Recently in Wild edible plants Category

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.

In his chapter on dandelions, the late Euell Gibbons, famous forager and author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, waxes nostalgic about a better day when the dandelion was appreciated as the valuable source of food, medicine, (and yes, fortune-telling) that it is.

"Did you ever see a child who did not enjoy blowing the fuzz-winged seeds from the hoary seed balls of the dandelion?" Euell asks, after stating his case about the dandelion's many tonic uses. And yet, "Every garden-supply house offers for sale a veritable arsenal of diggers, devices, and deadly poisons all designed to help exterminate this useful and essentially beautiful little plant which has so immensely benefitted the human race."

Reading Stalking the Wild Asparagus as a teenager, I had always wanted to but never tried any of the dandelion's useful parts--the flowers, young greens, and supposedly the roots. So the other day Gregg and I picked 1/2 a small Ziploc bag full of newly-opening flowers, dipped them in wheat flour batter, and deep-fried them.

After the excitement of the pennycress earlier today, Gregg and I decided to hike up above the treeline and look for another wild edible plant--stonecrop.

Stonecrop is one I've had my eye on in Cattail Bob's guide, Best Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado. It is a succulent so we were excited about the prospect of it being juicy.

Anyway, the search brought us to some beautiful vistas in the high country. We found the stonecrop above treeline but then once we knew what it looked like we were able to pick it out lower down on our way back.

It's confirmed--we've got pennycress growing! It's all over the place in the yard and next to the driveway. Why is this so exciting? Because pennycress is a wild edible plant, and I'm really into wild edible plants. 

Pennycress, which is part of the mustard family, has young leaves that can be eaten fresh in salads or cooked in soups, and apparently in the fall the seeds can also be harvested and eaten.

I was really hoping to find something wild and edible near the house (above 11,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies) in addition to the strawberries, which, like other berries, are only available in the fall.

After getting out Cattail Bob Seebeck's outstanding guide, Best-Tasting Wild Plants of Colorado, last week from the Fairplay library (which I also love, by the way), I identified a plant I thought might be pennycress.