Your backyard vegetable garden may be weeks away from its first harvest. But if youâre game to travel and work for your salad, an edible plant party awaits in local woodlands.
In these early weeks of spring, wild greens, shoots and leaves are strutting their stuff, a veritable cornucopia waiting to be foraged. With foraging comes a caveat, however: To get the goods, you need to know where to go and how to safely (and sustainably) harvest.
To better understand local wildness, I sought the counsel of Elisabeth Weaver and Alex Wenger, two Lancaster foragers who share a love for native plants and their role in our diets.
5 local plants to safely forage and cook this spring lancasterfarming.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lancasterfarming.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In Latin, she goes by
Urtica dioica, but you may know her as stinging nettle. The word stinging can be a bit of a turnoff, especially in the kitchen.
I urge you to get over it, as I did more than 20 years ago, because the gastronomic perks far outweigh this temporary obstacle. Nettles make fabulous pesto.Â
The sting (more like a mild irritation)Â is a thing only when the leaves are raw. A pair of disposable gloves will keep the invisible stinging hairs at bay, and once the nettles are cooked, the sting disappears. Poof, goodbye.Â
A perennial herb that grows wild in woodlands and along rivers and streams, nettles are among the first edible signs of spring. They are exceptionally nutrient dense, packing fiber, protein, iron and calcium, to name a few, plus disease-fighting antioxidants in the form of carotenoids. They offer antihistamine and anti-inflammatory support, which makes them great food during seasonal allergy season. (And it bears repeating they make f
PM Dining Critic Hal B. Klein is celebrating six recent sandwich triumphs.
December 23, 2020
PHOTOS BY HAL B. KLEIN
I hadn’t intended to write a sandwich round-up but I’m in a groove. Sandwiches have been my go-to takeout lunch for the past two weeks.
Portable by design, many sandwiches are built to hold a few hours. Some even get better as they sit, making them easy to take to wherever you’re going. Hot sandwiches almost always are better right away, but, since they require nothing other than a napkin (restaurant operators, please don’t forget extra napkins for your messier sandwiches), you can eat them in your car, in a nearby park or walking through side streets on a snowy afternoon, all of which you can do even in the depths of winter. On top of that, sandwiches, generally, are affordable, making them a terrific way to regularly support local restaurants without breaking the bank.