Wild Recipes

This is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

As a chef, if people live in cities or don't have access to public lands where they can forage for things themselves, then you're giving them that flavor that they have never had and that they can't find.

So we're making crepes with black locust blossoms.

The taste kind of sweet, a little bit nutty, kind of like a pea dicing some strawberries just to get them folded into the ricotta for the filling.

And then I sweetened it with a little bit of the maple sirup.

And then the other thing that I like to put in the filling is a little bit of lemon zest, maybe about a teaspoon.

Just got that mixed up.

Just picking the flowers off the stems so that when we have our crepes ready, we can quickly filled with everything so we can enjoy the grapes.

We're still warm.

The batter mix that is in here is a combination of two eggs, one cup of flour, a half a cup of water, three fourths of a cup of milk and three tablespoons of butter melted butter.

And this was all mixed together in the blender.

The mix for the crepes.

Let it sit at least a few hours in the fridge, if not overnight, because when you first mix it up, there's going to be a lot of bubbles in it.

It's not going to form like a nice scrape if you leave those in.

So just let it settle a little bit.

Kind of make sure it's forming a circle there.

That's about good.

You got to keep it nice.

And then because it's not a pancake, it's a crepe.

almost ready to be flipped because it's you can tell that it's starting to set up nice on the bottom so that with the filling I like to put take the whole crepe and I put a little bit up here in one of the corners and this is the ricotta with the strawberries and the maple sirup, a little bit of lemon zest, and then just pile your flowers in there a little bit more filling.

I would say this is about two tablespoons of filling.

One more fold.

Yeah, that.

And then we're going to do the same exact thing a little bit, filling a bunch of flowers, and then we'll go one time and half and then right on top, a little bit more filling and fold.

Again, some of this delicious local maple sirup.

Yeah, your beautiful strawberry garnish, some extra flowers and topped off a little bit of sugar.

It's a delicious strawberry ricotta black locust blossom.

Great.

Most Latin names of plants have English equivalents.

Sassafras does not because it's a Native American word.

It's a good identification marker.

If you see a tree with a photo still and there aren't very many.

Well, there is a physician in Spain.

His name was Dr. Nicholas Monardes he was a physician that served wealthy people and royalty.

So he had an excellent reputation as a physician.

Now, back in those days, if you were a physician, you were also a botanist, because 95% of all the medicines was tied up in plants.

When he came to New Spain, he met Native Americans and they had a plant that they showed him.

They called Sassafras.

He called it the universal remedy for all disorders.

There was about a 250 year period in history where there were trips financed and voyages financed to come to this new world for Sassafras, this is the sassafras will dig a piece of the root from and it doesn't take much.

So it's not like we're going to hurt the tree.

And there's a.

Little piece of wood right here.

I'm going to take a little.

Oh, yeah, that smells great, you know, right away, because the taste is very distinctive, even a little piece of fruit.

The piece I'm going to cook could easily make 10 to 15 quarts of sassafras if you use the same piece of fruit over and over again, I'm going to cut a piece right.

There it is.

And that will make a lot of tea.

You'll be surprised.

Oh.

Well, here's our root now.

It's about an inch and a half long, about three quarters of an inch thick.

The only thing we have to do to get it ready to boil is clean it off containers already.

You want to get out the pan?

I'll get the pan.

Now we have lots of pans, but we have one specific pan that we use.

It says right here for Sassafras.

The reason we do that, we probably don't have to, but sassafras does.

Stain smells so good.

Okay, let's.

Well, we won't fill all the way.

That's plenty.

I think there's not a specific amount of water because what happens is that chemistry of that root is going to be so strong in there.

We're going to have to water it down after we're finished boiling it, take the sassafras liquid and put it into the container.

We can do sassafras tea.

The only other thing that you might want to do is you have to test taste it because sometimes it's too strong, even though we diluted it already.

Sometimes when you put it in a cup of tea, we'll use half sassafras and half one.

And then Jan likes to sweeten hers with honey.

I like to sweeten mine with a little bit of sweetener, some sort.

Delicious.

Good batch.

Right out of the ground.

Right to the table.

First milkweed pods for boiling or pan frying.

I suggest taking them pretty young.

Less than an inch old.

So these guys here are going to be perfect, bite sized, not too bitter.

They have soft, fluffy spikes on them.

And size is not always an indicator because when they get older, they lose those soft spikes and it's like harder and harder ridges.

So you could still eat that one, but it's going to be woody and the silk inside is going to be more stringy, chewy.

So the feel test is the best.

You feel any hard, righteous hardness and you're too late.

Sometimes you find big ones, but as long as I have this richness, it's good to eat.

So I'm going to pick milkweed buds.

You want to pick them?

Pretty much at this stage when they're fully formed, but not open yet.

And always remember, leave some for the butterflies sometimes.

Well, thank you.

Try not to touch the white milky sap that's toxic.

Love it in the back when you first have milkweed, try not to eat more than three pots at a time.

See how you react.

Some people get the intestinal upset when they're young.

They look pretty much the same.

You can really see the difference in the stem is they're both developing.

You normally don't see milkweed branching anywhere to develop more leaves, so only dog pandas that milkweed has a hollow stem and whites up and dumping has a similar hollow stem, but not as hollow.

Unless you're really sure I wouldn't do it.

I'd rather mark the spot, go back there and fall and see how they look when they're older.

What we're going to do with those milkweed pods is throwing them in the water for 5 minutes and they like to float.

So I like to discourage that.

They need to go in for the last minute.

We're just going to put them in buttermilk.

They don't really need to marinate, just get wet, but they go for about two, 3 minutes or so.

Brown eyes.

These are pretty much ready.

It just keep them on low.

We might want.

And so, knot weed jelly.

Some people use it as the seeds as cream cheese substitute staghorn sumac.

It makes a pleasant lemon flavored tea.

The berries are or will stay all winter long.

If the birds don't get a bird, then they love them.

I have been successful in treating my own sore throat with it.

It it's rich in tannic acid.

Tannic acid now is can get kind of bitter if you get too much of it, but it's also got vitamin C in it.

So what we're going to see today is we're going to pick the buds and we're going to heat the wate and then we're going to let it soak for no longer than 10 minutes.

Now, the really important part, especially with the sag staghorn, is all those little hairs will really irritate your throat.

You really want to filter good.

So I always filter mine at least twice.

They are members of the cashew family, so that's actually a nut.

And if you have an allergy to nuts, then that's probably not something you want to forage on.

This does have some look alikes and where you in the way you tell the difference.

We're going to notice that this this stem is kind of furry.

The stems the pith is real soft.

Traditionally, they would cut the branches and use those for tapped maple trees with make that maple sirup because they could just they could just jab out that soft pith and pound it into the tree when we're ready to make the tea or pull our berries out and just kind of lightly brush them down into the coffee filter.

And I'm doing this this way because of those little hairs, get in your throat.

They they will be uncomfortable, to say the least.

And that'll do it.

So I just get a handful, give or take.

So I've got it all twisted up into a little package here.

And then I take a bread tie and make kind of a kind of a teabag type deal out of it and just let it state for about 10 minutes, just like just like any other tea.

All right.

And it's been about 10 minutes.

I'm actually satisfied with the color on that.

It's pink, but it's not like dark.

It starts getting dark on you.

That's when you're starting to get your astringent, bitter taste.

I think that in our modern world, it's important for us to get back to these roots and get back to the the the experience of being human.

You know, humans weren't meant to sit in a cubicle for ten, 12 hours a day.

We weren't meant to sit, you know, with an electronic device in our in our hand.

You need to be able to get out and appreciate creation.

And there you go.

The Chanterelles have a super fruity, aromatic smell to them and they're so sweet smelling because they were going to make some Chanterelle ice creams.

And I found over ten different species in Pennsylvania.

There's a lot of diversity in Chanterelles and they haven't been all classified yet.

I mean, some of the Chanterelles were only classified in like 20, 2012, 2013.

And we have all these Chanterell that we found and we're going to make some beautiful ice cream.

And all I did was rinse these Chanterelles in water from the sink.

And I'm going to go ahead and some of them and some milk just put this on medium low heat and let this simmer and what's going to happen is that the Chanterell essence, the smell, the aroma of the Chanterelles is going to infuse into this milk.

Oh, right.

So you're going to want to make sure you get the full fat coconut milk can get that right.

And then we're going to add a little bit of this vanilla extract and then we're going to add some maple sirup for our sugar.

All right.

And then we're going to blend this first by itself and then we're going to add our Chanterelles extract I'm going to strain out some of the milk in there, and I'm going to add just a little bit of Chanterelle help, give it that nice golden color.

It's almost Carmelina a little bit.

Got that coconut flavor in there.

Chanterelles hits in the back, perfect for a hot summer day.

Today, I'm going to make an old fashioned drink called Switchel.

It's also known as Haymakers, Punch, Switch or swizzle ginger punch.

There's there's various names.

First, what I do, I mince some fresh organic ginger.

And I'll add that to a cup of pretty warm water and I'll add like four tablespoons to the half gallon and it really depends on your own liking and let it steep a little bit, which will bring out the nutrients in the ginger.

This has been commonly used clear back from the 1800s to rehydrate, especially the farmers when they were out in the hay fields working in the hot summer days after about 5 to 10 minutes of letting it steep in the water.

And I like to use spring mountain water just because we have that and it's fresh and delicious and it comes from the earth.

And to that I'll add a quarter cup of raw organic apple cider vinegar, and then to that, add some freshly squeezed lemon, which would be about another quarter of cup today.

I'm going to be using raw local honey for my sweetener and you can use pure maple sirup.

This is from a friend of ours, which is also really good.

And to this, I'll add about a quarter cup and really is to your liking any of this.

It's not really an actual recipe that we use each time.

It can be a little bit different depending on the ingredients, but generally you'll have a tartness such as the apple cider vinegar or lemon or apple juice, cherry juice, and then you'll have the sweetener with water and you can add other ingredients such as blueberries, elderberries also like to add staghorn sumac, which is also a tart, kind of like a lemony sumac aid.

But I sometimes like to add that as well, so you just make sure it's really well blended and incorporated.

Okay, now what I'm going to do is strain it into another jar after it steeped a while, the another thing I like to do is add some freshly sliced lemon and I'll even a touch of lemon balm.

Cheers.

If you look around you, they are food that you can cook.

And today we can use one of them I call Purslane Portulaca in Vietnamese is called Portulaca And a plume at 10:00.

Exactly.

And at 10:00 it's.

I'll open and they close an afternoon.

So that's the flower Portulaca 10:00.

So here's Purslanes you can find everywhere they are so nutritious you know at the more you pick them the more they come back and they're very healthy to eat.

So it's a good thing.

And this is delicious.

Okay, olive oil.

Okay.

But if you want more flavor, you can even put a few drops of soy sauce if you want to.

You can do that.

Okay.

Got to chop only.

Okay.

Olive oil and garlic, little black pepper.

That is a basic step.

And you look around, there's a few things that you cannot eat except poison ivy.

But you can eat many things around.

I am from the wise woman tradition, and my goal is to help people nourish themselves through wild foods, weeds, learning how to cook simple, healthy meals so that we can get the micronutrients that we need from our food rather than from taking a pill.

Oh, welcome to my weedy yard.

And we're going to walk around and pick a few different things that we'll use in our salad today.

And there's a lot growing right here as you can see.

I mean, a lot of people would weed this.

I just leave them because I use them.

So these pretty little guys here, this is known as Purple Dead Nettle.

And I'm just going to pinch the tops off of these.

And right down here is some planting.

The plantain leaves when they're young or make a nice salad green.

This is ground ivy.

Some people call it go over the ground.

Some people call it creeping Charlie.

And it's a relatively pungent plant.

And I'm going to pick a few of the leaves and a few of the flowers because the flowers are also quite pretty.

And again, I'm just picking the tops off.

Oh, here.

Some dandelions.

Dandelions, I would have to say is up there in my top ten.

I can often find greens in the wintertime and the plant is just so fabulous.

You can use every part of it and it's nutritious and it's medicinal.

It's one of the most well known plants for the liver.

And so I eat a lot of dandelions.

Here's a nice little patch of chickweed.

This is Jerusalem artichokes.

The roots.

They're in the Sunflower family.

And as far as I'm concerned, they are one of the easiest wild foods to grow.

They have a smoky, crispy texture.

One of the things I like about violets is that even through the summer, the leaves never get bitter.

One of the benefits I find of weeds is that they are free and effortless.

You watch them grow and then you harvest them when they're ready.

So there's yarrow So this is what I do.

I just walk around in my yard when I'm ready for dinner and see what's growing.

And the things that we've harvested today literally grow in everybody's yards and it's easy to care for them and perpetuate them and have them become more of a growth in your yard rather than cutting them down and having lawn have weeds that you can eat.

I can eat this every day.

Hi, my name is Sero and my name is Brynn And today we're going to be making some Appalachian snow cream.

You want to get clean snow and obviously do not pick up any yellow snow.

The first thing you're going to need is one cup of sugar.

Then you're going to pour it, then you're going to mix it.

While he's mixing it.

We're going to add one cup of milk.

Then we're we're going to keep on mixing it now we're going to need one pinch of salt.

We're going to need four tablespoons of vanilla, pure vanilla extract we're gonna mix it really good for it to taste good.

Now we're going to taste it.

Oh, I can't wait That's really good.

It just tastes like vanilla ice cream But is vanilla ice cream great job.

This has been a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting.