We seem to be in the middle of stalk season. Everything wild we've eaten this week has been a stem--either the main plant stem or a petiole (a botanical term for leafstalk). The time for wild greens has passed as the plants toughen up their leaves with clusters of fibers that make them indigestible to all but the most committed herbivores. Since we don't have four stomachs, we are obliged to look elsewhere for our vegetables. The only domesticated plant that I know of which is prized for its stalk is celery. (Asparagus I think of as a shoot, edible only when it's tender and young.) Although their flavors are drastically different, the texture of the shoots we've eaten lately have been quite similar to celery.
Despite any culinary similarities, wild stalks are different from celery in that they all have taken extra processing time. They've needed to be peeled. And I, Thag, the foraging family's dedicated sous chef, am just the man for the job. Peeling, I can tell you, is a time consuming process. Certainly, some of that is due to my inexperience. I imagine our ancestral foragers peeling rinds and removing thorns with the finesse of a cordon bleu chef. As a young grasshopper of the foraging arts, however, I have a long way to go before mastery.
Foraging takes time, and time is one thing that I can never find in quantity enough. When I began this project, I dreamed of quiet Saturdays spent ranging through the woods and fields looking for tasty morsels. The reality is that we have yet another to do list. Surely, it is a labor of love, but it's seldom done at a leisurely pace. We are trying to tack a foraging life onto a civilized one that is already full. Our Saturdays were already packed with work, home, and family. I have even found myself pulling jewelweed by flashlight. The seasons of plants pass by quickly. We've already missed a few edibles that were on our list because we didn't gather early enough. As delicious as they were, the milkweed shoots should have been gathered several weeks earlier. We missed poke altogether. It had grown tall (and poisonous) by the time we we found its shoots. It is a challenge to keep one foot in the foraging world while another foot is busy running the rat race.
I am curious to know about how other would-be foragers make space for a little bit of wildness in their lives. If you're out there, I'd love some tips. Please comment.
