Yellow (large) morels with Black (smaller) morels from our last outing.

On our last morel hike, we found four small black morels, and some larger yellow morels. This time we added them to a potato kugel. The flavor of the morels was somewhat lost in this dish, so it wasn’t the best way to showcase the morels. But it was delicious, so I wanted to share it with you!

A Kugel is a Jewish dish made traditionally with pasta or potatoes and eggs. It is often sweet but can be savory like this one.

Morel Potato Kugel with Cheese

Morel Potato Kugel.

• Morels, chopped
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups chopped spinach
• 2 Tbsp butter or olive oil
• salt
• pepper
• 4 potatoes, cubed and steamed
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup grated cheese, such as cheddar (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350.

Peel and cube 4 potatoes and steam them.

Saute chopped morels, onions and spinach in butter for about 15 minutes, until onions are translucent and morels are wilted.

Mix four eggs with 1/2 cup milk, yogurt or cream, salt and pepper.

Mix eggs, potatoes and vegetables together and pour into a 9 by 13 baking pan.

Sprinkle a cup of shredded cheese on top.

Bake about 45 minutes.

A piece of mushroom kugel.

I hope you enjoy the kugel!

Have you found morels this year? What do you like to do with them? What else are you eating this spring? We’d love to hear from you!

~ Melissa Sokulski

Food Under Foot and Birch Center for Health

Yes, fresh nettles (Urtica dioica) sting. The sting I got the other day felt like a bee sting. The sting is from a chemical made by the plant, not from a pricker, so if you cook it, blend it or dry it you’re safe.

Young stinging nettles

In my first pot of nettle tea (delicious!) the nettle looked so good and bright green when it reconstituted, that I chopped it up and made a miso soup with it! It was sooo good. Next time I’ll have to remember to take pictures of that.

Here is the green smoothie, which is actually purple due to blueberries:

Green smoothie with nettles...it's actually purple because of the blueberries

2 bananas
1 cup frozen mangoes
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
handful (a careful handful…don’t get stung!) fresh nettles
2 cups water

Blend until smooth and enjoy!

We use the vitamix for our green smoothies…if you don’t know about this blender, please check out our video about it…and you’ll also find a coupon for free shipping on this page.

Thanks, and enjoy the spring!

~ Melissa Sokulski
Food Under Foot
Birch Center for Health

Garlic Mustard Greens emerging from the ground.

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.

washing the garlic mustard in a colander

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.

Garlic mustard roots

I chopped the roots:

Chopped Garlic Mustard 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…)

Blended in a food processor with a little water, salt and apple cider vinegar

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

Walking around some Pittsburgh parks today after a beautiful stretch of warm days…and we indeed see signs of spring!

We saw some garlic mustard rosettes bursting from the ground:

Garlic Mustard

Garlic Mustard is an invasive plant, brought to America as a culinary herb in the 1860’s. In Pittsburgh, many parks have volunteer days spent pulling this invasive herb out. By all means pull it up from your garden…but don’t be so quick to throw it in the compost! This is a delicious plant and early spring is when its flavor is at its best.

The leaves become bitter as the weather gets hot, so they are best collected in early spring and summer. Leaves can be collected either from the ground rosettes (pictured above) or from the stalk. Garlic Mustard leaves become more triangular when the plant bolts, and the leaves come up the flower stalk of this small four-petaled flower (unlike dandelion, whose leaves stay on the ground as the flower stalk is sent up).

Flowers and chopped leaves can be added to salads for a nice pungent garlic flavor.

Now is the time to collect the roots, when no flower stalks are present. These are very spicy and taste like horseradish. The root can be chopped and steeped in apple cider vinegar for a spicy condiment.

garlic mustard roots: spicy like horseradish

In the fall the seeds, which have a mustard flavor, can be collected and eaten.

I love to make pesto using the garlic mustard leaves:

Raw Garlic Mustard Pesto

1 1/2 cups garlic mustard leaves
1 1/2 cups spinach leaves
juice of 1/2 - 1 lemon (to taste)
1 clove garlic (or more to taste)
1/2 cup pine nuts or walnuts
1/4 cup olive oil
salt or tamari to taste

Blend above ingredients in food processor or blender and enjoy.

Here is a copy of my article on Garlic Mustard, published last year in Natural News.

Enjoy the spring!!

Melissa Sokulski, herbalist, acupuncturist
Food Under Foot
Birch Center

Another way I like to prepare burdock is to add it to delicious homemade sauerkraut! Fermented vegetables are an incredibly healthful way to prepare and keep your fall harvest into the winter. Because the vegetables are kept raw, all the vitamins, minerals and enzymes are kept intact. The live cultures that naturally live on cabbage and other vegetables breakdown the vegetables, making them easy to digest and also stocking them with probiotics which are beneficial to the body, especially the gut and immune system! (For more information about the health benefits of fermented vegetables, and health in general, check out our sister blog over at Birch Center for Health.)

First, I find the burdock plant that looks like this:

Burdock to Harvest

Notice it is still green and leafy and alive! Burdock is a two year plant, so this is a first year. The second year plants turn brown in the fall as they die, and you’ll notice they are covered with burrs, which is where their seeds are. (They stick to you as a way of spreading their seeds far and wide!)

Dig up the long tap roots (get as much as you can, they are difficult to eradicate!) Here is one that is already washed, but not yet peeled:

Burdock Root

Once peeled with a regular vegetable peeler, I grate the burdock along with cabbage, cucumbers and apples. I also added sea salt and small pieces of wakame, which is a sea vegetable. (You can grate the veggies by hand, but I used my food processor.) I added them all to a bowl and massaged the salt into them. Add plenty of salt, taste it once it’s mixed and make sure you like how it tastes.

Shredded Vegetables: Cabbage, Burdock, Cucumbers

Finally, stuff the mixture (and all the juices it released when you were mixing it!) into a canning jar. You can top with larger pieces of cabbage leaf, rolled and pressed down to keep the kraut below the juices so it can ferment properly and not mold. You can also use burdock leaves or grape leaves for this purpose.

Sauerkraut in the Jar

Cap the jar and label with your ingredients and the date. Leave your vegetables to ferment at room temperature. Uncap daily to make sure the veggies are pressed under the juice, and taste everyday. After 4 to 7 days, they kraut should reach a taste you like. (You can even keep them out longer if you like more sour flavored sauerkraut.) Put it in the fridge to stop (or slow greatly) the fermentation. It will keep practically indefinitely!

One book we love about making your own natural cultured veggies is called Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods, by Sandor Ellix Katz.  (You can browse our recommended books Here at Amazon).

Also, in Book 1 of our 5 eBook series (which you can get for free by signing up in the green box to the right!), has a recipe for fermented veggies with Burdock which you don’t want to miss, so make sure you sign up today! The book also has great pictures and information about identifying and harvesting burdock, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Thanks so much!

~ Melissa Sokulski, L.Ac.

Food Under Foot

As promised, here is the recipe for the delicious paw paw slushie I made with the amazing stash of paw paws harvested from the trees I found in our neighborhood (with the owner’s permission, I should add!)

Collection of Ripe Paw Paws

First, I peeled about four or five paw paws with a regular vegetable peeler, and put them in a colander (yes, one of them does have a bite out of it! I couldn’t resist.):

peeled paw paws

These paw paws were so ripe and soft, I just began to mash them by hand (the ultimate aim is to separate the seeds (which you should not eat - they may be toxic) from the fruit:

mashing up the paw paws in colander

Here’s how they look all mashed up:

mashed paw paws with seeds

I had the colander in a larger bowl (both the colander and bowl are actually part of a salad spinner…I did not use the top to spin it, just mashed the fruit through the holes by hand):

separating the seeds from fruit with colander and bowl (of a salad spinner)

I put the mashed paw paw fruit in a blender (I used our vitamix) with a bit of water and a lot of ice. It was actually very rich, like an icy pudding, so I added more water to my taste…I was in the mood for something to drink. You can experiment and see what you like:

Paw Paw Slushie

It made a lot…I saved the extra in a glass jar in the fridge, and then added it to my smoothie the next morning…I had a green smoothie with bananas, paw paws, frozen mangoes, collard greens, spirulina, water and ice. You can watch here as I make a similar green smoothie using wild lamb’s quarters from our garden.

I hope you enjoy! Please let us know your experience with paw paws by commenting to this post!

Also, if you enjoy these type of posts, please make sure you sign up for our free newsletter (you’ll find the sign up box in the right margin, it’s a green box with blue feet.) You’ll get five free ebooks, detailing five different wild edible plants, with great pictures and information on how to identify, harvest and use some very common plants, complete with recipes! Please sign up now…thank you!!

~ Melissa

Another edible mushroom we found on our hike with the Western Pa Mushroom Club was a bolete called Old Man of the Woods.

The Old Man of the Woods

Boletes are mushrooms that grow up from the ground, and the underside has pores instead of gills. The Old Man of the Woods has characteristic black bumps along the top and stalk and has white to gray pores underneath. When bruised or cut, the mushroom eventually turns black. (Beware of boletes which bruise blue quickly, these are often poisonous.)

This mushroom was positively identified for us by members of the club, and we carefully wrapped it in wax paper and placed it in our bag with our other edible mushrooms (the chanterelles).

We’d heard the Old Man is a tasty mushroom, as long as you don’t mind it turning everything black as it cooks. In the books, though, we found it was “edible” but not worth eating. We decided to try it.

We sliced the Old Man when we got home

sliced Old Man of the Woods

and sauteed it in olive oil, red onions and salt.

Old Man of the Woods sauteed it in olive oil, red onions and salt

It did turn black. It is a meaty mushroom, though had a bit of slimy-ness to it. All in all, it was very good, reminiscent of portebellos.

A couple good mushroom guide books are National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms (National Audubon Society Field Guides), and Mushrooms Demystified
), which is especially good for those on the west coast.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan has a wonderful chapter about mushrooms in it as well, be sure to check that out.

the chanterelle

On our first hike with the Western PA Mushroom Club we found many many mushrooms, including edible chanterelles!

a basket full of chanterelles

Chanterelles are delicious mushrooms that in the east grow in the summertime (in the west,  they are a fall/winter mushroom.)

Chanterelles are trumpet-shaped and have ridges or folds instead of gills (a gilled look-alike is the Jack O’Lantern, which is indigestible to us and will make people very sick.) The smooth chanterelle barely have ridges at all and instead have smooth sides.

both plates of orange mushrooms are the poisonous Jack O

Chanterelle smell vaguely of apricots. They also grow alone or possibly in twos or threes, but never in a whole bunch, as the Jack O’Lanterns often do. The Jack O’Lanterns (which glow in the dark) grow from dead wood (however this can be tricky, as they could be growing from a dead root underground) whereas the chanterelles grow from the soil (but can be right next to dead wood). They both grow in the woods, look for the egg-yolk colored chanterelles under the dead leaves lying on the ground. Finally, according to the book Mushrooms Demystified (amazon link), Jack O’Lanterns will never have white flesh.

It is often recommended to dry-saute the chanterelle first to let it release the water, then adding butter and a small amount of shallot (so as not to overwhelm the delicate taste of the chanterelle.)

We dry-fried once, but the other time we sauteed it in olive oil (it released it’s water fine), added some salt and garlic, and added back a bit of water as it cooked so the pan did not dry out. Delicious!

Chanterelles sauteed it in olive oil with some salt and garlic.

Chanterelles (like many wild mushrooms) need to be cooked at least 15 minutes to detoxify the mushroom, making it safe and digestible.

We learned not to refrigerate extra chanterelles – keep them in paper bags outside of refrigeration and they should last a couple weeks. When refrigerated, they will turn dark and slimy, releasing water into the bag.

We dehydrated chanterelles for future use. We sliced them thinly and laid them on the dehydrator tray (or you can put them in the oven at a low temperature.) We were told they reconstitute nicely.

dehydrated chanterelles on a dehydrator tray

Finally, we’ve heard you can preserve them in whiskey or scotch, soaking them in a jar with the alcohol for a month or so, then get rid of the chanterelle and the whiskey will become chanterelle-flavored. You can do this in vodka or wine as well, and then can add to cooking to infuse the dish with a chanterelle flavor.

Here is a recipe for the chanterelle omelet we made for Ella (she ate the whole thing!)

• One egg – cracked into a bowl and beaten with a splash of water
• 1 Tbsp red onion
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• salt
• 2 Tbsp grated pepper jack cheese
• 2 Tbsp sauteed (as above) chanterelles

• In a small pan over medium high heat, saute the onion in olive oil with salt about 5 minutes.
• Pour egg so it spreads over the bottom of pan and let it cook through until bubbles appear and it is no longer runny.
• Add the cheese and mushrooms to one half the egg, and fold the egg over in half, omelet style.
• Enjoy immediately.