Asparagus hunting!

By now, my kids know quite well that if we go hiking (or tiyuling) in February, I am most likely going to start searching for the elusive favorite plant of foragers, asparagus.

Yes, you can forage asparagus, especially in the Galil. I haven't found any in the Golan yet, but I have found plenty in a variety of places in the Galil.

staring into an asparagus patch

It takes a lot of looking. I stared at a particularly large patch of asparagus for a good 30 seconds before discerning those new small shoots that are still edible!

Asparagus is really only edible if you find shoots that are young. If you wait too long, they get woody and tasteless and even thorny. Not so good.
But if you catch them at the right time - you'll find gorgeous shoots of varying thicknesses, that are very tasty!

In my experience, asparagus patches that are right next to the beaten path are nearly always picked clean of new shoots by the time I find them, but if you're willing to go off the path even just a few feet, you can find some!

we found asparagus!

You'll recognize an asparagus patch by it's thorny overgrowth. Asparagus shoots that are not picked when young will keep growing and will send out offshoots which will open up into a very fine thorny foliage. So look for those. And then peer closer to the ground, at the edges or in the middle, if it's growing around a tree, and look for those gorgeous asparagus shoots!





Once you've found them, you'll know they are still tasty because you can just simply break them off with nearly no effort.

My kids tend to get annoyed with me, though, as my asparagus hunting seriously slows down our outings. But, well, they will just have to put up with it once a year in February!

I hope you find some too!

p.s. if you like the "bandana visors" my daughter and I are wearing the picture above, I still have some for sale. Please email me at ester@kosherfrugal.com for color availability and pricing information!

Suburban Harvest

I'm in the middle of this (mostly) pantry challenge week, and what I love most about it is that we are managing just fine. Which means my house was better stocked than I had realized.
(Well, we did buy some bananas and 1 kg of carrots)

So we are getting closer to the end of the week, and I KNOW that I have to pick up a few things on Friday. But I'm really loving not having my bank account depleted. And that got me thinking more about harvesting...

So I was out walking...

 

I came across a couple of large bushes with fruit on them that look like not yet ripe raspberries. Do raspberries grow around here? I'd love to take the kids to pick some when they ripen, if they ARE really raspberries!

And as my girls and I walked home from their dance and gymnastics classes, we happened upon a crate of red peppers in a driveway (remember the people who just put "spare" produce in their driveway? They've been putting stuff out in smaller quantities, and with less frequency, so I think they are trying to rein in their overbuying.)... I took a whole bunch, as I know that stuff just rots there if I don't! So now we have lots of red peppers! (They look like "sug bet" peppers, but I really am not picky about that!)

 

And lastly, as we walked up our walkway, I remembered our almond tree. I'm wondering how we can tell if our almonds are the sweet kind, and when they are usually harvested. And how we would know when to harvest them?

Foraged Greens in My Soup

Tonight's supper was a little last minute...

I was out in the back with the kids this afternoon and they had this desire to weed the yard (and the area right behind our yard leading out to the field). So we pulled up lots of milk thistle, and a bunch of dead branches, and picked some mallow too. The milk thistle got a taste of my scissors as we collected it - so much easier to take the thorns off the leaves BEFORE bringing them into the house...

(While we were out there, we discovered a scraggly looking prickly-pear cactus that had been hidden behind a bunch of dead branches. Time to clear out  that area - maybe we'll be able to nurse that cactus back to health? And enjoy the fruit at some point?)

So, I washed, checked, and chopped those greens, then wilted them in my cast iron skillet. Then I stared at them... Once wilted, a whole bunch of greens doesn't look like so much food...

Here's what I made with them:

1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, diced
3 large potatoes, diced
cook the above in a soup pot, with olive oil, till browning and fragrant.
Add water, soup stock, spices to taste (I only used salt and pepper).
Bring to a boil.
Add wilted greens.
Lower flame, and simmer about 10-15 min.
Serve hot with some croutons!

That was our yummy, if slightly too peppery, soup tonight. A few of the kids EVEN asked for seconds. Sounds like this recipe is a keeper!!

Wild Greens, Butternut Squash, and Barley

My kids were so excited to see lots of wood sorrell and mallow growing out behind our house, and there is still a TON of milk thistle! (That milk thistle is really hardy and spreads really quickly...) So I took my scissors out, and gathered some milk thistle, trimming off the thorns, while they gathered up the mallow and wood sorrel...
This was the beginning of tonight's meal...

Here's what I did:

Heat olive oil in a pot (I used a hard-anodized pot this time)
Chop and reduce all your wild greens (we gathered  a large amount - probably about 5 cupfuls after washing and chopping) in the hot pot, stirring frequently.
Add: 1-2 diced onions, 1 small diced butternut squash, 2 diced potatoes, 3 diced carrots
Stir frequently, cooking for about 10 min.
Add barley (sorted, rinsed) and soup stock to the pot. (I added about 3/4 - 1 cup)
Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce the heat and simmer for about 45 min - 1 hr.
Season to taste

I served apple muffins on the side...

Tuesday, Jan 17, 2012

It got busy here, but I need to make sure I have a supper plan - so I'll quickly write it down!

We were really intrigued by the milk thistle growing out back, and after some experimenting and research, I decided to use it for supper...

We have a really large patch of this growing out behind our house!

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And, those beans that I cooked overnight... those were supposed to be for supper tonight, not prepared simply, but rather turned into attempt #2 in my hunt for the perfect vegetarian meatballs!

So, it turned into an afternoon of  dicing, pureeing, checking greens for bugs, pulling little thorns out of my fingers, chopping, sauteeing...

Here's the menu:

Whole wheat spaghetti with black bean vegetarian meatballs and tomato sauce (recipe for meatballs not perfected yet, sorry! But they were good and this time they actually held their shape. SOON, I will share my recipe. Next batch I will actually record what I did, ok?)

Milk thistle and feta cheese roll (This involved a whole bunch of steps. 1. Forage for tender milk thistle leaves. 2. get all the thorns out of your fingers. 3. soak and check said leaves. 4 chop them (you can leave the thorns on if you'll be cooking the leaves, they soften when cooking and you won't notice them there). 5. Cook milk thistle leaves with onions, till the milk thistle is a really dark green and looks like spinach. 6. Spread the milk thistle and onion mixture on puff pastry, add feta cheese, and season to taste. 7. Roll up puff pastry. 8. Bake.

This took me so much time, but all was delicious!