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!

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.

Foraged Wild Mushroom & Ramp Strata

And just like that, ramp season is over! 4 weeks, give or take a day or two, and the leaves of all the plants are yellowing, wilting, and dying. We went crazy, harvesting the last of the greenery last weekend. We picked enough for another batch of Spicy Black Bean Fish with Ramps, enough to fill a couple of large freezer bags, and enough for this bread pudding dish.

A strata is like a bread pudding, very rich and dense. This is not a light meal, this is not a healthy meal; with heavy cream, prosciutto, eggs, bread, butter, and cheese, it's just plain decadent. . . But ramp season comes just once a year, and it just seemed fitting to have it go out with a bang!

I reconstituted wine-cap (Stropharia rugosoannulata) mushrooms from that epic haul of a couple weeks ago to make this dish, but you could use fresh cremini or white button mushrooms instead. Tossing a few morels in would probably be pretty great as well, given how well they pair with cream.

Buttery Swordfish with Ramps & More Ramps

This really isn't much of a recipe, more of a status update on what I'm eating, but it was quite tasty, so I hope you enjoy.

Ramp season is again upon us, and by us I mean the Northeast, Appalachia, parts of Canada and the Midwest. The UK also has very similar Rampsoms, which can be used in the same way as our Ramps. If you are unfamiliar, ramps are a gourmet, uncultivated onion, which can only be gathered in the wild, and only for about 3-4 weeks each spring. You can learn how to locate, ID and sustainably harvest Ramps from my blogpost here.

Ramps are so tasty, and they have been embraced by the world of restaurants and foodies, so they make a great way to introduce your hesitant friends to the world of foraging.

Swordfish isn't a fish I frequently eat, mostly for cost reasons, but also because I generally prefer to eat farm-raised for issues of sustainability. But properly harvested, swordfish can be one of the more sustainable wild-caught fishes, so make sure to check your source. This dish would be awesome with many kinds of fish really, salmon or perch would be great, as would any firm white fish (like sea bass, halibut, orange roughy, basa or swai). I think the ramps would probably overwhelm more delicate fish like flounder, but you should experiment with what is affordable and sustainable by you. 

Foraged Spring Stracciatella with Nettles & Field Garlic

Spring foraging should be well underway mid-April, but it's a week or two late this year. So I came up with this dish as a way to make the most of the small edibles one can find just starting to come out here and there.

Field garlic: the tube-like leaves are hollow
and smell strongly of garlic when broken

Traditional stracciatella is made with spinach, and has a very mild flavor, so henbit, deadnettle, or lambsquarters (when they start to come up) would be great, but I wanted something with a bit more of an herbal punch--and these greens, a mix of bitter (dandelion), pungent (field garlic and ramps) and sweet (nettles) satisfied my craving for the flavors of spring. But the recipe isn't exact, feel free to substitute whatever comes your way or strikes your fancy.

The base recipe is vegetarian. I added pasta and Italian sausage to the dish to make it a main course meal. You could leave both out, and make it a starter course or light lunch. Or you could replace with cannelloni beans and make it gluten-free and vegetarian. If you have a little more time on your hands to run to the bakery, serving the soup with some whole-wheat bread and ramp butter would be amazing!

Spring is Springing, and so are the Edibles

Young Ramps just starting to peek out.

Hello! Did you miss me? I wasn't the best blogger last fall, and I certainly was absent all winter. I had plans too. . . I was going to do book reviews during the winter months, but I just couldn't get excited about writing them. No more promises this year. . .I will post when I have something to share, and I won't when I don't.

Anyway, spring is back, kind of--due to the harshness of the season, it's about 2 weeks behind where it usaually is right about now.

If you are new and curious, now is actually a good time to start getting into foraging. Edibles aren't quite as abundant or as large as they will be in a couple of weeks, but they are in some ways easier to spot, as they generally come up earlier than cultivated plants. Of course, they are also harder to ID, since most websites and books don't show the young plants, they only showcase mature specimens.

With that in mind, there are some photos I would like to share, which showcase some of the things popping up right about now,

Before I begin, I want to reiterate the ground-rules. Proper identification is the responsibility of the harvester. I am giving you clues and tips as to how I identify things, it is your job to confirm them with reliable sources to your own satisfaction. If you are ever in the slightest doubt about a plant or mushroom--don't eat it. Also, don't harvest edibles from areas that may be contaminated. This would include areas that may have been exposed to pestasides, fungasides and weed-killers, areas near highways or busy streets, areas that may have had industrial or chemical run-off, and areas frequently trafficked by people walking their dogs. Finally, this guide is for Early Spring (usually late March to early April) in the Northeast, only! That is to say, New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, and north to Ontario and Quebec in Canada. What grows in your spring might be totally different. Even in the Northeast, remember to factor in "early" and "late" spring conditions.

Foraged Recipe: Milkweed Shoot, Pancetta, & Ramp Sallet

This is the kind of dish that keeps me foraging. I would go so far as to say it's the kind of dish that represents the lifestyle I aspire to lead: meals made with a mix of wild edibles and high-quality, healthy (mostly) store-bought ingredients. Meals that are quick enough for weeknights, but make dinner feel like a special occasion. Meals that are so good, and so easy, that I will never order take-out Chinese again.

I'm not there yet, but this was a great start.

Preserving the Flavors of Spring: Ramp Compound Butter Recipe

Making herb-infused butter is a centuries-old practice. In the days before refrigeration, hot-houses and airplanes to bring us food from across the globe, butter was used to preserve the flavors, medicinal benefits and nutrition of vegetables and herbs.

Today, it's a great way to preserve the fleeting flavor of ramps, which are only found for a few short weeks in the spring, in only a very small area of our planet, and which--so far--have not been cultivated.

Ramps: at one time the first green available after  long
winters; the flavor captures the essence of spring.

Herbed butters, called compound butters, are a favored tool of chefs, restaurants & gourmands. In fact, the most famous compound butter is called "Butter à la Maître d’Hôtel" because it was a secret ingredient hotels used in their food to entice the wealthy to keep coming back for more.

A little dollop is wonderful on steak, steamed or broiled with fish, under the skin of chicken or turkey, or just spread on toast. Over time, the rich, herbal flavors completely saturate the butter, which, when melted, seeps into every crevice of meat or flake of fish, to really infuse the taste and aroma.

Foraged Japanese Knotweed & Ramp Sushi with Garlic Mustard "Wasabi" Recipe

Beautiful, isn't it?

This dish came about a bit by accident. My husband loves to make sushi, and he does a fantastic job. We had some ramps, and decided to use them in place of scallions.

Then I thought of modern fusion sushi dishes, that use cucumber, rice wraps, etc. in place of nori. I really wanted to try it with ramps, since I love new ways to use them raw--besides the ubiquitous "slice and toss into salads". Raw ramps have an intense oniony sweetness, sweeter than the newest, youngest pearl onions, so sweet as to be almost berry-like.

The only thing better than one wild ingredient is two wild ingredients, and my thoughts immediately turned to knotweed. After all, it's Japanese, right? Get it? See what I did there? I crack me up.

Finally, most of the wasabi we get in the States is just colored horseradish anyway, and what foraged item tastes like horseradish? Yup, garlic mustard root.

So all the ideas flew together pretty quick, and I ran out to the park on my lunch break to gather the knotweed and garlic mustard (we did a ramps trip earlier this week).

One word of caution: you really have to enjoy the taste of raw knotweed to like this recipe, but if you do, then the crunchy tartness of the knotweed, mixed with the sweet oniony-ness of the ramps and the stickiness of the rice is really, really good. Alternatively, you could use pickled or blanched knotweed, for a milder flavor and softer texture.

Spicy Black Bean Fish with Foraged Ramps Recipe

With the trees now fully leafed out, the ephemeral season of the ramp is drawing to a close. Heading out to our patch on Sunday, we found that several ramp leaves are already showing yellow discoloration at the edges. Within a week, maybe a little longer, every leaf in the patch will have wilted to brown and this delicacy can no longer be gathered. 

As with any negative in nature, it's balanced by a positive. Once the leaves reach this state, they do loose a little flavor, it's true; but they can be harvested in great abundance, with impunity. As always, I entreat you not to take the bulb, (how to ID and harvest ramps), but the leaves are soon to die anyway, so you can now freely take a leaf from all the plants. Ramps only use their leaves for photosynthesis for a few short weeks before they become choked out of light; during that time, the pant stores as much energy as it can in the bulb. Now is a great time to harvest an abundance of ramps and freeze them. 

With gathering set to high, it's the perfect time to make a dish which uses a lot of ramp leaves. This is actually my husband's recipe, and it is his wild interpretation of one of our favorite dishes at our favorite restaurant, Chengdu 23. This fish dish is drenched in spicy heat from the peppers, sweetness from the ramps, and the rich earthy-ness of fermented soy beans. The ramps dramatically change the character of the leek-based original, which lacks the sweet onion note of the wild version, but has a denser, more fibrous texture. To retain that element, feel free to use a mixture of both ramps and cultivated leeks.

Foraging: Identifying and Sustainably Harvesting Ramps

Identification difficulty level: Novice

Allium tricoccum, called sometimes wild leeks, spring onions, wood leeks, or ramson, but most commonly known as the ramp or Ramps, are one of the most sought after wild foods.

Recently "discovered" by the gourmet world, Martha Stewart, the New York Times, the Food Network, and more have just learned what foragers and people of the Appalachian mountains have known for generations. . .that Ramps are the delicacy of the onion family!