Dijon Chicken with Foraged Juneberries in a Beurre Rouge

Been a little longer than I intended since my last post. My experiments with wild foods in the kitchen haven't really been post-worthy lately. I experimented with a dryad's saddle mock-meat, it was good, but needs more work. Some of the black locust blossom ideas I had came out just nasty, and had to be tossed.

So, back to revisit a dish I actually made last year, but didn't post about. Amelanchier, known locally as service berries, juneberries, shad bush, or saskatoon berries, are a native North American (generally) large bush or small tree. I say generally because there are also European and Asian varieties that have occasionally been planted here. All are edible, but the quality of the fruit varies.

Amelanchiers have very pretty, delicate white blossoms in the early to mid-sping, which lead to them frequently being planted as decoration. You can often find them in urban and suburban areas. My street, and the surrounding streets have them planted regularly between the road and the sidewalk.

Wild Berry & Baked Brie Tartlets

Either I somehow managed to miss the juneberry season, or it really wasn't very good this year. In April, when the flowers were blooming, I went around and ID-d a bunch of trees, doubling the number I knew of in my neighborhood. Despite double the number of trees, I actually harvested less fruit than last year, which is a shame, because I was really looking forward, and I had several recipes that I wanted to experiment with.

Despite early indications of abundance, most of these
berries were eaten by birds before ripening fully.

The birds seemed to notice the poor season as well. They striped the trees bare long before the majority of the fruit was ripe. Also, usually they stay in the upper branches, since my neighborhood has a lot of constant car and sidewalk traffic, and this leaves the low-hanging fruit for me. However, this year the birds were everywhere, even sometimes within arm's length of me, as I harvested. They also seemed to do fly-by "strikes" on the fruit--where they swooped in and pecked at a berry while continuing to fly. This meant that a lot of the fruit I could get was unusable, as it spoiled once pecked at.

Anyway, complaining aside, I got enough berries to make this dessert. It's not particularly creative, there are numerous recipes where berries (usually blueberries) are baked with brie; however, I wanted to make something a little less sweet, and completely home-made, without the preservatives and other additives found in pre-made phyllo dough or ready-to-bake crescent rolls. 

Foraging: Identifying Juneberries (Serviceberries & Shadbush)

Identification difficulty: Beginner

This year, the sheer abundance of berries made them impossible to ignore. For the past 3+ weeks, I have made berry pancakes, berry drinks, various breads and muffins, added berries to frozen banana "ice cream" and even made a sweet and spicy sauce with mulberries and chipotle for chicken. (I'll get around to a mulberry post soon, I promise!)