Mushroom Hunt

Shin, Andra, Katrina, Scott, and I went mushrooming today out in Metchosin.  It started raining at almost the exact moment we entered the woods, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mushrooms require rain, so part of me was excited about the rain.  We found moderate amounts of White and Yellow Chanterelles (Cantharellus subalbidus and C. cibarius), Hedgehog Mushrooms (Hydnum umbilicatum) and Puffballs (Lycoperdon perlatum).  I also picked a few Milkcaps (Lactarius sps.) because I want to get more familiar with that group.  I think the mushroom season may be winding down with all the cool weather we have been having.

Back home we canned some more Apple butter and sauce, and started another batch of Garry Oaks (Quercus garryana) acorns leaching.  I ground the acorns in the blender and let the blender go for a long time to try and make the flour as fine as possible.  Acorn flour smells so delicious!  Katrina likened the aroma to graham crackers.   I hope someday to purchase flour sieves so that I can eliminate the course pieces and only the leach the very fine flour.  This would enable me to leach the acorns more quickly, and probably retain more of the flavor.

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Prawning

Today we got to go Prawn fishing.  Ashley, a UVic Environmental Studies graduate student, works with a local fisherman (named Guy) to collect Prawns for her research every week.  She couldn’t make it out this week, and arranged for us to fill in for her.  Katrina, Kris (another UVic grad student) and I met Guy at his vessel, the Michelle Rose, in Sidney and spent an hour pulling up prawn traps near DFO’s Institute of Ocean Sciences.  Ashley’s research required juvenile Prawns and Guy said that he put the traps in the water just a couple hours earlier because the juveniles enter the traps first; if you leave the traps in too long, the adults drive the juveniles out.  It was really pleasant on the calm water, and Guy was full of interesting stories about the BC Coast.  This trip was for science, not the dinner plate, but it was still fun to learn more about an excellent wild food.  I was also impressed by Guy’s cooperation with conservation scientists like Ashley.  He was not only volunteering his time for the project, but he spoke about the different fisheries that he participates in with the long term invested interest that you would expect from someone whose livelihood is dependent on natural heritage, but for some mysterious reason has failed to manifest itself during some unfortunate periods of our industrial relationship with the earth.

When we got back I decided it was time to start processing the apples that we picked with Ryan yesterday.  I quartered, boiled, and sauced about 1/3 of our apples.  We have about a gallon of sauce in the slow cooker to make some more apple butter and another gallon that still needs to be strained.

Kris invited us over to sushi which featured his smoked Coho Salmon and fried salmon skin.  Then I dropped by Shin and Andra’s house for Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) pie.  It is wonderful having friends that love wild foods!

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More Apples and a Wapato hunt

Fall was in the air today.  It was sunny and cold as Katrina and I walked over to Beacon Hill Park to meet Ryan for some Apple picking.  We thought we were already saturated with Apples, but we couldn’t turn down a harvesting adventure with a good friend.  The picking couldn’t have been better.  With the salt breeze in our hair and the sun warming our rosy cheeks we filled our bags with the free fruits of the earth.  The trees we picked from may possibly pre-date the park, and though they were partially obscured by a ring of Snowberry, they proved their fortitude by supporting me as I tested some of the highest and farthest reaching limbs.  I believe that Apples, like many other wild food plants, have co-evolved with bears and their strong wood is nature's design for supporting beasts with a larger belly than my own.  However, when limbs do break, instead of harming the tree, they stimulate new, more productive growth.  When we prune Apple trees, we are only making up for our dainty picking habits.

After lugging our Apples home Katrina and I walked over to the Royal BC Museum to visit Ken Marr, the curator of the Provincial Herbarium.  We wanted to find herbarium specimens for some food plants that we have been having a hard time finding like Highbush Cranberry (Viburnum edule) and Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia).  Herbarium specimens include information about where they were collected, which we hoped would give us clues for finding these food plants.  Many herbariums have all the herbarium data catalogued on an electronic database, but due to funding cuts, this herbarium hasn’t completed a database for the 218,000 specimens at their facility.  To my surprise, we found several Wapato collections from Vancouver Island—A few even from Thetis Lake.

We decided to run out to Thetis Lake to see if we could find some Wapato but I think the recent frosts have killed the above ground vegetation and the Wapato is happily hibernating in its tasty tubers.  I still hope to pick some Wapato from a few spots that I know on the Fraser River, but it looks like it might be too late to collect from all but the places that I know exactly where the plants are.  Our afternoon foraging mission was not a bust, we found two amazingly large Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius).

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Results: Balsam Root Experiment

Members of the Capital Nut Tree Project had a meeting this evening not too far from our house so Katrina and I decided to check it out.  My motivation for attending was to try and meet someone that has a Davebilt Nutcracker in the hope that I could borrow it for a day to crack all of our acorns.  Nobody in attendance has one, but one member was very interested in getting one.  I also wanted to share the virtues of acorns to people that I felt would probably be receptive, so I cooked up the English Oak (Quercus robur) acorn meal that has been leaching for the last week and brought it along for everyone to sample.  It was my first batch of English Oak, and I thought it turned out well.  I sweetened it with maple syrup.  They enjoyed the totally tree bread and were very excited to learn more about acorns, so I arranged to lead an acorn workshop next weekend.  This group is working to plant more nut trees around Victoria and will likely host workshops on nut tree propagation and care.

My Balsam Root (Balsamorhiza deltoidea) experiment, like many others that don’t have the fortune of benefiting from very detailed traditional knowledge, has not turned out as well as I had hoped.  This afternoon the roots had a rich black-brown color that suggested to me that they might be done.  I decided to let the water boil down so that any sugars that leached out of the boiling roots might concentrate to the point of precipitating back onto the roots.  When all the water was finally gone I pulled a root out and sample it.  The cooked roots are incredibly fibrous.  They tasted like a hemp rope sweetened with molasses and flavored with Fir needles.  My conclusion is that I harvested them too late in the year.  A woman named Sandra Peacock did her PhD dissertation on Balsam Root, so I will try and get in touch with her, or her dissertation, to learn more. 

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Cider Pressing

Today we pressed the Apples that we picked on Thursday.  Kate rented a nice cider press for only $30/day.  A bunch of folks came over to use it and we all pitched in for the rental.  The press has an electric masher and a hand crank press and was very easy to operate with 2 or 3 people.  In less than an hour, Katrina and I made 6 gallons of cider from our 80 Kg of apples.

An even simpler cider press!

My little brother is fond of breaking apples with his bare hands, so I thought I would show him up by crushing apples with mine.

The Balsam Root  (Balsamorhiza deltoidea) continues to simmer in the slow cooker.  They are starting to turn brown which I think is an indication that the inulins are cracking.  Camas (Camassia spp.), another plant that stores its carbohydrates as inulin doesn't get sweet until the roots have been cooked long enough to turn black.

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Balsam Roots

This morning was pretty soggy outside so I thought it would be a good time to finally work on the Balsam Roots (Balsamorhiza deltoidea) that I picked in North Central Washington last month.  While I was washing the dusty pine forest earth from the roots I was trying to figure out a good way to cook them.  They are traditionally cooked in earthen ovens for 24 to 48 hours at which point the indigestible inulin is converted into sweet tasting fructose.  I wanted to use my slow cooker to simulate the traditional method, but I unsure what to do about the bark on the roots.  The slow cooker, differs from the earth oven in that it boils the food instead of steam/bakes it.  My concern was that I might infuse the roots with extra phytochemicals by boiling them in a tea of the root bark, so I opted to remove the bark.  The bark is very thick, hard, and deeply fissured, so I was not looking forward to peeling them.  What I thought would be an irksome task turned out to satisfy my more manly needs.  A hammer was the perfect tool for pounding that bark to smithereens; it flaked off like the shell on a hard-boiled egg.  The roots are cooking now and they fill the room with a godly aroma of balsam.

Once the bark is removed the Balsam Root looks really strange

When the rain stopped Katrina and I biked up to UVic to harvest some more Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum) rhizomes.  We dug one up that was much smaller than the one we got last week.  It was about 1 cm in diameter and was about 10 cm underground.  I also learned that, when wet, the brown, dead fronds make an excellent hand rag for scrubbing dirty hands.  Back home, I steamed the rhizomes but the pan went dry while I was on the phone and the roots burned (temporarily replacing the godly aroma with a god awful one), so that is strike two for Bracken Fern rhizomes.

 After dinner we put yesterday’s Haw through the fruit mill.  I steamed the fruit to soften it first and both Katrina and I agreed that the flavor is really improved with cooking.  The mush that comes out of the fruit mill looks like pumpkin pie filling.  Evidently, the Chinese make pies out of Haw, so we are going to try a bake one with ours, but no time for that tonight.

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Urban Foraging, making the most of non-native street trees!

After hearing about the Chinese Hawthorn (Crataegus pinnatifida), Kate really wanted to try some out, so today her, Katrina and I went to pick some on McClure Street.  I hadn’t realized how many are planted along that street: for a block on either side of Cook Street and on both sides of the road are large Chinese Hawthorns.  There have been several frosts this fall and a fairly hard frost last night, which has softened the fruit and makes picking them much easier than last time.  Katrina and I picked about a gallon in a half hour.  A ladder would make the picking much faster because the trees are tall and the branches don’t bend down enough to easily pick while standing on the ground.

Afterwards, we biked down to Superior Street to check on the English Oak (Quercus robur) acorns.  Once again we spent most of our time collecting from the same sprawling oak.  This time the acorns were very brown and loose in their caps; some have fallen on the ground.  I tried out a new technique for picking acorns that I found really fun.  I found a “go fetch” sized stick and hucked it into the branches to knock the acorns down.  When a laden branch was struck they came raining down like a piñata spilling candy.  We actually thought that there might be some connection to harvesting Pinyon Pine (piñon) nuts by knocking the cones to the ground, but evidently the etymology is from the Italian pignata, which is a fat bellied pot.  I also learned that the tradition of breaking a piñata was brought to Mexico by the Spanish, who in turn got it from the Chinese.  In any case, I felt like a child filling my pockets with loot as I scampered around pawing at the ground picking up acorns.  I know, the acorn addiction worsens....

From there we biked up to Fernwood to help Kate pick an Apple tree as part of the Victoria Fruit Tree Project.  From a Spartan variety tree on semi-dwarf rootstock we picked 230 Kg, which was divided up between the land owner, the pickers, and the food bank.  On Saturday we are going to make some more apple cider from our share.

On the way home we stopped by a Chestnut (Castanea dentata) tree in Fernwood that we have been watching for about a month.  Last week when we checked on the tree, only unfertilized nuts had fallen, but today we found a few excellent looking nuts.  I think more good ones will fall, but in general, it looks like it was a very bad year for pollination.  Considering that they aren’t native and throughout most of their native range they have been devastated by Chestnut blight, I was happy to get what I did.  I think Chestnuts might be like oaks in that they drop the nonviable nuts first.

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Crabapple Butter

A rainy day has at last allowed me to spend some guiltless time indoors.  I spent most of the day publishing my blog.  The Crab Apple (Malus fusca) butter simmered all day until it was thick enough to stand a chopstick up in.  I sweetened it with maple syrup, but even after 2 cups of syrup to my 8 cups of apple butter, it was still very sour, so I just canned it hoping it would mellow with age the same way that canned whole Crab Apples do.  I left the dregs out to dehydrate further for fruit leather.

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Rose Hips for Tea

Another morning spent bending metal.  I fabricated another berry rake out of the remaining copper and fashioned handles and spill guards for both of them.  Now all I have to do is solder them together.  I tried once again with the soldering iron, the stove, and even a clothes iron, but none of the tools can deliver precise heat with enough intensity to solder sheets of copper together.  I delight at how little copper remains from the original sheet but loathe recycling such a useful metal.  Surely I can put it to good use at another time.  As Ric would say, I’ll put it in a neatly labelled box next to the one that reads “pieces of string that are too short to save.”

This evening’s foraging began as the shadows lengthened across Cook St.  Katrina and I walked along the periphery of Beacon Hill Park and collected Rose Hips (Rosa sp.) to dry for tea.  The hips are very large, some about 1” in diameter and a beautiful red that give them the appearance of cherry tomatoes.  Many have insect holes or soft, discoloured spots, making the picking slow despite the abundance of hips.  The smaller hips appear to be less damaged by insects.  We picked until the sun set, and I actually skipped out a little before Katrina to enjoy the golden glow over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and mysterious veil of shadow and clouds obscuring the steep Olympic foothills on the opposing shore.  The water was tranquil, and my thoughts drifted to kayaking alone in the still darkness on the silent Salish Sea.

We ran the Crab Apples (Malus fusca) through the fruit mill and put the sauce in the slow cooker to thicken for either fruit leather or apple butter.  I have been changing the acorn water three times a day and the water hasn’t been very dark on the last few decants.  I noticed an unpleasant odour in the acorns this evening, and I fear that they are starting to ferment.  I think that the thick layer of fine flour in this batch has been fully leached for some time now and bad things are starting to happen to it and it smells of burnt Styrofoam, but the larger acorn meal still has to be further leached.  What to do....  More stirring and leaving the container top open to the air might help.

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More Cattails

Despite the beautiful weather, I was so excited to work on the berry rake that I delayed wild food adventuring until the afternoon.  I managed to cut and bend the copper to the appropriate shape, but I still have to solder the joins, install a handle, and figure out what I am going to use for the wire bottom tray.  The rake is roughly 3 inches tall, 11 inches long and 6 inches wide.

Shin finally roused me from the house and Katrina, he and I went to collect more Narrow Leaf Cattail (Typha angustifolia) rhizomes.  I dressed in shorts with sandals and neoprene socks.  Had I had gloves I think I would have been warm enough, but the water was very cold and I was only able to pick for about an hour.  We cleaned our cattails on site, which I think is the best way to do it, because nobody wants to deal with a bag that smells of swamp when they get home hungry and tired.  My technique for peeling the sponge layer has evolved recently.  After cutting the tips off the rhizome, I used to use my thumb as a blunt scrapping tool to push the sponge layer off of the dense core.  Now I cut through the sponge layer all the way around the rhizome at a point a few inches from the end with the most abundant rhizoids (usually the sprouting end).  Then I use the back of my knife to scrape away the sponge layer between my cut and the end.  Then I turn the rhizome around and either use my thumb as previously, or continue using the back of my knife.  If the rhizome is loose enough, and has few rhizoids, I can pull the core out from the sponge layer with one hard yank.

There was still a little daylight after our rhizome picking, so we drove out to Island View Beach and collected more Crab Apples (Malus fusca).  Almost all of the apples are soft and pinkish red; only a few are still yellow.  They pick much easier in this state and frequently detach at the apple, leaving the stem on the tree, which makes them much easier to process.  The leaves are also falling, and I often stripped an entire branch with my cupped hands, getting fruit and leaves together.  I wonder if leaves mixed with the fruit would help preserve the apples longer in the same way that wrapping domesticate apples in paper helps preserve them.

Back home I decided to remove the leaves from the Crab Apples and put them outside for the night (no room in the refrigerator).  Then I rinsed and chopped the cattail rhizomes.  Despite a late start I feel we still got a full day’s foraging in—here it is almost 10:00pm.

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Bracken Fern

Today I experimented with some Bracken Fern (Pteridium aquilinum) rhizomes that I collected in the Cowichan Valley last week.  It appears from the ethnographic literature that the rhizomes were used variously in the fall after the fronds die, or in the spring just as the fronds emerged.  The frond was dead on the specimen I harvested, but it was intact enough for me to stand it up to its full height of seven feet.  I dug into the ground with my small digging stick and found the ground to be difficult to dig even though there were only sporadic cobbles in the loamy soil.  I imagine that annual harvest of rhizomes would keep the soil aerated enough for easy harvesting.  The rhizome was as thick as my thumb and longer than I could unearth to see.  It was very smooth with black bark.  There were a few branches and at the end of smaller branches I found the dead growing tip of a previous year’s frond.  I read that only the rhizomes that were juicy were eaten, and I could easily see that the dead portion of the rhizome was not good to eat; the live portions were indeed juicy.  Shin tasted the milky juice and found it mildly sweet.  After harvesting the rhizome I left it in the car until today and it dried out considerably making the bark wrinkle longitudinally.  I read that the rhizomes were roasted on coals, or steamed in earth ovens, but I didn’t have a good way of doing either, so I boiled some and baked some.  The baking quickly rendered a very hard and brittle product that I couldn’t remove the bark from.  I should have tried pounding it, but didn’t have a hammer handy.  The boiled rhizome rehydrated considerably, which enabled me to slice off the black skin.  I was also able to slice along the fibrous layers inside the rhizome, but the amount of starch between the layers was so thin that I couldn’t imagine this technique being very practical.  Next time I want to try and pound or sear and pound the fresh rhizome.

Cross section of Bracken Fern rhizome showing a matrix of starch (white) surrounding tough fibrous material (brown).

I purchased some copper (in the form of a firewood rack) at the second hand store in the hopes of making a berry rake.

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BBQ Clams, Smoked Salmon, Elderberry Jelly, and Acorns

Shin, Katrina and I went out to the Sea Change and 100^th Anniversary of BC Parks Celebration at SNITCEL (Todd Inlet).  JB and Earl Claxton Jr. were leading several events: JB lead an ethnobotany hike which I missed because I was helping with the fires.  Earl was BBQing salmon and manila clams.  The clams tasted amazing!  He had steamed them before he came, and then put them on skewers next to the fire.  He said that his grandmother used to use snowberry twigs for clam skewers and spreaders to keep the salmon from curling as it cooked.  Earl also brought along some hard smoked Chum and some dried clams.  He dries the clams by steaming them, then laying them on a cookie sheet and putting them in the oven at low heat.

I finally got around to making jelly out of the elderberry (Sambucus caerulea) juice.  I started with about 15 cups of juice and brought it to a boil.  It actually simmered for about half an hour while I biked to the store to get some pectin.  Then I added 4 cups of sugar and two packets of no sugar needed pectin.  It set weakly on a cold plate and on the bottom of the pot after I emptied the jelly into the jars.  I don’t want it to set as strongly as last time that I made elderberry jelly—it was like cheese!

I also ground up some Quercus robur acorns.  I let the blender work for longer to try and attain a finer acorn meal.  Then I ran it through my 2 mm kitchen sieve.  It all passed through the sieve after a second blending, but there are still some small chunks that I think a 1 mm sieve would catch.  I am leaching enough for several meals since I would rather not have multiple jars leaching at a time.  I think I can refrigerate the finished product for a few days while I use it.  The fully dried acorns grind much better than the partially dried ones (unless the difference has to do with the species of oak—they were Garry Oak last week).  There was not nearly as much clumping, due—I think—to less moisture.  However, the hard dry acorns are very loud.  We found refuge from the clatter by sticking the English Oak acorns in our ears.  They are perfectly sized for earplugs!

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