Thanks, just made my first fruit leather. Wild plums aren’t ready so I used apple, rhubarb and cherry. Turned out great!
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Hey that’s cool Katie! Good job! 
I am looking forward to making some fruit leather this year too! I have some Concord grapes to juice tomorrow. I think I will save the pulp and run it through the food mill to remove skins and seeds. Then I can freeze it until more grapes are ready, or maybe I will do a blend later with apples, plums, blackberries, etc.
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Currently in croatia on vacation, where i have foraged probably close to 2 pounds of wild figs…they also have black elder fruiting
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Poke? Polk?
Either way, excellent mixed with other wild ‘greens’ foraged in the springtime.
(And I will deep fry poke stalks so long as they are young and tender, no matter the time of year…fried Okra, anyone?)
That experiment with poke berry wine…well, it was weak and turned to “poke berry vinegar”…but I still had a small sample of it and lived to tell.
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i treasure the wild mint i’ve moved to my garden.
i’ne grown all sorts of cultivated mints, which are ok for some culinary uses.
only wild mint makes great tea.
people don’t like it back east because its invasive in rainy areas.
you have to block it off, like horseradish if you don’t want it to spread.
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Just an addition: We live not terribly far from a Spring Creek without number of feeders. Today we picked watercress for soup, And wild mint for really, really good fresh mojitos from an ankle-deep stream…
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ok, it is that time of year: I am consoling myself over my dead persimmon trees with some wine made from wild plums picked last year (it’s not gritty, but hazy with fine sediment yet and really would have benefitted from a year of aging, but I tried it anyway…) and a colander full of garlic mustard I’m gonna sauté in a bit of oil…
I have never tried garlic mustard. But I picked whole bunch of dandelion and I am going to mixed with ground pork as filling of pot stickers.
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huh…I did store-bought dandelions a few times, I could see that being really good, and the bitter cutting the pork fattiness nicely.
I did a few sausages this fall (Kabanosy, Merguez, fake landjaeger soured w/ buttermilk instead of proper cultures) and I’ve seen some pretty awesome recipes for “ground meat stuff” that have admittedly left me excited. Plus I am sorely tempted to turn some garlic mustard, and perhaps wild watercress, into kimchi (or Chinese pickled mustard greens).
I hope you enjoyed the pear wine last year, Annie, the plum this evening is very good and I’m pretty much lust-eyeing the Superior, Toka, and Pipestone plum trees in my nursery now, thinking of putting them on a hill and coming back later for picking
I picked dandelion blossoms and deep fried them last week, tasted great, take something healthy and turn it into deep fried heaven, oh well
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I also pick a bunch of Artemisia argyi, Chinese mugwort’s tender green leafs and mix them with rice flour to make a spring food Qingtuan .
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is that picked wild, annie? Looks a lot like stuff I saw near the garlic mustard, which I thought looked like wild parsley or leaf celery at the time and had already noted that I should try to identify…
I planted and it grow like weeds. The leaf should have strong but pleasant smell similar to regular mugwort
good to know.
any suggestions for watercress? I have a spring creek that’s ankle deep that has probably a yard across in average of watercress, for a couple hundred yards of stream–I don’t want to strip it bare (and doubt I could) but it seems a waste not to utilize some of it…
Mark, I finally opened the bottle of pear wine you gave to me and shared with my families, my families all liked it. Thanks. I didn’t make any wine in 18. Without the cat controlling the yard, my grapes were picked by yellow jackets, and birds, and chipmunks, and squirrels, and…
Watercress is good in sandwich, salad, Eggdrop soup, and Cantonese makes great watercress tonic soup
Did you coat it with batter or just drop the whole dandelion flower in the hot oil?
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maybe i’ll have to drop another bottle, just planted the crosnes.
making a strawberry-basil lemonade wine right now for summer
Mark, if you drop another bottle, I trade you egg rolls. It is not the restaurant egg roll, this is real egg roll, sweet made with egg
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deal 