July 2009 Archives

It's been raining for a week now, on and off, with the wonderful result that everything is now growing a lot faster.

The season is later for plants up here above 11,000 feet anyway. By way of comparsion, I took a hike along the reservoir down in Fort Collins, Colorado, last week, and found lamb's-quarters growing to chest height. Up here, on the other hand, we barely discovered that we have lamb's-quarters growing in the yard, the reason being that they only range in height from 1 to 5 inches right now. The good news, however, is that there are about a zillion of them.

Willow has been my first foray into wild medicinal plants to date. The bushes are everywhere up here in the mountains of Colorado, and until recently I'd adopted the popular sentiment that they're more of a pain in the neck than anything else, having heard stories of how difficult it can be to navigate a thicket of them.

Kathryn G. and Andrew L. March explain willow's medicinal uses in Common Edible and Medicinal Plants of Colorado, stating that "the bark, roots, leaves, and flowers of various willows have long been used in America, Europe, China and Russia to treat colds, fevers, headaches, coughs, diarrhea, rheumatic pains, wounds, sores, dandruff, and other ailments." 

It's a new day and I'm starting a new blog category--one I have been planning for a while, actually. It's gold hunting!

Ever since I moved to Fairplay, Colorado last November, I have been interested in finding gold. I mean, we're not far from where they found Tom's Baby, the 13 lb gold nugget, back in the gold fever days. So after I got here I dragged Gregg across every tailings pile we could find, looking for treasure. The search has definitely been one of learning by trial and error. Much of the information I've gleaned to date has been from piecing together obscure pieces of information as they come my way.

For example, I've read up on gold in every ancient gold hunting book I found in the house, and these are replete with antiquated and flavorful stories--like how to separate gold from other metals by hollowing out a cavity for it in a potato and baking it together with mercury to cause the gold to conglomerate. (Right, so we modern people don't do it that way anymore because of the whole mercury poisoning thing.) And then, if you have a particularly pesky mother-in-law, the same book states, you can feed her the mercury potato. (Again, do NOT try this at home.) It's a good thing for Gregg's mom, I guess, that he and I are not married!

After all of my unsuccessful experiments baking and frying yucca fruits, I finally figured out how to eat them. With that discovery, thankfully, my love for wild edible plants has been rekindled.

This time I chopped the yucca fruits into chunks, boiled them in water for a while, emptied and refilled the water, and then boiled them again to leach out most of the bitterness. Next, I threw in some (garden grown) broccoli, boiled the two together for short bit, then drained the water and added the veggies to the green squash I had frying in another pan. I glazed the whole stir fry with Hoison Garlic sauce by Soy Vay (I am a big fan of their Teriyaki and Hawaiin sauces as well), and then sprinkled it with stonecrop flowers. It turned out delicious.

Okay, now I'm the one with the psychosomatic issues.

The back of my throat hurts a little--feels a little swollen, really, and my ear feels a little achy, and all I can think about is the nasty yucca fruits I sliced and fried in olive oil with salt and the aftertaste that made me feel faint and sick to my stomach. That's right, I'm blaming it all on the yucca fruits, and they probably don't deserve it (seeing as I've eaten them baked the last two days in a row).

"You're probably just coming down with a little cold," Gregg tells me.

Maybe.

I made a delicious, quick-and-easy chicken stir fry with yucca and peppergrass for lunch today--quick-and-easy, that is, provided you have already done the foraging. I sliced up some leftover barbecue chicken breast and fried it up in olive oil and Hoisin sauce with a few yucca flowers and a generous sprinkling of peppergrass leaves and seeds. The peppergrass became a little crunchy, which was a nice texture in addition to taste. This meal took an estimated 7 minutes to prepare.

I had harvested the wild edibles--the yucca and the peppergrass--on July 10. The good news is they have a long shelf-life, as they've been in the refrigerator for four days now (since I posted the entry Wild Edible Bounty). I have been keeping them in Tupperware containers and throwing a few into whatever I am cooking to test them out.

Yesterday was a day of wild edible bounty, if I do say so myself. Gregg and I had to go down to Denver so he could coach skateboard camp, and afterwards we took the opportunity to do some middle elevation foraging in the towns of Conifer and Bailey, Colorado. It was exciting, after the slow pace with which we've been finding the high elevation edible plants, how the middle elevation plants seemed to jump out at us one after another.