fiddlehead ferns
This post is submitted to Fight Back Fridays and the No GMO Food Challenge Blog Carnival. Eating wild foods takes me out of the industrial food system, and I won’t be eating any GMO foods. I like that!
Eating fresh sustainable produce and grass fed beef feels good. I’m getting superior nutrition because of the way the food is grown, and I’m supporting farmers who are good stewards to this earth so that nutritious food may grow year after year. One step further is wild food, so long as it is foraged in areas away from pollution (don’t forage along the roadside – car exhaust) and the food is harvested/hunted in a sustainable manner, so new generations can be gathered year after year.
I recently purchased a bunch of wild foods: morels, fiddlehead ferns, wild arugula, nettles, ramps and dandelions. A lot of these were new foods to me.
Morels are a kind of wild mushroom. As I discovered, they have a rich and powerful flavor that reminded me of a perfectly cooked steak. I’ll be eating morels again for sure.
Fiddlehead ferns are the top portion of a young wild fern. When they are young and growing, they are curled up and look like the end of a violin. They taste fresh and green and woodsy. People describe them as being similar to asparagus.
Wild arugula is just like cultivated arugula – good cooked or raw. A little spicy and quite good.
Nettles, as I described in a previous post featuring them, are green leafy vegetables with a flavor not unlike spinach or kale or some mixture of green leafy vegetables. They are a bit prickly, so you need to boil them before eating.
Ramps are a member of the Alliaceae family – the same family that gives us the onions, leeks, garlics and chives. They grow wild in many places and are so popular in Quebec that there is a limit on how many you can collect, so as to prevent them from being over harvested. They taste somewhere between a leek and a garlic, and are completely edible.
Dandelion greens can be eaten raw or cooked, but they begin to get bitter as they get older. Best to eat these young and fresh.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with all of these, it being my first time cooking many of them. I decided to saute all but the nettles (nettles weren’t included at all in this dish) and toss them with some pasta and lemon and topped with Parmesan cheese and another drizzle of olive oil. It was delicious, though I realized at once that I could have easily made the morels and fiddleheads the star of the show. In fact, I wouldn’t have objected to a plate filled with sauteed morels and little else! Being my first time cooking most of these, it was a lesson in preparation as well as taste.
If you decide to go for any of these wild foods I’ve mentioned, a few tips: