I'm in the northeast USA and would sure appreciate any ideas, details, or recipes of herbs and such that can be consumed as food. (eg. burdock root, dandelion, etc.) How to combine and prepare to arive at meal solutions is of particular interest. Thanks for sharing!

-- (arbitrage@usa.com), December 05, 2001

Answers

get a GOOD book,, wiht drawing,, AND pictures. , a good one,, that I have,,, Identifying and Harvesting Ediable and Medicial PLants in wild,, (and not so wild) places.,, written by,, Steve Brill

-- stan (sopal@net-port.com), December 05, 2001.

Chickweed is ok in salads- its rather easy to Id, Im not going to tell you what it looks like as a book will cover that much more in detail then I can. I like to add it chopped into onion soup- milk base with wild "onions" and chickweed. Um, ill send you a list of wild edibles in your area, maybe you could just ask about the ones you are not familiar with.. what area speciffically are you in. I know quite a few eastern plants- Pennsylvania and NC in particular, little bit in upper east like coastal Maine, too.

-- Kevin in NC (vantravlrs@aol.com), December 05, 2001.

I have dandelion growing now in my sunroom . I snip the tender leaves to add fresh greens to ramen noodle soups and harvest roots for drying.

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), December 05, 2001.

Bill and Bev Beatty's Wild Plant Cookbook. I picked it up at a local state park gift shop. The address in the book is as follows:

Naturegraph Publishers, Inc. P O Box 1075 Happy Camp, CA 96039

I really like this book. It has good recipes and gives the nutritional information for each of the wild plants. Example: .74 ounces of raw violet leaves provides the RDA of vitamin C for an adult.

-- Mona in OK (modoc@ipa.net), December 06, 2001.

Your best foraging opportunities (apart from dandelions) are more likely to be roadside fruit trees from seeds thrown from cars, or old orchards around abandoned houses, or groves of trees originating from seeds excreted by birds who've been feeding on fruit, or groves marching down streams as the seeds are washed downstream - all really introduced trees rather than native plants.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), December 07, 2001.

We really like lamb's quarters. They taste a lot like spinach when you cook the leaves. We also like young poke shoots in the spring. And morels! YUM! The kids can eat their weight in those fried! Not to mention wild blackberry pies and jams. Then there are sand plums that make great jams too. Wild onions and garlic are good to use in soups and stews. Also really good in scrambled eggs. Oh...just noticed that you are in the NE. I live in Ok. Wonder if you have any of those things up there? Hope that you do. They are great!

-- Nan (davidl41@ipa.net), December 07, 2001.

Berries are always relatively easy to come by during the warmer months in Maine. The tiny wild strawberries are usually ripe just before the cultivated ones. While it takes a very dedicated picker to get enough for jams or cooking, anyone can pick a handful to put on their cereal or ice cream, and grazing is always delightful. My kids (human) and kids (goat) all look the same in the spring...grazing in the lawn!!! Blueberries, raspberries, dewberries and blackberries are all over the place. If you know of a boggy area, cranberries grow here naturally also. As for other things, I only dabble. Wood sorrel has a nice lemony taste in a salad. I dedicatedly search for puffball mushrooms in the fall to saute. In Maine there is a very active mycological society which I will join some day in my spare time (?!) since I would love to learn more about foraging wild mushrooms. In the magazine People, Places and Plants, they have a calendar of events for New England which often includes classes on foraging. Good luck!

-- Sheryl in Me (radams@sacoriver.net), December 08, 2001.

I would just like to share my experiences with the most common of all plants, dandelions. To everyone else who doesn't read Countryside, they are simply "those damn weeds", to yourself and I, and all the other readers of Countryside, they are a veritable bounty. I have collected the "heads" of the dandelion in mid morning, removed all the green parts, made up a beer batter, dredged the flowers in the batter, and deep fried them until golden. Remove from the oil, and put them on a plate with doublelined toweling, and seasoned them simply with a little salt (or use the seasoning of your choice). I wasn't sure if my family would have ever eaten them, especially my wife who never eats anything weird. They went over with a hit! My six year old couldn't stop shoveling them in his mouth and my wife even thought they were great. I have also made dandelion wine, if anyone needs a recipe for that, email me and I will send it to you. Of course, I have used the leaves for salads, both raw and cooked with bacon. I have made beans and greens using a mixture of greens, collard, kale, mustard, and dandelion, all boiled together with some smoked ham hocks and beans. Yum!! Also, have used the roots as a decent coffee substitute. Gather roots, clean and dry in a 200 degree oven until thoroughly dry. Grind just as you would coffee beans and use them in the same way.

-- Thomas Cali (vlest319@aol.com), December 10, 2001.

I'm not from your area at all, so many of the plants are different. What I would suggest that you do is get an edible plants book, their are many available in libraries and booksellers. Be sure to check into the poisonous plants first. It is very important that you learn to recognise the potentially harmful plants, so that you can safely harvest the edibles. Most edible leaves you can eat raw, it will be obvious if you can't. If that is the case, tea, soups, stews, sauces, lasagnes, casseroles.......you name it. Roots like dandelion, and burdock, are quite strong tasting. I put them sparingly in soups and stews with lots of carrots, parsnips, potatos, turnips, etc. otherwise it tastes more medicinal, then edible. roast roots, broil roots, bake roots. Sometimes you have to peel the outter root bark layers to get to the inside starches. Stalks of some plants are edible, but usually only in the spring, and usually only if peeled. Stir fry like bamboo shoots, eat raw. One important note sometimes not mentioned in plant books is that plants like lambsquarters, rhubarb, stinging nettles, sorrel, pigweed, etc. are quite good to eat but be sparing in your use of these especially the sorrel leaves, and rhubarb stalks, but it is best to do so only sparingly as all of these plants, and many wild greens have high concentrations of oxalic acid which does nasty things with calcium absorbsion potential in the human digestive tract. Eat them young is better (less then six inches tall) and after that only the top fresh leaves (up to a foot in height) then leave it alone-and even that is pushing it, for acid content, from what I read. do some reasearch for your area, it pays. happy pickin

-- roberto pokachin in B.C. (pokachinni@yahoo.com), February 07, 2002.