The groundhog saw her shadow today and scurried back under ground for 6 more weeks of winter, but truthfully, here in Western PA winter has barely begun.

Lamium purpureum, purple deadnettle

I went out foraging and found gorgeous flowering Lamium purpureum (purple deadnettle) and delicious garlic mustard, which I made into pesto. It is divine. (I plan to steam the deadnettle later.)


garlic mustard pesto

I feel we could almost start our CSF (Community Supported Foraging) shares now! But we’ll wait until end of April, when the bounty is really overflowing and we can add delicacies such as morel mushrooms, young spruce tips and violet flowers to the mix!

Recipe for Garlic Mustard Pesto



garlic mustard

* 2 cups garlic mustard leaves, washed and patted dry
* 1 small garlic clove, peeled
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 2 Tbsp pine nuts, lightly roasted on stove top
* 3 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
* 1 Tbsp lemon juice
* sea salt to taste

In a food processor, blend garlic and garlic mustard while drizzling in olive oil.

Stop and add pine nuts, cheese, lemon juice and a little salt and blend again.

Taste and add salt if you feel it needs it.

I mixed some into gluten-free pasta with more roasted pine nut and a chopped tomato. It was excellent!

Here’s to wild foods!

Melissa Sokulski
Food Under Foot

Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com

Just a quick note…if you tried emailing about the Community Supported Foraging and didn’t hear back from me, please contact us again!

The email links I added did not work - so sorry!!

Please send me an email to: Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com if you are interested in a share of our new Community Supported Foraging.

Sorry for the inconvenience! Hope to hear from you soon.

Love,

Melissa Sokulski

Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com

(412) 381-0116

basket full of mulberries

Have you heard of CSA - Community Supported Agriculture?

According to Wikipedia, “A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farming operation where the growers and consumers share the risks and benefits of food production. CSAs usually consist of a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, in a vegetable box scheme, and sometimes includes dairy products and meat.”

This year, Food Under Foot is trying something new: Community Supported Foraging! Our trial run will consist of 10 lucky people/families (the first 10 to sign up) and every week we will forage a box of delicious wild foods for you to pick up and take home. We will also provide a newsletter and recipes with suggestions on how to use this bounty of amazing, wild foods.

We will forage from safe unsprayed areas far from major roads. Depending on the time of year, your box may contain:

• fresh morel mushrooms
• stinging nettle greens
• Japanese Knotweed Stalks
• Burdock root (wild Gobo)
• dried reishi mushrooms
• dandelion greens and root
• wild salad mix (chickweed, violet leaves and flowers, clover leaves and flowers, lambsquarters, purslane, daylily petals)
• mulberries
• raspberries
• blackberries
• paw paws
• fiddleheads
• milkweed buds
• lambsquarters
• purslane
• plantain leaves and seeds
• black walnuts
• crabapples
• wild apples
• chicory greens and root
• onion grass
• lemon balm
• chicken mushroom
• hen of the woods (maitake) mushroom
• puffball mushroom

The list goes on and on! And since we are starting with a small group, we will be extra responsive to your feedback and suggestions!

It’s a 20 week season starting at the end of April (week of April 30) and going into October (it will be 20 pick-ups total, but there will be missed weeks when we are out of town…we will get you the exact schedule as you sign up.)

Based on the CSA model, you pay the farmer/forager up front, and we supply you with a week’s bounty of produce for 20 weeks! There should easily be enough produce each week for 2-4 people to enjoy.

The price is $450 for the whole 20 weeks which is just $22.50/week! The pick up location will be on the south side of Pittsburgh, but depending on who signs up and where you are located we may be able to add more pick up locations.

If you are interested please let us know as soon as possible! You can pay by check or paypal, we’ll send you the details once you contact us: Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com or call (412) 381-0116.

Maybe there’s a recipe from Food Under Foot that you’ve wanted to try - perhaps a morel frittata or homemade nettle pasta, but haven’t been sure of wild edible identification, or haven’t been able to locate morels/nettles or found the time to harvest them? Now is your chance to have a box of the freshest most vital wild food picked just for you every week!

Morel Mushroom Frittata

We’re so excited to be offering this to you. We’ve been asked to forage for restaurants and private individuals and it occurred to us to make this service available to you - our Food Under Foot family. (Why should restaurants always luck out? ) And many of you know that when you buy wild mushrooms, especially morels, you will pay $30 or more for a pound. We hope to offer you at least a pound per box during morel season (depending on what the season for morels is like, of course.)

One week’s typical box in early spring may contain:

• fresh morels
• fresh nettles
• purple deadnettle
• Japanese knotweed stalks
• garlic mustard
• onion grass
• salad mix (chickweed, clover flower and blossoms, dandelion greens, violet flower and leaves, garlic mustard greens)
• burdock root
• dried reishi
• fiddleheads
• spruce tips
• and anything else yummy we come across while out foraging for you!

We hope you are as excited as we are about this new offering for 2012.

Thank you!!

Happy foraging!

Melissa Sokulski

Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com

(412) 381-0116

I’ve been reading a lot of wild edible foraging and recipe books lately, and I figured I’d share them with you.

Most recently I have been reading The Wild Table: Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes by Connie Green and Sarah Scott. Although some of the recipes in this book aren’t a gluten-free vegan’s cup of tea (Stir fried dandelion greens with duck fat and garlic), the descriptions of the wild edibles and the stories she tells about them are fabulous.

In fact, just her introduction alone is worth the read: how Ms. Green got into foraging foods for restaurants. Ms. Green explains that in the 1980s it was hard to sell anything foraged to any restaurants: the only two chefs who acknowledged her chanterelles were French - one denied they could even be chanterelles because he felt they didn’t grow in this country, the other preferred his tinned chanterelles from France, feeling they were superior to fresh American chanterelles.

I love Ms. Green’s and Ms. Scott’s out of the box thinking when it comes to using the wild edibles such infusing vodka with evergreen needles and the incredible sounding: “Connie’s Favorite Persimmon Pudding with Brandy Hard Sauce.”

Many of the recipes are certainly from and for gourmet kitchens…and I have a few friends who I know would love to get their hands on these recipes and work their culinary magic!

For me - who loves simple plant-based cooking and wild edibles foraging - there is plenty for me in this book. I can’t wait to try the basket-grilled morels over a fire this spring - a simple recipe of butter, garlic, salt and pepper which Ms. Green describes as “simply the best way to cook morels” and the Fresh Mulberry Ice Cream, though I will adapt the recipe replacing the sugar with a natural sweetener like agave or maple syrup, and the half and half with home-made cashew milk, though I have no doubt her original recipe is divine.

The pictures in the book, both of the wild edibles and the recipes, are gorgeous. Full page spreads of morels roasting over a fire, freshly picked lobster mushrooms, huckleberries flowing out of the bag and onto a plate.

I can’t get enough of this book: reading about her experiences and what she has to say about the plants, drinking in the color pictures, ruminating over the recipes.

This is definitely a great one to have on the bookshelf!

Happy Foraging!

~ Melissa

Randomly drawn winner from about 100 entries

Thank you so much to all the participants of the reishi giveaway!! We had over 100 people enter! It was so interesting hearing from you all! We had people enter from Australia, Canada, Cyprus…and all across the US from here in PA to Texas, New England, California, Michigan and tons of places in between.

Your wild edibles ideas were so fabulous that I have to share some…and I will do so in upcoming blog posts (keeping your names anonymous for privacy…I’ll use initials or just first names and where you are from.)

We’ll have another giveaway in February and other big news to share coming soon as well.

Thanks again and congratulations to Laura of Fort Erie, Ontario Canada who won the mushrooms (she has been contacted and they are being mailed out right now.)

Happy Foraging!

Melissa from Food Under Foot

Happy New Year!

We have so many great things planned for 2012 - and they involve YOU- our Food Under Foot family. (If you are not already signed up for our newsletter, please take a second to do that right now: in the green box to the right.) 2012 is going to be the year that Food Under Foot gets happy feet! More on that later, but for now….

Our very first Food Under Foot give-away! That’s right, we want to send one lucky person 4 oz (1/4 pound!) of some of the gorgeous dried reishi mushroom (Ganoderma tsugae) we harvested this past year from the old growth hemlock forests of Northern Pennsylvania.

Basket of Ganoderma tsugae (reishi mushroom)

To enter:

1. Visit and like our facebook page* (if you don’t have a facebook account you can still enter by email…see information after the star (*) at the end of this post)
2. Find the entry that says: REISHI GIVE-AWAY
3. Under that entry leave a comment telling us where you are from, your favorite thing to forage (all the better if it’s a local treat) and what you love to do with it/how you love to eat/use it.
4. Share so your friends and family can have a chance to win (one entry per person please.)

That’s it! And please share the info with your friends and family so they can join in the fun (who knows, maybe if they win they will share, as I’m sure you’d do the same )

4 oz dried Reishi (Ganoderma tsugae)

Reishi is a medicinal mushroom which you boil in water and drink the tea.  Known in China as Ling Zhi - the mushroom of immortality, the tea is known for its health giving properties. It’s been used for thousands of years in Asia. It boosts the immune system and is anti-cancer and is known for supporting overall wellness and vitality.

You have until Sunday January 8, 2012 to enter, then on Monday January 9, we will assign everyone who entered a number, and randomly pick a number from a hat and whoever matches that number wins!!

We will pay shipping for the US…if you are outside the US we still invite you to enter, but we’d ask that you please help us pay for shipping.

Ganoderma tsugae (reishi) growing on a fallen hemlock tree

Good Luck!!

~ Melissa Sokulski from Food Under Foot

* If you don’t have a facebook account but would still like to enter, please send me your name, where you live, favorite wild edible and what you love to do with it…send it to Melissa@FoodUnderFoot.com, subject: Reishi Give-Away, and we will get you entered to win. Please also make sure you are registered for our newsletter (upper right margin) to hear if you win! Get your entry in by January 8, 2012!!

What a fun year this was for us! We did so many great things with wild edibles…I thought it would be fun to take a look back.

In March, we were fortunate enough to have a friend with maple trees who allowed us to stay with her for a couple weeks. We had the opportunity to tap her trees (with spiles we made out of staghorn sumac branches):

Placing the jug over the spile to collect the sap

Collect the raw sap and boil it into maple syrup and maple candies.

maple candies

Later in March we released The Wild Ally Workbook, which you are able to purchase at a price YOU CHOOSE. I love that so many people decided to get this book and chose a wild plant to work with throughout the year while supporting our efforts here at Food Under Foot. The book was written in response to a very common question which Melissa hears on her walks: “What is the best way to learn about wild edible plants?” If you haven’t gotten yours yet, now is a great time to get yours in preparation for studying wild plants in 2012!

At the end of April we began finding morel mushrooms! We found morels until mid-May.

Black Morel

In May we made dandelion wine!

a gallon of dandelion blossoms

In June we gathered Reishi mushrooms (Ganoderma tsugae) in gorgeous old growth hemlock forests in Northern Pennsylvania.

Ganoderma tsugae - a type of reishi mushroom - growing out of a fallen hemlock tree

In July we discovered wild huckleberries while camping on Grape Island in Boston Harbor with our friends.

Two lovely young ladies gathering huckleberries from a tree in the Boston Harbor Islands

And on the winter solstice we tried our wonderfully sweet and spicy dandelion wine - yum!

Dandelion Wine

We are looking forward to 2012! We have such exciting news to share with you…but for now it’s fun to look back on the past year and all the fun we had.

Thank you so much for being part of Food Under Foot! We love sharing our love of wild edible plants with you, and look forward to more exciting times in 2012.

Happy New Year!

~ Melissa, Dave, and Jason
The Folks at Food Under Foot

Burdock Burrs

So. Here is a dead burdock plant (Arctium lappa). You can’t dig the roots on this one. If you walk too close the burrs stick to you and getting them off can be a pain.

But is there more here than meets the eye?

In fact there is (but you probably knew I’d say that!)

Inside the burrs are the burdock seeds. This is why the burdocks stick to anything that walks by: to spread its seed around. You’ll likely pick off those burrs sometime later, deposit the seeds there and voila, the plant has traveled. Those seeds will take root and a new burdock plant will grow.

And the seeds themselves? Useful, of course! In Chinese medicine the seeds are known as Niu Bang Zi and are boiled into a tea. They treat constipation and also help bring out a rash if someone is coming down with something like measles or mumps. This progresses the disease along to help speed healing.

One trick to making burdock seed tea: use the whole burr. Don’t open the burr to get the seeds out unless you are wearing protective eye wear like goggles. Don’t get me wrong: the burr opens very easily, but those velcro-like outer burrs break off and float through the air…I know from experience this winds up in a trip to the ER (or a very nice/patient eye doctor who will see you in her/his office at any hour.) It isn’t worth it. Just bundle the burrs up in a cloth tea bag and boil the whole thing in water for 20 - 30 minutes.

So just because a plant looks/is dead doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot going on!

Happy Foraging - even in winter!

~ Melissa Sokulski, Food Under Foot