When on Outward Bound in Hawaii (yes, don’t laugh) we regularly picked and ate wild guava fruits in the rainforests. YUM.
I want to find some pesticide-free dandelions. Maybe I need to go to my Grandmother’s 150 acre farm…
She has muscadines, too! May be an acquired taste, but oh-so-satisfying on a hot summer afternoon. She has crabapples and orchards that have gone wild. Lots of different berries, too. We’ve killed and eaten deer, frog, turtle, all kinds of fish, birds, etc. on her farm.
Frog is a little squicky to me, though. Those black veins or tendons are nasty looking, although it tastes good.
Also had gator tail, but we didn’t catch it/kill it.
I’ve always wanted to try fiddleheads, but just never got around to it and now I’m so afraid of pollution…
No one’s mentioned ramps yet? Those are soooo good. I love them roasted with chicken. Soon they’ll come into season here, soon! Just have to wait a little longer…
You need a LOT of big roots, so it’s not practical unless you’re clearing them from a large garden, or you’re growing them specially.
You scrub, peel and chop the roots (to quarter inch dice or so), then you spread them in a layer across a metal tray and bake them in the oven until they are dry/shrivelled and have turned mid brown, then you let them cool and blitz them in a food processor until they are little crumbs and return them to the oven until they are dark brown and crunchy (they may need turning/stirring periodically).
Then they can be used in place of filter coffee grounds.
The resulting beverage is really pretty good - it’s rounder and smoother in the mouth than coffee - in fact it feels slick when you drink it.
The taste is more like real coffee than any instant coffee I’ve tasted (I realise that this won’t come as much of a recommendation to many here). It does have a different range of flavour tones though - the bitterness is similar to coffee, but with a molasses/licorice twang, the body is more mellow and substantial than real coffee.
There’s certainly enough complexity and depth in the flavours to make it a worthwhile drink in its own right, even if not everybody will compare it favourably to coffee. I’ve also tried commercial dandelion coffee products and they were desperately bland and disappointing compared to the stuff I made at home.
There are two main disadvantages:
-It takes one hell of a stack of roots to make any amount of the stuff (at a guess I reckon probably a pound of roots would yield enough for four or five pots of beverage - the raw roots are mostly water by weight)
I tried them on the recommendation of folks in this thread and they really are pretty good. I used an egg-based batter, but I think next time I’ll just use simple one (maybe just beer and seasoned flour) - the egg-based batter was good, but it doesn’t stay crispy for long.
I just remembered eating a lot of clover flowers as a kid, too. They were pretty tasty. Do you think they would work battered and fried like the dandelions?
Mangetout - I was interested to read of the fried dandelion flowers. I’ve eaten the leaves in salad but not tried the flowers. My lawn is about 75% moss and 25% dandelions, so I should have a good crop.
The roasted dandelion root “coffee” intrigues me. Do you just clean the roots and roast them till they are dried up and crumbly, or what?
Hmmm…they might. But they’re sweeter, so they might benefit from a slightly sweetened batter and a sprinkle of powdered sugar and/or raspberry preserves. I might just have to try that!
(Elder flower pancakes are delish like that, by the way. Just dip the flower in pancake batter and pan fry like you would a pancake.)
Dandelion I usually go savory for: salt, pepper, garlic, oregano, basil, red pepper flakes or salt, pepper, garlic, cumin, chili powder or salt, pepper, onion powder, curry powder, turmeric.
Yeah, just wash scrub, chop and roast, then break up and roast again. You can’t really do the roasting all in one go because it either entails chopping finely to start (which is hard without accidentally making puree) or ending up with large chunks that are burnt on the outside and white in a middle.
The only thing I know I have eaten wild is raspberries. As a child between the ages of 9 and 12, my grandparents would take my sister and I to the reservoir and my grandfather would point out and feed us these tiny, super tasty raspberries. I kid you not when I say it ruined me for all other raspberries. Since then I’ve had a grand total of ONE experience of eating a raspberry that I enjoyed - and I was out with GingerOfTheNorth and made a comment about this experience and she pointed out wild raspberries right there on the side of the walk. YUM! Other than that, I give raspberries and raspberry flavored things a pass.
I’ve eaten or attempted to eat all sorts of things as a kid in the outdoors. I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that in thinking I was emulating Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House books I ate a few petals of wild poppies (in my memory, it certainly looks similar). I’d convinced myself and the little girl next door it was a buttercup. I’ve never seen a non-Princess Bride buttercup in my life.
I convinced another neighbor kid that those cactus fruits were prickly pears, and so we should pick them. That was a painful lesson for both of us. Between the “buttercups” and the “prickly pears” I learned not to presume I knew what was food just from a vague book description. I suspect she learned not to listen to neighbor kids who seemed like they were bullshitting, especially when pain might be involved.
Lord only knows what else I’ve attempted (or successfully) eaten that I should have. But wild raspberries are the only definitely edible wild thing I’ve eaten. I do wish I had more people around as a kid who would have been able to take obvious interest I had in locating wild food and help me learn and cultivate it. But my family has never been the outdoorsy types, and my own inclinations in that direction have resultingly been stunted. I’m interested, but incompetent. I’ll learn now, though. I hope.