Gillian's Backyard Buffet
An invitation to lunch opens up a new adventure in eating wild veggies.
After filling a wheelbarrow with dandelions, I suddenly felt a pang of guilt. The leaves from all those dandelions could feed a village. I was throwing away lunch. My father's family evaded starvation during the Depression by frying up dandelion greens in bacon grease.
After boiling a few dandelion/sow thistle leaves for five minutes to take out the bitterness, I added them to some bacon, celery, and home grown onions and potatoes. My tongue told me more than anything what a delicacy this dish was, starving or not. And three of the ingredients came from my backyard.
At nearly 7000 feet elevation in Truckee, CA, my husband, Jeff, set up two raised beds and fenced off an area to accommodate a potato patch. In the raised beds, he grew, fairly successfully, the trifecta of tomatoes, garlic, and basil. A robust dill helped attract aphids away from the other plants. Harvest of all this bounty, however, proved meager. The learning curve steepened as our garden battled harsh sunlight and marauding deer and other critters.
When we moved to Minden, NV, Jeff started farming our acre by planting bare root fruit trees which only survived a couple of years. Â A cold frame gave us varying success with tomatoes, kale, chard, carrots, and beans. The most successful, of course, was the potato, onion, and garlic patch. Â We joked that what more do we need other than those three items alongside a locally grown steak and a picon, AKA the Nevada State Beverage.
To support his projects, he enrolled us in a club that specialized in residential food growing efforts. That's where we met Gillian and Ed. For years, these two have been living almost off-grid with a bank of solar panels, an EV, chickens, goats, and bees. While they grow some vegetables in a formal garden, Gillian loves to take advantage of Nature's produce department just outside her back door. She invited us to have lunch one day after a bit of foraging to supply the menu. I anticipated a lunch repast reminiscent of my dandelion dinner.
Here are some of the plants we picked:
Wild lettuce and sow thistle: good mixed in soups and stews because the leaves can be bitter.
Plantain: another good addition to salads and entrees, a bit bitter, but some people like that kick in their salad.
Purslane:Â The way to tell edible purslane from its poisonous look-alike, spurge, is to cut the stem. If white liquid oozes out, it's poisonous.
Lambs quarters grows everywhere on our acre, including the cold frame and wine barrels. It just blows in on the wind.
Once we gathered a bagful of our pickings, Gillian cooked up a tasty omelet with some of her chickens' eggs. While she had goats, I can't remember if she made cheese from their milk.
After our lunch outing, I looked at home for my own wild greens. The wind blows in the most amazing things. Literally, manna from Heaven. This encouraged me to use my own yearly harvest of wild goodies, many of which are better cooked with rice dishes, eggs, or soups and stews.
Mallow
I remembered seeing people in Israel gathering mallow in vacant lots, so I was thrilled to see it appearing in my garden. Another plentiful wild edible was mustard. In fact, Gillian told me that any member of the mustard family is edible. Check for a square stem on the plant to make sure it's a mustard of some kind.
Mustard
Mallow and mustard took hold of our backyard and supplied us with a winter's worth of hearty meals. I even washed and dried the leaves, and then packed them in freezer bags. They look a little haggard when you take them out of the freezer, but you're going to use them in a hot dish, right?
I became quite fanatic for a year or two, looking at the newly sprouted greens each spring, craving their blood-cleansing tonic much the same as Rapunzel's mother did shortly after birthing her. You may remember the story. She pleaded with her devoted husband to pick some of the greens growing by the witch's house. He was caught with a handful and paid the price by forfeiting his newborn daughter. Alas, Rapunzel still ended up in the clever suitor's arms despite the witch's attempt to protect her in a tower.
But I digress.
My ardor to explore the smorgasbord of wild food, I discovered another edible growing in the backyard. Mushrooms!
I spotted these mushrooms bursting out of our "well-watered" lawn. Should I or shouldn't I? That's a question any forager should ask when picking mushrooms. All my resources told me these were the same as the little white mushrooms you get in stores. Just be sure that bugs haven't crept inside the gills on the underside of the head. Good to know!
So, I gathered some and used them in that night's dinner. Obviously, they didn't kill us. Didn't even get sick. And no, we didn't hallucinate either, darn it.
Caveat: I ate a plateful of mushroom ravioli at a well-known Italian chain restaurant in Reno and spent that night purging … a lot! So even respected eateries can be misled.)
Over the years, we've curbed our enthusiasm for backyard sourcing of food. Lazy, I guess. My desire for vegetarian fare has always been low, however, especially after the restaurant mushroom incident. That said, this is our experiment in "outdoor" dining, so to speak. And I will always be grateful to Gillian and Ed for sending me on this delightful exploration of wild veggies.
Disclaimers:
Okay, here's where I insert a disclaimer/caveat: please do your own research. There is a lot of information about wild edibles on the Internet, in your local library, or bookstore. Also, check out local herbal healers, master gardeners, and foragers who can verify which plants are safe to eat. Plants do have toxins to protect them from predators … like us and other grazers. So be careful out there.
Another caveat is to be realistic about replacing the grocery store for a consistent, year-round food supply. Results depend heavily upon the conditions of your soils, water usage, seed sources, and most of all, the climate zone. It's a cinch to plant an abundant backyard food source in California, but you'll struggle in Nevada to grow anything. A very steep learning curve indeed.
If you'd like to give it a try, be careful where you forage. Along highways and industrial areas, even near the foundations of your own house, are undesirable places due to pollution leeching into the soil. If you know someone who already forages, invite them to guide you, complete with dinner.
Another disclaimer for whatever it's worth: be advised that while we succeeded in not getting ill from overeating wild food doesn't mean it won't happen to you. Gillian got a little too enthusiastic in her wild diet and became ill for a while. Too much of a good thing? So, due caution as well as moderation in all things.
Bon appetite!
All photos by Sue Cauhape.
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I just have two words for you
Yum. Yum.
Dandelion greens were dug up by us grandkids and cooked by our grandmother who ensured that no cooked dandelion went uneaten. It simply wasn’t worth the pain.