“Wildman” Steve Brill, who had an interest in healthful gourmet cooking, was out for a bike ride when he came across a group of ethnic Greek women dressed in black among the greenery in Cunningham Park, Queens. As he likes to tell it, “I asked them what they were doing but it was all Greek to me!” He went home with grape leaves, which he stuffed “and they were delicious.” When I met Brill, I thought in some ways he could be the spiritual son of Gibbons—he is quite the raconteur. Brimming with enthusiasm, he delivers his wisdom with a unique sense of humor. On the mullein plant (sometimes referred to as cowboy toilet paper), he has this to say on his website: “Women who were forbidden to use make-up for religious reasons rubbed the rough leaves of this rubefacient on their cheeks, to create a beautiful red flush. People who spend time in the woods are attracted to mullein’s large, velvety leaves when they run out of toilet paper, again creating a beautiful red flush on their cheeks.” He has been foraging and leading tours since 1982, has written several guidebooks and wild edible cookbooks, and has produced a master foraging app for mobile devices, “Wild Edibles Plus.”

At left, “Wildman” Steve Brill (image courtesy Steve Brill); at right, the spoils collected by a participant in one of Brill’s Central Park foraging tours (image credit: Fred Benenson).

On a recent tour with him on the Appalachian Trail in Pawling New York, I was surprised when two members of our group reported being accosted by an irate hiker who was not happy to see them digging up burdock plants. The familiar admonishment issued by many parks services, “take only pictures, leave only footprints,” needs to be revised. Many harvestable plants are actually invasive species. Picking endangers few.

The flora of the Appalachian Trail in New York. Image credit: Renee McGurk.

I would agree with Brill that nature is not a museum to be viewed from behind a velvet rope. Nothing gives you a greater sense of place and respect for nature than being able to gain sustenance from it. “I haven’t seen any danger to the environment from 31 years of foraging repeatedly in the same places with large groups… no decline in the dandelions, lamb’s quarters, burdock, sassafras, or chicken mushrooms anywhere we’ve been harvesting these renewable resources.” He recently led a record-breaking 81-person tour in New York’s Central Park. “The mowers will still be moving in to cut down the same ‘weeds’ we’d eaten. Of all the threats to the environment we’re facing, ecological harvesting of common weeds doesn’t even make the list.”

Many of the local foragers I interviewed and have met online (or in the woods) cite Wildman Steve Brill as the person who introduced them to collecting edible wild plants. Among them is Ava Chin. As a child, Chin remembers pulling up field garlic from her apartment courtyard in Queens. On her first walk with Brill in Central Park years later, she says, “Learning that so many of the ubiquitous weeds from my childhood were edible was a revelation.” Chin, who was going through personal difficulties at the time, found that foraging provided an antidote to her fears and sense of failure. “It provided insight into nature’s timing and cycles, and helped me to see the world as a place of beauty and abundance.” Now, in addition to being an English professor at the College of Staten Island CUNY, she writes about the wild edibles that grow in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene/Clinton Hill area as the Urban Forager for the local section of The New York Times. Field garlic was the first plant she profiled. You can find her recipes and learn about her foraging adventures in NYC and environs at foragergirl.com.

Field garlic. Image credits: Anna Kika and The Biodiversity Library.

Foraging is a matter of economic necessity in many parts of the world. Even in Europe people tend to know where and when to look for local wild foods like asparagus, but in the United States people are just starting to catch up. Wild foods have always been billed as healthy, but not until recently has it become known just how much more nutritious than cultivated foods they can be.

Jo Robinson’s new book, Eating on the Wild Side, recently excerpted in The New York Times, has created quite a buzz. The book isn’t about foraging for wild foods per se, but it is a guide to finding and using foods in the produce aisle that most resemble their wild counterparts. Robinson explains how we have unknowingly bred many of the nutritious qualities out of the vegetables and fruits we eat. Based on ten years of research and analysis, she compares and contrasts the nutritional profiles of wild plants and their cultivated cousins, like dandelion greens, which have seven times more phytonutrients than the “superfood” spinach. One could extrapolate that adding even small amounts of highly nutritious wild foods to your diet can have quite a substantial benefit.

This new information may make the latest wave of interest last longer than in the past. Steve Brill also credits the effect of information technology. Facebook groups like “Foraging for Everyone,” “Forager’s Unite!” and “Edible Wild Plants” provide forums where people can trade recipes and help each other identify plants. “People can communicate with each other, whether they’re preppers, vegans, freegans, environmentalists, science geeks, or parents with nature-hungry kids.” Ava Chin would also add to the mix foodies excited by recent culinary trends.

Beet and crab salad with purselane from New York City’s Print Restaurant.

Innovative Nordic cuisine has been inspiring the use of foraged foods in high-end restaurants. René Redzepi of Denmark’s Noma, voted best restaurant in the world for the past three years, may have started the culinary ball rolling by featuring items like deep fried moss, sea buckthorn leather, and wood sorrel granita on his menu. US restaurants that emphasize local ingredients are now increasingly adding wild foraged foods to their menus. Many even employ foragers or buy from full-time professional ones. Meghan Boledovich, a menu consultant and “urban forager” for Print Restaurant in New York City, procures chickweed, lamb’s quarters, and other wild foods from local farm distributors who now include them on their availability lists. Aside from their health benefits and the new spectrum of flavors they offer, they are the ultimate local food, and they’re also hyper-seasonal: “Some things can only be found for a week or two; they really give a sense of the place (terroir) and time to the diner,” says Meghan, who also notes that it can be challenging to translate to the customer what certain things are, but “luckily certain wild foods like ramps and purslane have become popular, so I think the baseline knowledge and curiosity is there.”

A White and Green Asparagus Pine dish served at Copenhagen’s famed restaurant Noma. Image credit: Sarah Ackerman.

If you’re interested in foraging, the free version of Wildman Steve Brill’s app, Wild Edibles, which covers the twenty most common backyard species, is a good place to start. You can pick up a guidebook, do research online, or join social network groups to find out more. But the best way to learn safely is to take a tour or class with a forager who has expertise in the plants of your area. Be patient, don’t try to learn everything at once, and never taste-test, as even a small bite of the wrong leaf can have you foraging at the emergency room, which isn’t nearly as fun as your local park or woodland.

Read Part I of our foraging series—Digging Deep: Foraging through History.

Discover the native vegetation of the Catskills with the help of these Catskill Trails Maps:

Lisa Kelsey is a Dutchess County, NY-based art director. Her radio shows “Stirring the Pot” on home cooking, and “Spice: The Final Frontier” on herbs and spices, can be heard on Pawling Public radio. pawlingpublicradio.org.

“A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was raised in the country and I wanted my children to have the benefit of a clean, natural environment as well—that was one of the major reasons my husband and I decided to relocate to the Hudson Valley from Manhattan. I spent my childhood wandering among widely spaced oaks, amid the scent of wild oat grass drying in the sun. The golden hills of northern California did not prepare me for the expanse of lush greenery that confronted me on walks in the woods near our new house in a watershed area of the Hudson Valley. Wherever I look, vegetation of all kinds seems to coil and climb and tower over everything. The vigorous growth of weeds in my garden, their ability to grow seemingly overnight, often makes me feel I am battling some kind of interplanetary spore invasion in a science fiction movie. I have jokingly said to my husband, if only we could just eat the weeds and forget about planting vegetables!

The lush, fertile hills of the Hudson Valley. Image credit: Robert Rodriguez, Jr.

All kidding aside, there are many edible (albeit uninvited) plants growing right in my backyard. I recently spotted a plant reminiscent of miner’s lettuce, whose round bright green leaves I recalled munching while hiking with a guide in the Pacific coastal forest. My young son grabbed a handful and, crushing the leaves in his tiny hands, announced that it was garlic. He was right about the scent—it was allium petiolata, or garlic mustard. It wasn’t miner’s lettuce, but it was edible. And so began my quest to pull that wild mass of green into focus by identifying the plants that grow around us, and more importantly, which ones we can eat.

A field of garlic mustard. Image credit: Flickr user Carsten aus Bonn.

Foraging for wild foods has become the latest extension of the “eat local” movement. People are scouring their backyards, nearby pastures or even urban parks for edible weeds, berries, and roots. It’s not a new activity but one of the oldest—older than civilization itself. As humans we spent the better part of 100,000 years as hunters and gatherers. Foraging is deeply embedded in our genes and it formed the primeval basis of our relationship to what grows around us. Exploiting nature’s bounty continued after the arrival of agriculture. In our area, Native Americans foraged wild foods to supplement their cultivated corn, squash, and beans. Acorns, sunflowers, plums, grapes, wild sweet potato, black walnuts and pokeweed, among many others, were gathered from the wild. Early settlers in New England foraged for berries similar to those they recognized from their homeland, but most of them probably weren’t putting cattails and acorns to good use. Sadly, with the pushing out of Native Americans, the heritage of wild food foraging was largely lost.

Various plants traditionally foraged by Native Americans in New England. Clockwise from top-left: the purple fruit of the pokeweed plant (image credit: Dennis Blythe); the flower of the wild sweet potato (image credit: Cody Hough); wild grapes (image credit: Tonreg); acorns (image credit: Focx Photography).

Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Last Rediscovered Manuscript, a collection of essays based on Henry David Thoreau’s observations of the fruit and nut trees, berries, and other plants growing wild near his home in Concord, Massachusetts, was published posthumously in 2001. In these pre-Civil War era writings, Thoreau was already lamenting the fact that our native huckleberries and wild apples were being neglected in favor of exotic imported fruits like bananas and pineapples. He pondered the spiritual nature of gathering local wild foods. “Do not think, then, that the fruits of New England are mean and insignificant while those of some foreign land are noble and memorable. Our own, whatever they may be, are far more important to us than any others can be,” Thoreau wrote. “They educate us and fit us to live here. Better for us is the wild strawberry than the pine-apple, the wild apple than the orange, the chestnut and pignut than the cocoa-nut and almond, and not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education.”

From left to right: Henry David Thoreau and Thoreau’s Cove at Walden, Concord, MA. Image credit: Library of Congress.

Thoreau would have been happy when the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s renewed interest in wild foods. This was greatly due to Euell Gibbons, an endearing storyteller who captured the imagination of a generation. His first book on foraging, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, became an instant best seller when it was published in 1962. But Gibbons was no longhaired idealist. He was born in Texas in 1911, less than 50 years after Thoreau died. He spent most of his childhood in the parched hills of New Mexico and learned about plants from his mother. At times during the Depression when his father couldn’t find work, Gibbons provided for his family by foraging in the hills for mushrooms, piñon nuts, and yellow prickly pear. He had only a sixth-grade education but continued to teach himself by reading nature guides in libraries, asking locals how they used wild foods and seeking out the knowledge of experts.

According to veteran forager and author John Kallas, that garlic mustard my son picked is one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed. It’s higher in fiber, beta carotene, vitamins C and E, and zinc than practically any other leafy green. There are lots of ways to use it, but I like to give it a whir in the food processor and make a nice pesto—it makes a peppery sandwich spread or you can toss it with pasta and fresh tomatoes.

Garlic Mustard and Walnut Pesto

Although garlic mustard has a nice peppery bite, I like to boost the garlic flavor by adding some garlic cloves, leaves, or scapes.

3 cups garlic mustard leaves, stems and seed pods (if any) removed, washed and drained well
3 cloves of garlic (or you can use chopped tender garlic scapes or leaves), chopped
1 cup walnuts
¾ cup olive oil or more for the consistency you prefer
½ cup grated Parmesan or Grana Padano cheese
Salt to taste

In a food processor, pulse garlic mustard leaves, walnuts, and cheese to make a paste. With the motor running, drizzle in the olive oil until the pesto reaches the desired consistency Add salt to taste and blend again.

Read Part II of our foraging series—A Walk on the Wild Side.

Discover the native vegetation of the Catskills with the help of these Catskill Trails Maps:

Lisa Kelsey is a Dutchess County, NY-based art director. Her radio shows “Stirring the Pot” on home cooking, and “Spice: The Final Frontier” on herbs and spices, can be heard on Pawling Public radio. pawlingpublicradio.org.

Two winters ago a friend was passing through New York on her way from Quebec and brought me a big can of maple syrup from the airport’s gift shop. Without a stack of pancakes in sight, I punctured the top of the can and drizzled it on a bit of yogurt and was overcome by its rich amber color, sweet depth of flavor and silky consistency. It was the first time I ever had real maple syrup.

Growing up in the rural foothills of North Carolina, far removed from the northeast (farther still from the cultural influences of the maple sugaring industry), I had been perfectly content in my ignorance to dress my pancakes with caramel-colored high fructose corn syrup poured from the flip-top kerchiefs of plastic plantation-era mammies.

So began my affaire de coeur with real maple syrup. Since the yearly sap harvest is drawing to a close, now seems like the perfect time to enjoy the fruits of all that labor while celebrating the history and versatility of this uniquely North American provision.

The Sugaring Process

The sugaring process (rendering sap into syrup) is labor-intensive to say the least. It all happens during a four- to six-week window during the sunny days of late winter known as Maple Sugaring Season. It is during this time that the season’s supply of maple syrup is harvested from the red, black and sugar maple trees of the greater Hudson Valley, New England and eastern Canada.

When daytime temperatures rise above 40 degrees but still fall to below freezing at night it creates a pressure fluctuation that forces sap up from the maple trees’ roots. Because such specific conditions are necessary to create that pressure, each sugaring season is unique in length and yield. There are only twenty or so prime sapping days between mid-February through early April. When the sap does flow freely, rousing the trees from winter dormancy and preparing them for spring’s reawakening, the trees are tapped and the collected sap is then boiled down into syrup.

Native Americans figured out this process long before the arrival of Europeans in the new world. An Iroquois legend tells about the clever wife of Chief Woksis and the accidental discovery of maple syrup.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

The story goes that Woksis left one morning on a hunting expedition, removing a tomahawk blade from the trunk of a tree where he’d flung it the day before. As the day progressed and the temperature rose, sap poured from the gash in the tree and into a vessel that happened to be sitting nearby. Later, the wife of the chief discovered the watery substance and decided to try boiling the evening’s meal in it in lieu of trekking further for water. Later that evening when Woksis returned from the hunt, he was enamored by the aroma of the rendering syrup from far away, and so began the tradition of maple sugaring.

Whether that happy accident actually took place we’ll never know. But we do know that French explorer Jacques Cartier observed Native Americans tapping maple trees in 1540 and there are written observations of the Native Americans’ sugaring process dating back to 1557. The earliest of these observations discuss how sap was held in a hollowed-out log of basswood and heated stones were used to evaporate the water.

The mechanics of the process have evolved immensely since those days but the basic tenets of production still hold true. Well into the 20th century sugar producers would punch a v-shaped gash into a maple tree, insert a wooden or metal spout and then hang a bucket to catch the sap.

Today this method has given way to more efficient and complex systems of plastic taps and tubing that carry sap from many trees to one central holding tank by relying on gravity.

Photo Credit: Cedervale Maple

After the sap is collected, its excess water must be boiled away. A gallon of syrup requires approximately 40 gallons of sap. Many syrup producers first use reverse-osmosis devices to remove the sap water without heat. This energy-efficient method enables approximately 75 percent of the water to be removed before any heat is introduced. Once the concentrate reaches about 66 percent sugar (as opposed to sap’s 2 percent), it is ready for filtering and bottling. (It can also be further processed into maple cream and maple candy — a favorite treat at your local farmer’s market.)

A Drizzle a Day…

Maple syrup is the definitive topping for flapjacks, french toast and waffles but it has a host of other uses in dishes both sweet and savory. One of my favorites is easy and delicious. I cut a butternut squash in half, hollow out the center where the seeds are, stick in some cloves and then pour maple syrup directly into the cavity. Roast it until the flesh is tender, take out the cloves and mash up the syrup-infused squash into a hearty and delectable side dish.

You can also substitute maple syrup for white sugar in many recipes. Because it has nutritionally significant amounts of manganese, zinc, calcium and potassium, maple syrup can make your next homemade dessert a little more healthy and guilt-free. Substitute ¾-cup of syrup for 1-cup sugar and reduce the liquid content of the recipe by three tablespoons for each cup used.

Hudson Made offers real maple syrup from Sugar Hill Farm in Pine Plains, NY. In addition to its annual maple production, the farm also produces responsibly raised Berkshire pork and Black Angus beef. Consider glazing your steak with maple syrup combined with a pinch of cayenne pepper for a sweet and spicy flavor combination. I’ve been known to drizzle it on popcorn. Or put a dash in my favorite cocktail. And on a rare occasion, I have been known to just take a swig, right from the bottle. Why not?

Click here to learn more about Sugar Hill Farm’s maple syrup.

Looking for the ultimate culinary gift set? Consider “The Flap Jack.”

Sloan Rollins is a freelance writer who contributes regularly to Hudson Made’s ecommerce site. His work has been seen in Time Out New York, and he is a music and theater critic for edgeonthenet.com. sloanrollins.com

But are you aware of the mystical feature of beeswax candles that lies in basic chemistry? Beeswax releases negative ions into the air, which subsequently attach themselves to the positive ions, which are housing airborne things like dust, mold and other toxins and allergens. These ions then fall to the ground and away from our noses. Magical!

Goodbye, allergens! Goodbye, stress! Feel calmed and cleansed with candles made from nature’s most perfect ingredient.

A truly autumnal ingredient, and one we will be featuring in our specially curated gift sets, is maple syrup. Today, we are exploring maple syrup grades: how they work and which one, if any, is the best.

Maple syrup is graded based on its density and translucency, falling into one of five different categories: Grade A Light Amber, Grade A Medium Amber, Grade A Dark Amber, Grade B and Commercial Grade.

photo by flickr user lacylouwho

The perceived hierarchy between Grade A and Grade B is false, it is simply a matter of preference, much like that of beer or wine varieties. Grade A is typically harvested toward the beginning of the season (the converted sugar in maple trees rises in the sap in the spring), and ranges from delicate to full-bodied flavor. Grade B is robust with rich undertones of caramel, making it ideal for cooking and baking.

Whichever your grade preference, if you are one of our northeastern neighbors take advantage of locally-produced maple syrup and it is sure to be delicious. Happy fall!

As far as healing goes, honey can be put on cuts or scalds and it will prevent bacteria from entering, as well as soothe the wound. It can also treat minor acne by killing the bacteria and healing the skin, making it a natural antiseptic. So much for Neosporin!

There are also variations between light and dark honeys. Dark honey is generally stronger in flavor and comes from the nectar of flowers such as buckwheat, and is stronger in antioxidants. Lighter honey, such as that from the nectar of clover and orange blossom is milder, and works best in tea. Honey can also be “single-flower” honey or will be called “wildflower” if it has come from multiple flower varieties.

On top of all this, honey is also delicious. Heat peeled and thinly sliced ginger with a strip of lemon rind, water and honey to a boil. Add lemon juice and tea bags to steep for a pot of nutritious tea, sure to give your immune system and energy level a boost!