. It’s also highly nutritious.

We’d encourage people to give this grain a try, and if anyone has any good recipes for using teff, feel free to post them on the comments below!

Instead of getting all fancy, though, we just cut up some watermelon rind and plopped it into the hot-sour soup we were making for lunch.  The result?

I have to admit, I was skeptical at first, but it was delicious!  The rind took on a soft jade color — quite beautiful, and had a subtle, sweet flavor.  Its most remarkable property was that it had a pleasant crunch while still being very juicy. (Though I suppose the crunch might be destroyed with too much cooking.)

We’re definitely adding this to our cooking repertoire.  It’s going to be especially fun to try it out on friends, who surely won’t recognize the ‘exotic’ fruit we’re using in our stir-fries, soups, and other dishes.  If you’ve never tried it, give it a shot!  You simply eat the fruit, use a potato peeler to peel the green skin away, and chop it up into whatever size you’d like for your recipe.  Of course, if you want to become an aficionado, you can visit www.watermelonrind.com yourself and give some of the other recipes a try =)

Enjoy!

We came across two mysteries.  The one we solved, but the other is still eluding us.  You can experience the mysteries yourself right here –

The first was this tree.  Its rough bark was quite unlike any other tree’s bark we had ever seen.  Any guesses as to what it is?

Stepping back, you can see more of the tree.  But its nature still eluded us . . .

The mystery began to resolve itself when we looked up.

And a closer look confirmed it.  Not what we had expected.

A birch tree!  So old that its lower bark had split apart and become very un-birchlike in appearance and texture.

Then a deeper mystery confronted us.  Flapping through the trees, a large bird — clearly a raptor — alighted in a branch.  It was very difficult to get an angle for a photograph, so our pictures are very ‘Loch Ness Monster’, and we couldn’t get a shot that included the tail.  None of us had ever seen a bird quite like this, and our guesses started flowing.  It wasn’t until a dear friend of ours sent the pictures to a falconry expert that we received our startling answer to the mystery.  Here are the pictures — What do you think it is?

My guess was completely wrong.  Seeing those distinctive eye-stripes, I pounced on the only bird I remembered with those markings — the Peregrine Falcon — even though the habitat was all wrong. When we got home and consulted our Sibley Guide, the Prairie Falcon stood out as another possibility, although it wasn’t really in our range.  The falconry expert, however, took one look at the pictures and informed us that this wasn’t a falcon at all, but most definitely a hawk.  Without seeing the tail, the two possibilities were a Red-Tailed Hawk and a Red-Shouldered Hawk.

Puzzling over how the falconer could have been so sure it wasn’t a falcon, we carefully observed the photos, and decided that one could tell by the face — can you see how ‘long’ the bird’s face is in the above pictures? Then observe this photo from the Idaho Birding Trail website.  The Prairie Falcon has a much ’shorter’ face.  From what we can tell, this seems to be the case across the hawk/falcon world.

Visit our Adventure Journal to find out about this week’s adventure!

Be sure to identify the tree with a reliable guide book, and remember that the flowers are the only edible portion.  Then seek out the perfect blooms — pure white and rubbery to the touch.  Each tree offers a slightly different flavor, and each stage of bloom does as well.  You’ll be happiest with freshly-opened flowers that show no discoloring.  In the picture below, the flowers on the left are edible and decent-tasting, but the ones on the right made us melt.

Of course, don’t forget to take a good look at what you’re eating, because these flowers delight all the senses.  They’re truly a natural treasure!

There are a lot of plants out in the wildlands and back yards that make for great teas.  In the interest of culinary curiosity, today we thought we’d have a showdown between the Red and White Pines, with a Norway Spruce thrown in for variety.  We collected the needles, attempting to gather a similar amount for each cup, and poured boiling water over the top.  They steeped for ten minutes each. Here are the results:

Color

We had assumed we’d see a golden color, but instead the teas were shades of pink.  The White and Red pine teas brought up an interesting conjecture.  Could the names of these trees be due in part to the colors of their teas?  The White was almost colorless, while the Red was surprisingly pink.

Aroma

White Pine
Rebecca: Earthy aroma with a hint of Christmas tree
Kenton: Lighter scent, slight lemon aroma

Red Pine
Rebecca: Initial scent of red pine bark or sap, followed by pungency
Kenton: Strong and a bit harsh

Norway Spruce
Rebecca: Very subtle aroma, like green tea
Kenton: Depth of scent, slight earthiness

Taste

White Pine
Rebecca: Very light on the tongue and filled with soft full flavor.  An initial very subdued Christmas tree flavor ending with an almost nutty taste.
Kenton: Very subtle, easy to drink. Pleasant all around.

Red Pine
Rebecca: Tastes strongly of the smell of a warm red pine forest in the middle of summer.  Strong earthiness with an acidic finish of tannins.
Kenton: Earthy, robust, and full.  Distinct pine taste.

Norway Spruce
Rebecca: Tastes like the smell of freshly cut grass mixed with green tea.  Finishes with a very subtle pine-y flavor.  Light and pleasing to the palate.
Kenton: Delicious.  Smooth, round, with pleasant resin overtones.  Slight bite in back of throat after swallowing.

The winner:

Kenton: Spruce.  It has enough punch to keep your cup interesting, but isn’t as harsh as the Red.  The White was definitely my second favorite – it was pleasant, but I felt myself hoping for a little more character.

Rebecca: I’m going to say that white pine is my favorite, although the spruce is a close second and I would probably alternate between the two depending on what type of mood I was in.  The red pine I found to be a bit overwhelming to my taste buds, although that could simply be in comparison to the other types.  The funny thing is that I thought I would dislike all the evergreen teas because I think of them as so strong.  I was delighted to discover that I actually enjoy their flavor.  I recommend brewing a few different varieties and trying them for yourself – then let us know which one is your favorite and why!