I've been eating sheep sorrel ("sour grass") with my family since I was a child, and it's one of the first edible salad greens my kids learned to recognize, in the wild. It's good for vitamin C, and delicious in salads, etc. Not safe to eat too much, as it can cause diarrhea, but really who would want to eat too much of something so sour, anyway? Still... as a condiment or mixed-salad ingredient, it's wonderful! I looked it up to see if it had any medicinal qualities, other than being a laxative and high in vitamin C, and found that it's used as both a diuretic and anti-inflammatory. Great! There's a great entry for it at Flora Health.
We have a surplus of sushi ingredients from Taliesin's birthday dinner (yesterday), so we thought we'd experiment with sourgrass sushi! It was delicious! The sourgrass punctuated the delicate rice and fish flavours very nicely!
Stuffed cheeks are a sure sign of enjoyment. :--)
For those interested in child-friendly chopsticks, this photo illustrates how we do it, with a little bit of rolled up foil or paper and an elastic band.
Now we think it would be a good idea to try a sushi meal made of wild seaweeds (can we even make Nori?!), wild plants, home-caught seafoods, and... something starchy that we can't think of just yet. Maybe cattail roots or shoots.
Maybe wild mushroom soup instead of miso?
(And what's with YouTube not understanding a portrait-oriented video? Hmph. So it's stretched.)
Mmmmm...
This is Tal's "seaweed taco":
... endless variety is available if only we allow ourselves to endlessly rejoice in and play with our food!
I am sometimes (thankfully less often as time goes by) asked how I expect my kids to learn anything when I'm not teaching them. Or how I can expect them ever to succeed in life with "no skills", and how can I stomach the guilt that must come with unschooling... etc. I used to defend myself because, quite frankly, I was scared. Recently I've stopped answering those questions, partly because people who ask such ridiculous questions rarely seem willing to open their minds enough to hear the answer, anyway, but also because I'm not scared, anymore. I have started to notice all the ways my kids are learning in everything we do, and with what joy and inspiration they compel themselves to learn "school skills" without my even encouraging them.
So today's Wild Food post is a celebration of all that happy, free learning. As I looked through the photos I kept noticing various "skills" appearing naturally. My only intentions, this day, were to get some fresh air, taste some yummy teas, and spend a bit of time with the kids and Opa. See what comes of having a good time ...
Gross Motor, Strength, & Agility: In other words, we hiked around a bunch, and the boys especially took great delight in teetering, leaping and cascading on the steep hill and stumps.
Biology, Observation & Classification: We went out and found Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Grand Fir, and Ponderosa Pine. The kids practised recognising various types of conifers, and spent quite a bit of concentrated time picking off all the needles, and depositing them into the buckets. Opa helped find a Grand Fir whose branches we could actually reach. Rhiannon was particularly excited about the long pine needles, and went to great lengths to reach and pick a whole heap of them, herself. Magic: We found this caterpillar happily munching away at some frozen, frost-coated blackberry leaves! We have no idea what it is, but we were all a little enchanted to find it living so happily in the cold winter!
Fine Motor Skills, Herbalism, Health, Cooking, and more Identification: Once inside (and after a bit of a play time) we sorted out the various needles into piles and talked about how healthy each type is, all while cutting up the leaves and putting a couple of tablespoonfuls of each into four little teapots. Then of course each of the four little teapots had water added, and we sat around waiting for them to steep for a few minutes, sniffing and comparing the smells.
Cedar: anti-viral, and high in vitamin C. Douglas Fir: antiseptic, antioxidant, vermifuge and antifungal. Grand Fir: diuretic, expectorant. Ponderosa Pine: anti-bacterial, and contains vitamin C.
Shamefully, I've lost my notes on these at the moment, and cannot describe more... suffice it to say that the medicinal qualities of these various needles (and others that we didn't harvest) are interesting and varied. It is usually better to pick the young needles, so we'll probably revisit this project in the spring, as more of a harvest-and-store, instead of just a taste-test. Also many tree barks, roots and cambiums are useful... also this will be explored, eventually! ... and let us not forget pine-needle baskets! :--)
Printing, Spelling, Division & Grouping: Eventually, we had to organize in such a way that we would each get to taste each type of tea, and remember what type it was, at the same time! Not so easy, splitting 4 types of tea between 5 people! We decided it would be easier if some of us shared cups, so we split into 3 groups, according to who had been sick recently and was most likely to pass germs on, and who might already have had the same illness...
We got 3 each of 4 types of cups, so that each type of tea could go into a particular cup. One of each type of cup was then labeled with the type of tea it would contain, and by that label we would know that all such cups contained the same type of tea. Phewf. Complicated? We nearly confused ourselves into forgetting which tea was which, but it all worked out in the end. Because of all the confusion I didn't even ask if any of the kids wanted to label the cups; I just did it quickly while we still knew what was what. But guess who was still busy copying out words onto extra labels, long after teatime was over... Rhiannon!
Tastebud Excercise: Time to taste! The teas were all interesting, but the biggest surprise was Douglas Fir: it smells like bland dust, or perhaps clay, but tastes wonderful! And the Ponderosa Pine was good too; even a bit citrus-y. What an adventure. We all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and plan to harvest large quantities of new Pine and Douglas Fir needles, in the spring.
I was raised on rabbits, and, although I never had to kill them, I saw my father do it. And all of us helped slaughter them. It wasn't always easy, and, because I often named our future meals, despite my parents' warnings, often brought many tears. But rabbits are delicious, and were certainly the most ethical meat I have ever consumed. The experience also gave me a life-long appreciation for the value of meat, and interest in biology. I want that for my children.
Of course, the truth is that it's hard to kill! So we're starting small. We got our ducks this summer, with the full declared intention of consuming their eggs and potential offspring.
And today we harvested slugs. Yes -- slugs. Banana slugs. We, the intrepid harvesters of all foods wild and edible, tromped out in the dark, heavy forest looking for slugs. And found one. One green one, and one black one, which we declined to eat, because our friend Sheila says they taste like rubber tires, and even just licking them raw can make your tongue numb. (Not appetizing, we thought.)
We were terribly disappointed in the lack of slugs, turned over many an old rotten log and stone in our search, and ended up bringing home a large collection of various grubs, worms, millipedes, and one beetle and very large centipede as a result. Luckily it started raining on the way home, and we did manage to harvest 4 slugs on the return walk: one for each of us!
Here are the kids, discussing our plans at a particularly devoid-of-slugs-moment in the woods (notice Rhiannon's horrible eye infection in this video! Poor Annie!):
Finally, we did get home with the slugs, and the following photos will tell the story: The Recipe: Deep-Fried Slugs and Green Tomatoes
Look at the slugs before you kill them. Say "poor slugs", and "I'm sorry, but I hope you taste yummy." Then pick off any large pieces of dirt.
Drop slugs into a bowl with ½ vinegar, ½ hot water. Soak for 10 minutes or so to kill them and remove slime.
Rinse, then boil for about 3 minutes; change water.
Rinse, and boil again, until they stop producing slime. Stir well to separate slime from slugs, then rinse thoroughly. Slit along ventral side of each slug, being careful not to slice the organs, inside, and pull out the digestive gland (in posterior of slug), and any other organs that come out easily.
Turn slug inside out, cut a small slice into the inside of the mantle and slip out the shell. (I am sure we could eat this, but in the interest of education we took them out to examine.)
Show your amazing gutted slug to Pappa:
Rinse slugs again, cut into bite-sized pieces, and bread. We used eggs, and cornflour with a bit of salt, cumin, savoury, and garlic mixed in. We breaded halved green cherry tomatoes in the same way.
Deep-fry, until nice and brown!
Eat!
They were like a cross between chicken and calamari. A bit like escargot, although I've never experienced deep-fried escargot, so I can't say, exactly! Certainly they were delicious, and the combination with green tomatoes was lovely! Acknowledgments:
Tim Pearce, Asst Curator and Head, section of Mollusks, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, provided crucial information to our pre-hunting research, via his comments on the Shell-Collecting Tribe: Tim advises removing the digestive gland before eating, cooking the slugs to kill any potential parasites, and soaking them in 1/2 vinegar, 1/2 water, to kill and remove slime. He also suggests changing the water repeatedly during boiling, to get rid of slime.
The Urban Pantheist also provides interesting information on banana slugs. The Latin name for our prey is Ariolimax columbianus.
A Note on Conservation:
The E-Fauna BC website lists Pacific Banana slugs as yellow-listed, which is very well indeed for our harvesting of them, but I do wonder if they might be threatened by other species, here. When I was young I remember lots of large banana slugs, and what we called "Army Slugs" (black-spotted banana slugs), and a similarly large amount of black Arion slugs. Now it seems the banana slugs are fewer, while we have an enormous increase in the number of red Arion slugs in the garden (in fact, I don't remember ever seeing them, as a child). This is just passing observation, but unfortunate if it's true that the introduced Arion slugs are pushing out our native mollusks. For this reason we won't be harvesting large quantities of banana slugs, and I intend to research whether or not Arion Rufus might cause tongue-numbness, as does the black Arion variety. If it turns out to be highly edible, we will certainly harvest them, instead!
Great Grandma's Box of Memories
We started the day with personal histories... that's a fancy way of saying we went through some old stuff of my grandmother's: Some letters from just after the turn of the (previous) century, written by my great grandfather to my great grandmother. They were very interesting, but the children bored of them after a while, of course. Then we looked at photos of the last 6 generations on my mother's side, including, of course, Tal and Rhiannon's own birth photos. Next week we'll be bringing these things in to the Learning Centre, to share with the older kids, there.
Wild Food Day: Burdock Root Tea
Later it was time for our Wild Food Day adventure. Apparently burdock root is best harvested in spring or autumn, so we thought it would be a good food to look for, today.
Taliesin first declared he didn't want to do wild food day, anymore, but since his preference was to hang out inside and do nothing, or just be inside doing.... well, nothing... Rhiannon and I trumped him and we went outside. By the time we reached the endless burdock field, his interest was revived, especially after I assured him we didn't have to dig them ALL up. The process is described best in photos:
Off to the field with a shovel, a bowl and a pinwheel!
Required: the weight of at least two on the shovel-handle.
Oof! There it is!
Washing the roots...
Peeling the roots...
Chopping up the roots...
Our friendly helpful kitchen-cow, dumping the roots...
The same kitchen cow, between milkings, pan-roasting the roots!
We did have some fresh burdock tea, but just can't show you every cup of tea we photograph; they're all so alike! The kids were quite disappointed, declaring that it tastes like nothing. "Just like water? We like water!" says Mama, trying to be optimistic. "No," they assured me, "not like water -- like nothing." Well it was a bit green, at least. The book we read claimed that burdock root tea is strong and robust, and needs no honey or milk. Well I tell you, if we had added honey or milk to this we would still have tasted nothing but honey and milk. I suspect that the roasting of the roots brings out that robust flavour; we'll try them, tomorrow. And why not, since we now have a nice little bowl of burdock root, roasted and toasted and waiting in the kitchen...
Stink Currants:
Stink currants are one of the indigenous berries, here, apparently eaten still by many native peoples in various manners (dried in cakes, or with oil, or more recently as jam), but totally ignored by the rest of us. But as we play in and around them, I can't help noticing the lovely sappy smell of the plants, though the berries really aren't very tasty. So I thought it was about time we tried them.
This was our first harvest, today. The look on Taliesin's face here is his reaction to the berries' fresh flavour: pretty bitter, but powerful! Rhiannon worked hardest of all, harvesting berries and holding her bucket out for those berries only I could reach.
Unfortunately, stink currants are harvested by other animals, too, and the berries are few and far between. I estimate we traveled more than a kilometer over logs and brush, through ferns, hollow stumps and a few devil's club plants, to find as many as we did. And in the end, after scouring all the plants on the property, and the various patches we know about in the woods, we had enough to make about 1/4 cup of jam.
Recipe: cover the berries with water, bring to boil and stir with chopstick until the mixture is a deep, thick purple, and the berries begin to fall apart. Add a bit of sugar, a teeny tiny bit of gelatin to help it set, and a very small amount of lemon juice. Stir stir stir, and then cool. The jam was really wonderful; even the children and our guests agreed. It tastes very full and has a lot of character. It's different, but not in an off-putting sort of way! Too bad we didn't manage to make more!
Licorice Fern:
On our stink currant journey, we of course found plenty of licorice fern growing on the mossy trees, and decided we should bring some home for tea. The sword ferns are at the moment all loosing their spores in great clouds on the forest, and we walked through many a brown fertile-haze, today. If you click this licorice fern-closeup you will see the little sori in great detail. They're so very tidy! The licorice roots are all drying up for the winter, so we harvested a few teapots worth of roots, for storage. On the way home Taliesin and Rhiannon chewed licorice root, and became so entranced with it that they began drifting off into faery. At one point I turned around and Tali was gone. I called a bit nervously (we had just passed the bones of a deer and some bird remains, which to me appeared to have been crunched by a cougar...), and heard a faint reply from the ferns: "hmmmm...".
"What are you doing? Where are you?"
"Having a little licorice root..." Here in this photo is Taliesin, the way I found him, drifted off into faery with a little freshly harvested licorice root in his mouth and the rest of the harvest in his hand.
Wild Food Teatime: When we finally made it home, (and after a good lunch, because after all, a kilometer-long bush-hike is hard work for 3-5 year olds), Taliesin cleaned the roots of their moss, then I gave them a good scrub, and we chopped them up for tea (sampling a little as we did...). Yes those are Tal's hands using the big sharp knife!
We had guests over, and they were very happy to join in our wild food day. Here's the spread: Homemade gluten-free toast with stink-currant jam and licorice-root tea! Lovely!!
I've been eating sheep sorrel ("sour grass") with my family since I was a child, and it's one of the first edible salad greens my kids learned to recognize, in the wild. It's good for vitamin C, and delicious in salads, etc. Not safe to eat too much, as it can cause diarrhea, but really who would want to eat too much of something so sour, anyway? Still... as a condiment or mixed-salad ingredient, it's wonderful! I looked it up to see if it had any medicinal qualities, 
other than being a laxative and high in vitamin C, and found that it's used as both a diuretic and anti-inflammatory. Great! There's a great entry for it at Flora Health.
For those interested in child-friendly chopsticks, this photo illustrates how we do it, with a little bit of rolled up foil or paper and an elastic band.
