Foraging recipe: veggie burgers with chickpeas and edible weeds, vegetarian and gluten-free

All week long I've been eating these veggie burgers/patties, just dripping with the foraged green goddess dressing.
I'll share the dressing recipe soon!

I love me a good veggie burger. (I love a good meat burger too!)

But I've never met a pre-formed frozen patty that I could actually call a good veggie burger. Not even the expensive, organic ones from places I rarely shop in. Part of the problem, I think, is that too many veggie burgers try to be meat substitutes. They try to emulate the texture, and in some cases, the flavor of ground beef.

I guess that makes sense for vegetarians and vegans, who might be craving something they can't have. But, since I am not a vegetarian, I eat plenty of actual beef. So when I want a veggie burger, it's because I am deliberately seeking out the unique flavors, textures and even colors that you can't get with meat.

Of course, some frozen veggie burgers DON'T go the meat substitute route, but they are still a product specifically designed to be mass-produced and shipped and stored in a frozen state for an indeterminate length of time, and reheated through whatever technique the user desires. They are formed first for connivence, and only second for flavor.

This time I used wild curly dock. These burgers are also good with nettles or sow thistle.
Not a forager? Try spinach or kale instead.

My version of a good veggie burger uses a lot of leafy greens. This time I opted for curly dock, because it was abundant and looking super tasty. Sometimes I use nettles, sow thistle, wild mustard greens, pokeweed or lambsquarters, or a mix of any of the above.

I use beans. Depending on the flavor profile I'm aiming for, I usually use black beans (with Mexican seasonings), chickpeas (with Indian or Middle Eastern flavors), or white beans (cannelloni) with Italian seasonings.

This time I mixed it up. I was craving an Italian twist, but I had chickpeas on-hand. As Bob Ross would have said, "It's your world. There are no mistakes, just happy accidents."

If you're thinking that these veggie burgers sound a lot like the pokeweed veggie patties I shared last year, you're right. And I'll probably share something similar next year, I simply love having a lot of these patty/burgers, made from different ingredients, on hand.

Creamed wild greens with Greek yogurt: vegetarian, high-protein, low carb, low fat, gluten-free optional

Non-foragers, don't run away, although I made this dish with wild, foraged greens, you could easily make it with spinach or kale--and it would still be a healthier take on the creamed side dish.

Spring is officially ON in north Texas, and a lot of our freshest, tenderest wild greens are peeking out above the duff. But it can still be chilly, this year more than most, with temperatures in late February dipping into the 30s. And cold weather craves comfort food.

This dish makes great use of 3 invasive species: bastard cabbage (Rapistrum rugosum) a member of the mustard/cabbage family, curly dock (Rumex crispus), and this field garlic, I'm not sure which one it is, but if you get that garlic smell, it's an edible garlic.

If you don't have either of these wild greens, feel free to sub any mustard greens, lambsquarters, dandelion greens, sow thistle, spinach, kale, etc.

Bastard cabbage, Rapistrum rugosum.
All members of the cabbage/mustard family are edible,
if you can identify them properly.

Curly dock, Rumex crispus. An abundant, invasive wild edible,
available throughout North America.
I have a post on how to ID this plant, see below for more.

As yet unidentified wild garlic. It appears to be a hybrid with
invasive crow garlic, Allium vineale

One of the best things about this meal is that it can be on the table in under 20 minutes, and only uses one pot!!! So easy for cleanup as well. It makes a great side dish for grilled meat, or to help stretch out leftovers.

This dish is vegetarian, low in carbs, low in fat, low sugar, high in protein, and gluten-free optional.

Vegetarian, foraged oyster mushroom chowder

It's important to know the right mushroom for every task.

When you go to buy oyster mushrooms in the store, you will find that the caps are very small (less than 2" across) and still feature "in-rolled" edges. Basically the edges of the caps roll down and under, towards the gills. This is considered the best time to eat oysters, as they have not yet released their spores, and the flesh is at it's most firm and meaty.

They basically look like this:

When the caps are still rolled down towards the gills,
oyster mushrooms have their best firmness. 

It's easy to harvest "optimal" mushrooms when you are farm-raising them. But in the wild, you generally don't have the luxury, unless you know a spot you can visit every day. Most often the oysters you find in the wild will have flat caps, occasionally with rippled and/or cracked edges. They will mostly look like this:

Older oyster mushrooms are less firm, and work best in soups,
gravies, and after being dried and reconstituted.

Older oyster mushrooms, like the ones above, loose some of that firmness, and are less meaty. Some foragers will even bypass these "spongy" specimens, but they still have a lot of flavor, and are perfect in the right application. By pureeing these mushrooms, like in soups or gravies, you avoid the texture issues.

You can also dehydrate older oyster mushrooms. Once reconstituted, they will have a unique texture--not firm and "mushroomy" like the young ones, but more meaty, almost rubbery a bit. Rather like cooked clams, which is what made me want to try this dish.

Being a native New Englander living in Texas, I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with the desire for foods I simply can't get around here. Sometimes it's lobster rolls, but most often it's clam chowder.  I'd heard that oyster mushrooms can make a passible substitute for clam chowder, and I was highly skeptical, but I decided to give it a shot.

Wild mushroom chicken marsala with foraged oyster mushrooms

So much for my plan to post new content every week.

This happens to me every so often, I get overwhelmed with life and have to withdraw from online socialization for a while.

Then to make matters worse, I developed plantar fasciitis, and have been struggling with it for months. Finally, with the help of new sneakers (I've spent a small fortune trying different pairs), and a lot of reflexology, I'm feeling good enough to forage again. However, I can only go on the weekends, as I have to get a foot massage afterwards, to keep things from tensing up again. I've only been feeling this good for a couple of weeks, so hopefully it keeps up.

Of course, the past few weeks have had incredibly unseasonable cold here in the DFW area, so I wouldn't have been out anyway. And a lot of the plants and mushrooms I enjoy in December were killed off by the low temps. Still, this weekend reached the upper 60s, and I was able to get out into the woods, where the mild temps and moisture created an oyster mushroom fungal bloom!

This is my take on your classic chicken marsala recipe. It’s pretty standard except for the use of wild mushrooms (in this case oysters) and the addition of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar and aged balsamic.

I’m going to soapbox for a bit about oyster mushrooms, and human/forest interaction. If you just want the recipe, please feel free to skip down to where you see the recipe subhead.

Burdock and pokeweed fritters, foraging recipe. Potato substitute with lower calories and higher nutrition.

Looking for a great substitute for potatoes? I really love burdock! 

Burdock, (sometimes called Gobo), is a root, like potatoes. It's an Eurasian plant, related to sunflowers and artichokes, and is an important part of traditional Asian and Mediterranean diets. Burdock has a nice, potato-like texture with a subtle artichoke flavor, but clocks in at only half the calories and a little over half the carbs. Bonus: it's been linked to clearer skin, kidney and liver heath, lymphatic and circulatory (blood health) support, and blood sugar management. 

Those large leaves are burdock. At the center, underground is the large root.

Burdock has been introduced to North America, where it now grows as an invasive species, a common "weed". If you've ever walked through the woods in early fall and gotten the sticky, spikey "burr" seed balls on your clothing, then you already know burdock. 

Vegetarian hot & sour soup from scratch, made with 3 wild mushrooms and burdock. Gluten free, high protein, low sugar, low carb

Today's recipe is amazing. It's super healthy, tastes great, and is jam-packed with vitamin, iron and mineral-rich wild mushrooms. It's a better-for-you, scratch-made, vegetarian version of classic take-out Chinese: hot and sour soup. It's low in fat, low in carbs, high in protein, and gluten-free.

It's also much more time consuming than anything I usually make, clocking in at about an hour and 45 minutes (but it makes a TON and it's totally worth it), and you're probably going to need to hit up an Asian market for all the ingredients.

But if I haven't scared you off yet, let me just say again: totally worth it.

With three kinds of wild mushrooms it's got a ton of umami flavor, you won't miss the meat! It's spicy and sour and thick and richly textured. While we usually think of hot and sour as an appetizer, this is totally a complete and filling meal.

Wood ear mushrooms are a superfood, cholesterol-lowering, hypoglycemic, and tumor-reducing!

I've used 3 kinds of foraged mushrooms here, but you can also use store-bought. Just make sure to pick a good texture mix. So you need 1 kind of meaty mushroom (oysters, shiitake, or hen of the wood), and 1 kind of soft mushroom (I used honey mushrooms*, but you could use beech or enoki as well), and wood ear mushrooms. You absolutely have to have wood ears, they are the traditional black fungus that gives hot and sour soup it's unique texture. They can be purchased, dried, in Asian markets.

Balsamic soy wild mushroom pizza. Vegetarian foraged honey, oyster and velvet shank recipe.

When my husband and I lived in the Northeast, one of our favorite restaurants was The Continental. They have locations in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and the surrounding areas. The food is great, the atmosphere is retro, and they do awesome things with mixing and fusion cuisine.

Winter oyster mushrooms

One seasonal dish they make is a balsamic soy flatbread pizza with wild mushrooms. I've seen a lot of balsamic soy mushroom recipes, but something about theirs always stood out. Maybe it's the wild mushrooms or the quality of the aged balsamic, but the dish was really superior. Since then we have played around with a ton of variations, and they've all been good (my favorite is with hen-of-the-wood mushrooms!). This one uses honey, velvet foot, and wild oyster mushrooms - all foraged. 

I hope you like this recipe, it's one you can make with store-bought mushrooms if you like - try cremini, shiitake, or store-bought oysters or hen-of-the-woods.

The rich flavors of wild mushrooms and aged balsamic mean you don't have to go crazy with the cheese to still have a decadent pizza, keeping it low in fat and as healthy as pizza can be. Which isn't very healthy, but still. . . sometimes you just have to have pizza!

Velvet shank or velvet foot mushrooms, another winter species that makes a great pizza topping

Deconstructed vegan sushi bowl with wild mushrooms. Gluten-freewildcrafted food. Foraging recipe.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays. With such an abundance of wild winter mushrooms in the woods this year, I feel like I've already unwrapped tons of presents. I've found nearly 10lbs of one of my favorites: Pleurotus ostreatus, aka the winter oyster mushroom! Oyster mushrooms are found in temperate regions, and even in the tropics, world-wide. They are fairly easy to identify, have medicinal qualities, and frequently fruit in abundance, making them a great wild food. And, of course, you don't have to forage for them, you can get them at almost any market!

Vegan shaggy mane summer rolls with spicy peanut sauce. Foraged, gluten-free wild mushroom recipe.

With my husband working on Thanksgiving, (he's a nurse), and my family all 6 states away, I decided to spend the whole day in the woods. I explored some new trails, got eaten alive by bugs, experienced the kind of natural beauty which refreshes my soul, and basically expressed thankfulness my own way.

I started to make my way back to my car about an hour before sundown, tired, dirty, and renewed. 

I'd found some more tasty curly dock, and medicinal Ganoderma mushrooms. . . But then I saw this ghost-like shape poking through the leaf litter. A shaggy mane.

Once I saw one I saw another, and another, and another. Having trained my eye, I started to see the little ones, mostly burried in the leaves. I used a stick to brush aside the fallen foliage, and I started to see the tender, flavorful babies.

Sorry no pics in the wild. I always find the most interesting things after my phone has died. 

Florentine curly dock & ground beef pinwheels. Gluten free, keto, paleo optional

Curly dock is one of those plants which I historically categorized as being grossly overrated. Foragers go on and on about the succulent texture, the rich, slightly sour flavor, and the versatility. Meanwhile, I would turn my nose up at the bitterness, the stringiness, the coarseness, and the fact that it was a small, dirty plant, which frequented polluted areas. "No thanks!" I'd say, "None for me, I like my forage large, lush, full of flavor, no bitterness, and, above all, CLEAN!"

Well, then I moved to Texas and had to eat crow, because I discovered this:

Super cheesy, scalloped wild mushrooms with leeks. Vegetation, low carb side dish, gluten-free optional

The best way to keep a massive haul of most kinds of mushrooms is to dry them. Drying is optimal for the boletes, chanterelles and other vase-type mushrooms, morels, lactarius, oysters, jelly fungi, and pretty much any gilled mushroom. I've even had good luck with the small puffballs, though I've never tried it with the large ones. The only group that drying isn't ideal for is the polypores.

And so it was with the mushrooms I used to make this dish. I found a long-lost container of wine-cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata) in the back of the pantry. I believe these are from the batch we harvested in spring of 2014, which was from a truly epic flush of mushrooms.

Don't have wild foraged wine-cap 'shrooms? That's ok! Try this dish with store-bought cremini or portobello mushrooms.

Tofu stuffed with pork and foraged wild mushrooms. Gluten-free optional.

These adorable little cubes of steamed tofu are my riff on a traditional Hakka Chinese dish, where they are traditionally stuffed with pork and salt-cured fish. I can never really get into salt-cured fish, so I've substituted foraged mushrooms.

Hakka cuisine isn't well represented in the US, but the Hakka people are one of the important ethnic groups in China. They also have an international presence, primarily in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and some of their food has melded into those cultures. So when you have Taiwanese cuisine in the US, it may have Hakka origins or influences.

This dish can be made with nearly any wild, foraged mushroom, but for preference, I'd use hen of the woods, any of the Agaricus, wine-caps, or dryad's saddle.

Using store-bought mushrooms? I recommend mushrooms traditionally used in Asian cuisine: shiitake, enoki, or hen of the woods. 

White button mushrooms or cremini would also be good.

Also note, this dish can easily be made vegan, remove the pork, and triple the amount of mushrooms. 

Pumpkin spiced wild persimmon syrup for cocktails, baking & dessert. Vegan, gluten-free, paleo optional and foraged.

We all know the old joke: "If you say Pumpkin Spice Latte" into a mirror

three times, a suburban girl in yoga pants will appear and tell you her three favorite things about fall.

Well, I don't wear yoga pants. But. . .it's not far off. I actually don't even DRINK coffee, except when it's a pumpkin spice latte during the fall.  I love that warm flavor of sugar, spice and everything nice. So I couldn't help but wonder what else I could use it with. Persimmons, another fall-only fruit, with a sweet/tart flavor, seemed like it would be the perfect pairing.

It came out really amazing. My husband took one taste and said, "It tastes like the holidays".

It's also really, really easy to mix up a batch, and can be used in cocktails, desserts, baking and more. The base recipe is vegan and gluten-free, and can be made with non-foraged (aka store-bought) persimmons, if you can't find wild ones by you. There's even a Paleo option!

Foraged purslane Okonomiyaki. Japanese "pizza" from invasive weeds. Vegetarian optional.

The rain finally came to Texas, and broke the breeze-less 100+ degree heat. With that kind of weather, I hadn't been seeing many edible wild plants, except for heat-loving purslane. Even purslane needs water though, and the plants were wilted, shrunken, and unappetizing.

All that changed with the rain. The purslane fleshed out, becoming plump and succulent. As I've mentioned before, up north I always found purslane in really gross locations--like the parking lot behind and auto repair shop. I never found "clean" plants in great abundance, not enough to run real culinary experiments with.

So I was really excited to finally have enough purslane to try some new dishes. This is my first one: an okonomiyaki, a Japanese street food. Okonomiyaki is sometimes called "Japanese Pizza" because, like pizza in America, it's a popular snack and quick meal food which can be customized with a wide variety of toppings.

My vegetarian okonomiyaki, with king oyster mushrooms

"Normal" okonomiyaki is made from cabbage, and uses a special flour, which has been thickened with rice or yam. It also contains seasonings, including dashi (made from fermented fish). I've never actually used that flour, I've just experimented with changing proportions to get the right thickness, and with spices commonly found in an American home.

Foraging Recipe: Bastard Cabbage Chana Masala

So I hope you checked out my earlier post about trying bastard cabbage, Rapistrum rugosum, for the first time. Bastard cabbage also goes by the more polite names turnip weed and wild turnip, but for some reason I mostly see it called bastard cabbage.

Bastard cabbage likes open fields and disturbed
ground, like the edge of this trail

Bastard cabbage may very well be Texas's most infamous invasive weed, and so I was very anxious to try it. I'm glad I did! When blanched, it tastes like a mixture of spinach, sweet corn and a hint of pepper. Every mustard green I know is nutrient-dense, as are dark leafy greens in general, and I'm sure bastard cabbage is no exception.

I was nervous about the fuzzy/hairiness of the leaves. Don't be, blanching them takes care of the texture.

Chana masala, or chickpea and tomato curry, is an excellent dish to make after a day of hiking, as it's super easy and comes together quickly. It's also vegan, for anyone who wants to try a tasty meatless dish. Despite being technically a curry, it's much milder in flavor that most, and has a nice freshness as well. There are numerous was to prepare it, so if there's something you don't like, just leave it out, or substitute something else. There was a time in my life when I made Chana masala every week -- it's that good!

Foraged Ramp Pakoras with Tomato Onion Chutney

Apparently this is the first Indian dish I have made for this site, which is strange as Indian is actually the cuisine I prepare most often, about once a week. Indian food is great, especially if you like vegetarian. It can seem daunting to start preparing Indian cuisine, because of the long list of spices and seemingly difficult ingredients, but it's well worth it. And you can get everything you need in one trip to an Indian market. The spices keep for a while, as do things like gluten-free besan (chickpea/garbanzo flour) and basmati rice. Plus the seasonings used, like ginger and turmeric, are incredibly good for you--we are only just starting to fully understand all the health benefits.

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.

White Bean & Sun-Dried Tomato Stuffed Wine-Cap Mushroom Recipe

I am not kidding. Go out and make this recipe. Right. Now. If you aren't lucky enough to find wild mushrooms, portobellos will be fine, but you need to try this. 

While out foraging last Saturday, my husband spotted some huge mushrooms growing in woodchips outside a park, as we raced to the morel spot. After hunting around for morels (and finding a nice haul), we stopped at the park to see what he spotted.

Sorry, no pictures in the "wild"

I don't know where the park got it's wood chips, but they were literally bursting with fungi. You could barely walk from one clump to another without trampling dozens. Most were non-edible, very possibly poisonous, but on one edge of the park we found the motherload of wine-caps (Stropharia rugosoannulata).

Within minutes we had over 10lbs of mushrooms. I failed to take pictures as we were in full sight of the road, and in a park full of people (who were giving me the stink eye), and my husband was hurrying me on--fearful of the police. The mushroom ranged from the smallest, firmest young buttons to older mushrooms, with caps the size of salad plates! Some of the older mushrooms had tops which dried out, and had cracked, but when I sliced through them, the interior flesh was still firm, white and moist. The entire collection was surprisingly bug-free, only one had to be thrown away.

Stropharia rugosoannulata aren't the most difficult to ID, but they aren't a beginners mushroom either; still I was confident in what I had, having been with several experienced mushroom hunters who had ID'd them for me before. I would not recommend you try to hunt these until you have several other species under your belt, and preferably get introduced to them by a local expert.