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In case you want to follow Food Under Foot in the news, there have been 2 amazing articles about us recently:

• The Pittsburgh Post Gazette food section featured us in their Wild Food feature on Thursday, April 12, 2012

• Pittsburgh Magazine columnist Leah Lizarondo mentions us in her awesome article Girl Gone Wild

Great recipes for wild foods can be found in both places!

Also, we had 2 excellent wild edibles walks yesterday at the Frick Park Earth Day celebration. Thanks to everyone who came! I will get a blog post up soon with everything we saw and discussed. Unfortunately, the rain erased most of the emails I collected from participants so if you don’t get the email from me that’s why. I hope you find us anyway. Make sure to sign up for our newsletter in the green box in the right margin!

Yesterday I finished the book 29 Gifts by Cami Walker. I’ve taken the challenge: give 29 gifts in 29 days. I also joined the community.

Day 1 of giving was today and so far my gifts were “wild”:

• showing columnist Leah Lizarondo a wonderful nettle patch in Frick Park (for her upcoming NPR interview!!)

• Harvesting nettles for my daughter Ella so we can make Nettle Pasta together (she’s been asking me since the nettles have come up.)

Happy happy Earth Day!

~ Melissa

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Our first walk of the year was so much fun! We had great weather and lots of enthusiastic people. We identified at least 12 wild edibles (including Dryad’s Saddle, an edible mushroom that everyone got to take home.) Unfortunately we didn’t find morels…but join us on Saturday for our Earth Day walks and who knows what we’ll find!

We found and discussed:

Dandelion

Plantain

Chickweed

Japanese knotweed

Dryad’s Saddle

Purple Archangel (Purple deadnettle)

Violet

Broad Leaf Dock
Burdock

Nettles

Cleavers
Garlic Mustard

May Apple

We discussed making:

• Dandelion Wine
• Plantain Oil and Salve - to soothe the skin and ease itching, rashes, stings, poison ivy/oak, bug bites, etc
• Latkes (potato pancakes) with nettles and garlic mustard
• Garlic Mustard Pesto
• Garlic Mustard “Horseradish”
• Steamed Deadnettles
• Roasted Dandelion and Burdock root for coffee substitute
• Drying plants and roots
• Making tinctures

Our next walks are this Saturday at the Frick Park Environmental Center for their family-friendly, free, Earth Day Celebration! The festival is Saturday April 21, 2012  from 11:30 to 4, and we will lead two walks at 1 pm and 2 pm.

Hope to see you there!

~ Melissa

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Happy April!

I feel like spring is really here with the abundance of wild edibles around.

The juice above is Japanese knotweed stalks, cucumber and apple (juiced in a Jack Lalanne Juicer)

So delicious and super nutritious: Japanese knotweed has the highest natural concentration of resveratrol, an anti-oxidant which is good for the heart and brain, is anti-aging and anti-cancer. Supplement companies used to use grape skin to make resveratrol supplements…no more! Now they use Japanese knotweed (usually the root). What a great way to use this terribly invasive weed.

Japanese knotweed’s newest use is as prevention and treatment for the symptoms of Lyme disease, which is why I may drink this juice every day that the stalks are available. I am in the woods a lot and am often pulling ticks off me (yuck!) I’m also going to tincture the root soon (it’s best to do when the plant is not flowering, so early spring and fall): I will dig up the roots (which are orange/yellow in color), clean them, chop them and add them to a glass jar that I fill with 100 proof vodka, which is 50% alcohol. I will take pictures and post what I do step by step. For more information on treating Lyme disease with Japanese knotweed and other natural remedies, see Stephen Buhner’s book Healing Lyme: Natural Healing And Prevention of Lyme Borreliosis And Its Coinfections

By the way, the above juice is truly yummy: sweet and tart and incredibly thirst-quenching!

The potato pancakes are a bit more decadent:

1 large potato, peeled, grated
1/4 onion, grated
1 egg
1/4 cup flour (I use gluten free flour such as buckwheat or rice flour)
handful garlic mustard chopped - use more if you want!
large gloved handful of stinging nettles, blanched to remove sting and then chopped - use more if you want!
1/4 cup grated spicy Jack cheese (optional, yummy)
salt
pepper
olive oil for cooking

Mix all ingredients in large bowl.
Lightly coat frying pan with olive oil (rather than deep frying, you can also bake these at 375 til browned, 30+ minutes)
Spread a tablespoon of batter into pan (fits about 3 at a time in my cast iron pan).
Cook on medium high (turning down if oil begins to smoke) for about 3-4 minutes until browned, flip and cook another couple minutes.

Can serve with applesauce and sour cream or just enjoy as is…so tasty!

CSF-ers can look forward to all the wild ingredients in this weeks share, and others can find these ingredients in plentiful amounts these days…at least here in Western PA!

Love and nettle stings,

Melissa

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We’re back!

As you probably noticed, we have not posted in a while…even though spring has come so early and wild edibles have been bursting forth from the ground! That’s because our computer broke (boo!) and then when we finally got a new one it would not let me do blog posts (I finally realized I had to upload and work through Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, though I have no idea why.)

So now we’re back and like spring we are bursting with excitement and lots of information!

First: our CSF (Community Supported Foraging) is about to get up and running! Our first pickup will be Thursday April 5, ONE WEEK FROM TODAY! How exciting! We realized if we waited until May to begin we would probably miss morels, fiddleheads and all sorts of early spring treats.

Don’t fret if you missed the boat on the CSF for this year (we only offered 10 shares for our flagship year)…we are still offering wild produce locally through Green Circle Farm’s weekly produce list. (And we may even offer our very own “list” soon, we’ll see how it goes with the CSF and Green Circle Farm.)

Our friend Erika at Green Circle Farm offers a weekly abundance of all sorts of things: raw milk, raw butter, grass fed beef and other sustainably raised animals, free range eggs, produce from the Pittsburgh Public Market, she even had wild ramps this week available (and not even from us!) Visit her website to be added to her list (you get a weekly email, place your order by a certain date and then pick up at one of various locations around Pittsburgh.)

Also, we will have a weekly newsletter for the CSF-ers with info about the wild plants and recipes, and we will post those newsletters here on our blog. So you’ll get lots of yummy recipes and tidbits of info of what to do with all the amazing food and medicine popping up right under your feet all season long.

Second: WALKS!

We have heard you loud and clear: you want walks and more walks this year. We are working on our schedule, and it even includes a MOREL HUNTING WALK this year!! Oh yes we did! I hope you will all join us. The full schedule will be up soon but I will let you know this: we will be offering two walks again at Frick Park’s Earth Day celebration this year. The date is Saturday, April 21, 2012 and our walks are at 1 pm and 2 pm. Be there!! This is a super fun, free, family-friendly celebration of nature at the Frick Environmental Center on Beechwood Blvd in Squirrel Hill (Pittsburgh) PA. The festival itself is from 11:30 to 4. You will be overwhelmed (in a good way) with fun and music and arts and crafts and food and walks and more!

Third, now is the best time of year to get started on a Wild Ally!!! Did you do one last year? Pick another one for this year! An ally is a wild edible plant that you study, learn from and enjoy intensely over the course of the season. I have created a workbook of exercises for you to do with your ally. I really find this is the best way to get to know (and love) wild edible plants (and medicines!) Our workbook is STILL pay-what-you-choose, so make sure you grab one today!

As you have probably noticed, wild plants are up early and in great abundance this year! I was out yesterday and in addition to all the nettles, deadnettle, garlic mustard, onion grass, wintercress, chickweed, and dandelion that are out, I saw fiddleheads, Japanese knotweed shoots, burdock and have heard the murmurs of early morel mushrooms in the wind.

Let’s get this party started!

Coming up in this blog (I have so much for you…trying to get caught up!)

• What to do with all this (yummy) Japanese Knotweed

• CSF Newsletter “0″: making a Ginger Bug starter for wild sodas

• Walk schedule, including our all new Morel Hunting Walk

• “I smelled ‘em before I saw ‘em….Nettles”

• And so much more!! So stay tuned my friends!

Walk with care and don’t forget to look up sometimes; there are some amazing birds out there!

Love and nettle stings,

Melissa Sokulski of Food Under Foot

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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

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Today I harvested garlic mustard for the spicy white roots to make a horseradish-like condiment.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is an invasive plant, brought to America in the 1860’s as a culinary herb. It spreads like wildfire and often will displace native mustards and cresses. Many parks hold days where people can come volunteer to pull out garlic mustard so it doesn’t take over other native plants. This is one weed no one will mind you pulling!

Now is a great time to use garlic mustard: the leaves are tasty and not too bitter, as the weather warms the leaves get more bitter and lose their spicy garlic mustard flavor.

To make the condiment, harvest the entire plant, and wash the roots well. The roots are white and have a horseradish-like smell. They will taste spicy.

I chopped the roots:

I blended the roots in a food processor with a bit of salt, a couple teaspoons of water and about 1 tsp apple cider vinegar and blended until it looked like horseradish: (It stung my eyes! Pretty spicy…)

Here it is, in a jar:

According to Chinese Medicine, the spicy or pungent taste of horseradish and garlic mustard enters the Lung meridian, and is known to clear the sinuses and help the body get rid of respiratory infections. (For more on Traditional Chinese Medicine and health, visit our sister website Birch Center for Health.)

Here in Pittsburgh, wild edibles are just emerging from the ground. Today we also found nettles! What is popping up where you live? We’d love to hear from you!

Thanks!
Melissa Sokulski, acupuncturist, herbalist
Food Under Foot

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As promised in the previous post, here is how I made my own burdock root tincture.

Look for a first year burdock plant. This time of year it will still be green, large leaves in a basal rosette on the ground. You’ll likely find them next to the dead second year plants, which are brown and covered with burrs.

Below you’ll find one of the burdock roots we were able to get from the ground. Burdock has a long thick tap root, it’s nearly impossible to get the whole thing out, but do as best as you can.

After I washed all the dirt off, I peeled and chopped the root, below:

I put some of the chopped roots on drying racks to dry (I actually used my dehydrator, but you can air dry them as well, in a dark, airy place), and the rest I put into a glass jar and covered with 100 proof vodka, to tincture:

I could have covered it and put it away for six weeks, but instead I made use of my Vitamix (a high speed blender), and blended it all together. This way, I’ll be able to use the tincture faster:

I labeled it with the date, what was inside (Burdock Root) and what the solvent was (100 proof vodka). Two weeks later I poured off some of it, filtering it through a paint straining bag purchased at Home Depot (2 bags for $3). You can also use cheese cloth or other cotton cloth napkin to filter. You save the liquid (that is your tincture) and compost the plant matter. I poured off enough to fill a 2 oz dropper bottle, the rest is still in the jar in a dark cabinet.

Let us know what you do with Burdock. I’ll soon post a pictorial of how I made the delicious fermented vegetables with cabbage and burdock root. Now is a great time of year to harvest the burdock root. If you’re unsure how to identify it or what to do with it, make sure you sign up for our 5 free ebooks (the green box in the margin to your right.) The first book is on Burdock, so you’ll receive a ton of information right away after signing up.

Have fun, stay safe!
~ Melissa Sokulski, L.Ac.
Food Under Foot

Also please visit our sister blog, full of information on general health and Traditional Chinese Medicine.

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Autumn is an excellent time of year to harvest burdock root.

If you haven’t received our eBook all about Burdock, including how to identify and harvest burdock, and recipes and projects using burdock, please sign up for our free newsletter on the right margin.

Aside from being an excellent vegetable (called Gobo in Japan), burdock root is used medicinally to cleanse the blood.

Some reasons that blood may need to be “cleansed” include:

• parasites
• toxins from cigarette smoke or pollution
• toxins from alcohol or junk food
• bacteria or viruses, including chronic viruses from things such as Lyme’s disease
• heavy metal exposure, like mercury, lead, or arsenic

This time of year you’ll find burdock, a biennial plant, in both phases: one being the brown dead plant covered with burrs that stick to your clothes (do not harvest these roots, they are dead - pictured below), and a plant with a rosette of green leaves, still close to the ground, with no flower or seed stalk. This is the first year plant, and it is from this plant you want to harvest the roots (shown above).

We harvested some burdock root the other day, and prepared it three ways:

• dried for use as a tea


Sliced Burdock Root Drying on a Dehydrator Tray

• tinctured in alcohol


Sliced Burdock Root Steeping in 100 Proof Vodka, Before Blending

• fermented with cabbage in cultured vegetables (also known as sauerkraut.)


Shredded Burdock Root, Cabbage, and Seaweed Fermenting on the Counter

Over the next few days, I’ll post step-by-step pictorials of how I made the above remedies. The sauerkraut is absolutely delicious! The recipe is in our free e-book, so please sign up (green box to the right) if you haven’t yet!

Happy Harvesting!

~ Melissa