Late summer at the BBG

There was actually less tornado damage than I was expecting, other than these guys:

But there were all manner of odd and spiky plants towering and lurching and flailing all over the garden.

This thing, for example, was wider than my wingspan.

I never knew that thistles blew out like this at the end of the season. Amazing.

Sweet Home Chicago

Sumac-ade

I took another foraging course with Leda Meredith in Prospect Park this weekend. There was a fair bit of overlap between what we found this week with the plants we talked about in June, but some new stuff too. Like sumac, the berries of which are covered with a water-soluble, deliciously acidic substance. When Leda did her 250-mile challenge, she used sumac as a substitute for lemon.

I wasn't sure what kind of proportion to go for, so I put my handful of berries into a cereal bowl of cool water and swished and rubbed them until the berries were tasteless.
There was a fair bit of leaf matter and whatnot along for the ride, so I strained it through cheesecloth into a glass.
It tasted like water with the juice of about half a lemon added, roughly that degree of tartness. The flavor was pretty comparable, actually. I don't know that I would have questioned it if you had told me that's what it was, but since I did know, I'd say that the flavor was ever so slightly darker than lemon. A teeny bit musky. Not quite as sunshiney. Delicious. I liked it unsweetened, but I can see where adding a little honey or maple syrup would be swell. And there are a lot of interesting cocktail possibilities.

That's one thing I really like about playing with wild foods: getting to try things that aren't commercially available. We were talking about that on Saturday, in the context that acorn flour is so fantastically time-consuming to make happen that it will pretty much never be available for purchase, so if you want to know what it tastes like, you have to do the multiple boils with many changes of water and peeling and grinding and drying yourself. I *do* want to know what it tastes like, though word is that this summer has been too dry for a good acorn harvest. I'm thinking acorn crepes when I get around to this someday; you only need a cup of flour and don't have to worry about them not rising. In the meantime, I am super psyched for the October session: mushrooms and nuts.

Prospect Park foraging

This past weekend, I took a fantastic foraging tour of Prospect Park with Leda Meredith. She shares information in a very low-key, effective manner that's more like taking a walk with a very knowledgeable friend than the spectacle of shtick that another (also knowledgeable, harder to take) local foraging educator puts on. Plus, in a move I was extremely charmed by, she brought a snack for everyone to share at the end of the tour that used some of the plants we'd just talked about, a dip with daylilies and peppergrass. I'd highly recommend one of her future tours if you can make it, or either of her books.
Here she is, showing off some wood sorrel. This is a plant I have a soft spot for, since I used to pull it out of our lawn to munch on when I was a kid. (How I knew to do this, I have genuinely no idea.)
I have several pages of notes in the back of my Moleskine of the dozens of plants we found and talked about, but the highlights for me were:

• Goutweed, the leaves of which have an appealing herbal-celery scent and flavor. I can see myself throwing a handful in the pot when I make stock.

• Sassafrass, the roots of which I've used to experiment with making homemade root beer (medium success; the flavor was right, but I didn't brew it strong enough). I didn't realize that the leaves, dried and blitzed in a coffee grinder, make filé powder, the traditional thickener for gumbo. I've never made gumbo, but that's not to say I never will.

• Elderflower blossoms. I have a real fondness for St. Germain and most elderflower-scented and -flavored things, so being able to identify and collect it for myself is splendid. I started a batch of Leda's elderflower champagne that night and want to make a few bottles of elderflower-infused simple syrup for using in summer cocktails.

• Mugwort, which can be used as a seasoning or tea. Or, since it has muscle relaxing properties, steeped into a bath. I made a cup of mugwort tea Saturday night that was ... vaguely palatable, especially once I added some honey. I like the way the raw plant smells, but once it sat in the hot water for a few minutes, it had a hint of a slimy-greens-left-too-long-in-the-crisper scent that I find off-putting. It's an invasive weed and Leda said that the roots exude a substance that discourages other plants from growing nearby, which is fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint, but kind of terrifying, especially since once I knew to look for it, I saw it freaking everywhere in the park.

• Juneberries, which were one of my favorite discoveries of the day. They're delicious, like slightly milder blueberries, and have seeds that taste like almonds. And holy! crap! I just googled "juneberry cyanide" to see if that's where the flavor comes from (it is, but not enough to be an issue) and learned that juneberries are the same as saskatoon berries, which I've read about as being a great delicacy in, um, places closer to Saskatoon than I currently am and had filed them away on the list of Things I Must Eat Someday But Which I Cannot Get in New York, Like Mangosteens.And here they are, literally right in what might as well be my backyard. Color me gobsmacked.

• Chokecherries, which are awfully pretty, all glossy and blue-black. I really like the flavor too, sort of a cross between cherry and grapefruit, though you might need an affinity for sour things to eat more than one out of hand.

I do have an affinity for sour things, but I wanted to play with them a little more. I made a syrup with these by boiling a cup of the fruit with a cup of water and 3 T sugar for probably longer than I should have — kept waiting for them to burst like cranberries, but they never did — then pushing as much liquid as possible through a fine sieve. It was a fair bit of effort for not much syrup, but it was tasty mixed into some seltzer and drizzled over a bit of ice cream. Very similar in flavor and consistency to pomegranate molasses, which I love. I also happen to have a large bottle of it in my kitchen already, but this would make a handy locavore substitution, if one was looking for that.

I think the most amazing thing for me though (up until a few minutes ago — high five saskatoon berries!) was learning that many parts of the milkweed plant are edible. I grew up with milkweed plants everywhere. We made Christmas ornaments out of the dried-out pods in elementary school. I remember trying to make glue out of the sticky sap. When I learned to spin, I embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful milkweed-floss-spinning endeavor (I have enough experience at this point to know that the problem was that I was trying to spin it on the wheel like wool; treating it like cotton might work, especially with an ultralight spindle). Learning that I could have been eating it all along blew. my. mind. There weren't very many of them that hadn't flowered yet, at least in the part of the park where I was, and I didn't want to take more than one bud cluster from each, so I just brought a few home with me to test out.

Leda had said to treat them like broccoli, so I browned them in a little butter and sprinkled them with salt and enjoyed every bite. I described them to a friend earlier today as a bit muskier tasting than broccoli, almost like a cross between broccoli and an artichoke.

Seriously delicious. And by happy coincidence, I'm heading upstate this weekend, far enough north that they're a little behind Brooklyn in the growing cycle. There's a fair bit of marshy wetland near where my mom lives and I have a sneaking suspicion that she'll get as much of a kick out of eating milkweed as I did.

Surprise!

I was walking home last night when something caught my eye:
This is the back of a billboard that faces out onto Flatbush Avenue, which for some reason is covered with an illustration of what I'm pretty sure is New York Harbor in what I'm randomly guess-stabbing is the 18th century. I would love to see it more clearly, but since it's on the back of a billboard that can only be seen from part of the block of Park Place between 6th and 7th Avenues, I'm not sure I'll be able to get a better look.

Needless to say, I was *delighted* by my discovery and very, very curious about the story behind it. Who? Why? When? How? Anyone know?

BBG

There's something that feels just a smidge pathetic about reporting on a weekend when you're much closer to the next weekend than the one being reported, but here we are anyway. This past weekend at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I took a little detour into the native flora section, with cool stuff like tree-sized rhododendrons:
and weird, spiky grasses.
But the main draw was the rose garden, which was full to bursting with roses at their peak. Going back through my photos, I learned that I really like somewhat unusually shaped blossoms...

...and anything either multi-colored or orange. The orange was a surprise, I have to say. Not a huge fan generally, but I do love orange roses.

And anytime there's a bee on a flower, it's an automatic win as far as I'm concerned.

Oh, right. THIS happened.

Monday flowers

I wasn't sure I was going to make it to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden this weekend because it was supposed to rain pretty heavily Saturday morning during their free hours. I was bummed since I had missed it last weekend (out of town for work) and will miss it again this weekend (going to visit my parents), and I knew the bluebells were blooming and I'm crazy about them. Happily, I did end up taking a quick walk through because it actually did cut off a corner to walk through the garden from Eastern Parkway over to Washington Ave. and was not disappointed.

I love the bluebells.

But there was plenty of other good stuff to see too, like this gorgeous, all-over-the-place, cottage-garden-type arrangement of rich purple and pink and white.

It started raining while I was in there, so I had the pleasure of seeing these sodden peonies and roses, sparkling with raindrops and especially fragrant in the cool, damp air.

Monday flower report

I have a feeling this is going to be a regular thing around here, this posting of photos on Monday of what I saw at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden over the weekend. I went Saturday morning hoping for lilacs and was not disappointed.

Screw Disneyworld. This is the happiest place on Earth.

But I hadn't realized the peonies, which I adored, would be blooming too.

Nor that the tulip garden had such a varied and stunning range of blooms (and fans).

I crossed a part of the lawn I hadn't been on before and saw this set-up from a distance. The part of my subconscious mind that believes in magic was all, 'oh, that must be the mailbox for whoever lives in that tree,' before my rational mind caught up and was like, 'DUH, brain. They would just leave the mail at the front gate.'
(The actual purpose that little stump-on-a-post serves is so prosaic and antithetical to anything approaching magic that I can't even bring myself to type it out.)