Recipe: “Forest Bars”

Breaking news! There are candy bars in Nature! Yes, yummy, indulgent candy bars, growing right on the trees!

Maybe not quite….

These are based on all the different fruit and nut “paleo” energy bars you commonly find at the the grocery store. They’re amazingly simple to make and great snack for everyone!

For the base, we also used flour made from mesquite pods. Mesquites, for better or worse, are quite prolific here in Bryan, Texas, but their fruit are an amazing (and delicious!) food source. The other ingredients are flexible; you can use whatever fruit or nut you’d like. For us, we had a great blackberry harvest earlier this Spring, and we still have a lot of pecans left over from last Fall. You could also use grapes or strawberries instead, or almonds or other store-bought nuts too though.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup mesquite flour
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1/4 cup raisins
• 1/2 – 1 cup blackberries (flexible, depending on size, juiciness or if frozen)

First chop or break up the pecans. You can do this by hand or in a food processor. Next add all the ingredients into said processor. Pulse until the whole mixture is starting to pull away from the sides. If it doesn’t seem to be coming together very well, you can add some more berries or 1 tbsp. of water. In the end, the mixture should be very dense and not too moist. Remove it with a spatula from the processor and push it into an oiled square pan. Last, cover it with wax paper and refrigerate for 30 minutes. When they’re done, you can wrap individual portions or just pull some out whenever you’re hungry!

For more information on when, and where, you can find your own haul of local, wild blackberries, and what to do with ’em, check out their information page here! For information on making mesquite flour, and when and where to find mesquite trees, click here!

Recipe: Acorn Pot Pie

I love pot pie. It is a meal unto itself. Its an amazing way to combine so many different yummy ingredients into a single, breaded, delicious, dish.

We make a lot of different breads using mesquite, acorn and dock flours, and cobbler and crackers as well. So it was only a matter of time before we thought of making a pot pie. For the crust, though, we’d obviously use acorn flour, as mesquite flour is so honey-sweet and dock flour doesn’t cohere very well. We filled it with lots of different wild veggies we picked: purslane, curly dock and amaranth leaves and onions and garlic. We also added hard boiled eggs, turkey, and some sweet potato. You could leave the eggs out and use more veggies, and you could substitute another meat for the turkey, or leave it out as well.

We lightly sauteed all the veggies together before putting them into the pie, but you could also omit that if you wanted them to have a fresher taste. Additionally, we didn’t make a gravy or sauce to incorporate into the pie either; we just forgot to. However, while ours was delicious, gravy is always good!

Ingredients:

• 2 – 3 cups acorn flour (depending on how much veggies and/or meat is included)
• 1/2 stick of butter
• 1 egg
• turkey or other meat (optional)
• sauteed/steamed purslane, curly dock, amaranth, onions, garlic or other veggies
• 4 – 6 hard boiled eggs (optional)

First, if you’re so inclined, hard boil some eggs to include in your pie. Next, mix the first three ingredients together with a pastry cutter or fork until well incorporated and chill for 10 minutes. Take 2/3 of this and press into a greased pie pan. Saute the purslane and onion and garlic with oil. Steam the curly dock and amaranth leaves with oil as well.

Heat your oven to 350 degrees.

In layers, add onion, garlic, greens, purslane, eggs and turkey to the pie. Pour your gravy, one cups worth, over the top of this mixture. Take the remaining dough and roll out between two sheets of wax paper. Delicately place over the top of the pie and bake the whole thing in the oven, at 350 degrees, for about 25, 30 minutes or until starting to brown.

Acorn flour naturally has a darker cast after baking, so no need to fret about it being burned! For information on making acorn flour, or what type of acorns to pick and when, click here. For info on finding wild veggies like purslane, amaranth and wild onion, follow the links to their plant pages.

Enjoy!

Recipe: Mesquite flour

So, making mesquite flour is probably the easiest flour to make. Also, mesquite trees are rather over-abundant in this part of Texas, and each tree can produce hundreds of beans.  So they’re not hard to find, nor will anyone begrudge you taking them. You may actually be doing someone a favor!

Mesquite beans have a starchy pith inside that tastes similar to sweet honey or molasses. It’s got a lot of fructose as well as protein, so it can provide energy and be quite filling!

Take your ripe, dry beans and simply snap them up into smaller pieces and toss them into a blender or other grinder.

Grind them up as you would a bunch of ice; pulsing until all the pieces are ground. Use a mesh sieve to sift out the finely ground flour from the chaff of the outer pods and the stone hard seeds. You can either pour this remnant back into the blender to try and get more flour out of it, or you can simply toss it in the compost pile.

There’s a wide variety of recipes you can make using mesquite beans, from pancakes and pie crusts to bread AND jelly! Make sure any beans you gather are ripe and dry (meaning they pull off the tree with no effort and can SNAP in half) and don’t have any black or dark stuff growing on them. In really wet years, in places where it’s humid (like Bryan/College Station), the rain and the bugs can combine to ruin a mesquite harvest. Lucky for us, those seem to be the years when the beautyberries THRIVE!

But that’s another recipe.

Garden Update: Rewilding

So it’s been a while since I updated about our wild garden. When I’d last mentioned it, we’d run into a set-back, but this past Summer has seen it really take off.

For wild plants and seeds, the process of over-wintering is a crucial step in preparing them for germination in the Spring. Additionally, we found that, by far the easiest step to take, was to work with wild volunteers that were already appearing in our garden! Curled dock (Rumex crispus), wild amaranth (Amaranthus spp.), mustang grape (Vitis mustangensis), and blackberry (Rubus spp.) have all shown up and we’ve nurtured and encouraged them as best we can.

young dock sprouts

dock maturing in the late sun

Young Amaranth growing

full leaves and seeds!

ready for picking!

placing grapes on trellis

grape inspector

grapes growing on trellis

blackberries…

blackberries gone wild!

We have had a lot of success this past year seeing a lot of things started from seed or transplantings as well! We found some purslane (Portulaca oleracea) growing, and since it’s such a wonderful, delicious vegetable, we took a couple cuttings and stuck them in, of all places, an old wicker papasan chair we had found, and it went bananas!

Purslane is a succulent, and can be readily propagated by taking cuttings during its growing season, similar to cacti. It loves to thrive in heat and humidity, when all other plants, wild or domestic, are wilting into Fall.

We were also able to extend the amount of time we had with the amaranth this Summer, simply because we kept introducing its seed into new places! Turns out amaranth seed, like many wild seeds, don’t need much encouragement, if anything. We also grew a rather prolonged crop of tomatoes, wild basil, and even managed to have some chocolate mint for a time.

Curly dock seed

The effect restoring all these native species has had on the rest of the ecosystem around us has been inspiring to see as well! From tree frogs, fireflies, garden spiders and butterflies to skinks, opossums, bats and mourning doves; we’ve really enjoyed seeing the positive impact we’re having on the world around us!

 

Even though native plants don’t need much TLC, it’s been hard working restoring and reintroducing all these different species to our yard. For that, we’ve been really grateful to have the help of the hardest working grub in the garden.

I feel really happy about the experiences our Luna is getting to have here, because it’s those kind of experiences which can really make a difference in a kid’s life. Seeing where their food really comes from, seeing and touching the earth and the land around them, learning how things change and grow; seeing Life. All too often kids don’t get those kind of lessons today, but that’s something we can change. Wild plants are available all around us, even in a large city like Houston or Dallas. Even if we live in apartments or duplexes, people are learning how they can bring some plants, some greenery, some Nature back into their lives.

No, we can’t change the world overnight, but we can make a difference each day, with each seed, each plant, each child. And, we’re finding, that’s all it takes.

Midsummer Madness

This week past we finally had our big Midsummer’s Eve party. This time of year we celebrate our independence and love for life and all that we see Nature providing all around us.

Faces were painted, health was drunk, music was danced to.

Earlier that day, we’d harvested the wild grapes ripening in our neighborhood. I guess this was the real impetus behind our celebrations….

We’d spent the past month planting our gardens and cultivating the wild species that had offered to grow in our home. From laying out a new patio, to building a trellis for our wild blackberries and grapes and native passionvine, to planting beds for tomatoes, squash, and native wildflowers to caring for wild stands of amaranth and curled dock, we’ve worked with what our home has given us and nurtured it into a thriving environment.

Garden help

grapes growing on trellis

dock maturing in the late sun

We’ve actually seen all kinds of strange and wondrous creatures make themselves at home in our backyard since creating this magical space: tree frogs, giant spiders, owls, voles, opossums, doves, lizards and strange, hoppy bugs.

Curly dock seed

We occasionally see the wild Grendel out there as well.

This is such a beautiful time of year (searing heat aside!), and there is so much fun things to do! Luna has loved playing at the creek and going out to the lake.

We’ve been experimenting with different recipes using all the acorn flour we still have (left over from last Fall!) and for our big Midsummer party, Lacie made an amazing mesquite and blackberry cobbler.

squeezing out the water

As a final note to this wonderful update, I just want to say: I hope you had an amazing Birthday Month my dear, may the end be as magical and uplifting as the beginning!

News and Update; an end to inertia….

So it has been entirely too long since I have posted on here, and I can’t exactly say it’s been because I’ve been working so hard on any particular project. I’m still trudging along with the two paintings I’ve currently got in the works, and I’ve also got two carvings that I’m now committed to doing for people. But I can’t shake the feeling that, in the main, I have been woefully lax in my efforts to be creatively productive these past months. I’ve been in a funk, been distracted, been too busy wasting time thinking and worrying and not enough time forcing myself into action. I’ve been suffering a lack of impetus. But not a lack of motivation, I think.

Work in Progress

For anyone who lives in Texas, the past week has, timidly, been the first time in a while we’ve seen sunlight. There have still been wild days of crashing storms and floods, but this day, at least, seems to be a beautiful break in the rains. Perhaps that’s all I needed. I love the rain storms, but you really can’t get anything done during them. Even indoors, you’re compelled to just sit and watch and wait it out.

boating season….

Back before the floods started, Lacie, Luna and I had made an effort of gathering as much of the young cattail flowers and then the wonderful, magical cattail pollen as we possibly could. This stuff has got be some kind of sacred manna; if you’ve never tried cattail pollen, you are missing out. I’ve been making a habit of taking different things Lacie and I make at home to share with our friends at my work, and it’s been really inspiring to see and hear their responses. Last night we made acorn flatbread sandwiches, with black forest ham and cattail flowers, slathered in mesquite-jalapeno jelly. I could not tell you how amazing they were; they only thing that would make them better, would be using thick cut bacon instead of the deli ham.

Omg.

The past month has seen a lot of plants and seeds ripening and now that the sun is starting to break through the clouds, all the wild grapes will start ripening quickly in the lead up to Midsummer. Amazingly, I even saw a couple passion flowers blooming around the woods the other day! I could have also sworn I saw fireflies out in the garden the other night, and as we’re in this transitional period of tons of water lying around and warmer, sunlit days, we’ll probably see more of them during this happy time of year.

I am actually looking forward to getting down to the waters myself now that the floods are giving us a break. I’ve got a new, smaller cast net and long pole, and my favorite fishing spots are calling to me in my dreams. We’ll actually be going down to the coast before too long, and I’m hoping to catch the blue crabs down there when the moon is full and they are wont to dance in the moonlight. Last year we timed it perfectly and ended up with more than we expected! I also still have buckets of wave polished shells of almost every color that I haven’t gotten around to playing with yet. That’s another thing I’m hoping to get around to soon; so many sculpture projects that I’ve kept on hiatus while I finished this past slew of paintings.

Speaking of which, I do have a giant debt of gratitude to repay to someone I’ve met in these past months. A strange form of luck allowed me to meet Cyd Cassone at work one day several months ago, and it was clear we had a lot of the same passions. Cyd is a musician and currently works at the Creekside Wellness Center in Bryan. They focus on holistic approaches to medicine and naturopathy. After spending some time talking about some of our shared ideas, they offered to host some of my paintings in their office! I couldn’t think of a better place to show these pieces since so many of the messages in them are reflected in the work Cyd and her partners are doing.

I’m really so glad to have met them and many others this past Spring, and Nature willing, I’m hoping the clearer days are a sign leading to more great things happening in the near future and an end to inertia.

Update….

Jeez, I am starting to feel it now. A deep-seated fatigue, most likely due to the notion of what I still have to finish.

I’ve taken a lot on in recent months. To be clear, I’ve no intention of giving myself any slack; I’m just finally coming to terms with what I have committed to.

I’m very close to finishing the portfolio that I started at the beginning of last year, and by close I mean I still have four more paintings to finish. I am currently working on three of them though, so we’ll see how that goes….

In addition to this, I’m still working with an area non-profit, providing environmental education to area schools. I love this and can’t express how thankful I am to be a part of it. Educating kids about the wonderful environment all around them, I really feel like I’m helping to connect them to the world they’re a part of. And that makes me feel great.

That’s why I’m really excited about the new programs we’re (hopefully) going to offer this year. Starting this Spring, I’ll be teaching classes on wild edible plants of the Brazos valley. The amazing plants we’ll see can be found right here in Bryan/College Station, so you can interact with them everyday.

The hope I have for this workshop is to show people that wild foods aren’t just something for “survival scenarios”; that they’re capable of enriching our lives on a daily basis. It’ll be about Thriving, not just Surviving. Because there is a positively reinforcing relationship that we can have with our environment, because we’re meant to be right there.

Wish me luck.

 

on foraging

A lot of people are becoming interested in “urban foraging”, or just foraging; I’ve seen several articles referencing or discussing this trend across the net.

For anyone interested, there are several good, if not amazing places to begin this journey of discovery and, really, enchantment. Some great people are listed in the “Helpful Resources” tab above, but there are many, many others of course. Some have extensive online resources at the disposal of those interested, some perform physical classes in different parts of the country, and at different times, some do both. However, most folks that take the time to put together a really heart-felt and sincere attempt to educate people generally have the background, education and training to make your time worthwhile. A few, in brief, are Sam Thayer (a name not unheard of to many), “Greene Dean” of New York fame, the legend Euell Gibbons, Mark “Merriwether” Vorderbruggen, Linda Conroy-herbalist (there are many powerful women herbalists and “wild-crafters” out there; too many to list).

In response to this popularity (dare I say, trend?) several concerns, appreciatively, have been raised. Chief of which is the potential for damage to local, native environments and the general sustainability of this lifestyle. Anyone who is interested, or passionate about this way of life should have an equal, if not greater, commitment to propagating and restoring more of these resources, these wild species. 

For one reason, it is extremely easy to do so. Wild plants are much hardier and tolerant, obviously, than domesticated ones; they need little to no extraneous labor or resources.

People developing an interest in finding ways to benefit from their natural environment, in its natural form, provides the impetus and the opportunity to discover real ways to live in harmony with Nature. Restoring, and utilizing, wild species of foods, doesn’t just restore a beneficial resource to people, it also restores important natural habitat for wildlife. It is this critical, positively-reinforcing relationship (between humans and their environment; their home) that provides a real, tangible connection with the greater Community of Life.

Re wilding: seed failure, May Day

So our experiment has run into a problem; our original planning seems to have been inadequate in that we didn’t fully compensate for the biological requirements of wild plants.

We had saved hundreds of seeds from plants we harvested last year, from a multitude of fruiting species and had intended to plant them this Spring and watch how they grew over the following year(s). However, as planting time came around, I read that for wild species, over-wintering is a crucial part of the germination process. I had attempted to soak and stratify the passiflora seeds we planted, but neither they nor any of the others have sprouted as yet. I read more about planting wild plants and most authorities on the subject say that seeds from wild species need to be planted in the Winter or even the preceding Autumn.

Actually, there were some seeds which did sprout, and honestly they were the last ones I would have expected; the mesquite seeds which I errantly scattered in in the yard have shot up like weeds!

Now this is significant because (and I don’t know if I mentioned this in earlier posts) they are the only ones which I planted (scattered, really) when it was still cold outside! I must have planted them sometime in late January or perhaps February. I had thought to myself that since mesquite seeds are so hard, surely they will need the cold frosts of Winter to crack open; if only I’d stopped and applied that same logic to the other species we were planting….

I cannot begin to describe how foolish and disappointed I feel in myself for such an obvious error. We are still determined to continue with this experiment however and are adjusting our strategy accordingly. Perhaps this will actually make things easier in the future. During this Spring and coming Summer and Autumn, as we pick our various foods, the ones which we intend to try planting we will immediately place into the Earth. As we pick and eat passion-fruit this Summer, we shall spit the little seeds directly where we want to see them sprout. This means that we don’t need to take up space storing and keeping track of so many seeds (which can be a hassle with small children) and all “planting” will be done at the time of harvesting. If you think about it, this is exactly what happens in Nature anyway.

This hasn’t been a totally disappointing time though. We danced around a maypole and celebrated the first of May yesterday with the blooming of so many wonderful wildflowers everywhere around us.

Also, the curly dock plants which are growing in the yard are now as tall as I am and close to ripening their legions of seeds.

All the cattails in the area are just fixing to shoot up their delicious young flowers as well!

In addition, there is currently more blackberries ripened nearby than I have ever seen, or may ever see, in my life. To stand and look at them, is like looking at an ocean of glittering gems extending to the horizon; you start picking and the more you pick, the more you see, and eventually as you keep standing and looking further and further away, you’re struck by the futility of it all. There is no conceivable way you could ever pick all of them. Indeed you would literally need an army of pickers to come close to such a feat.

But then, perhaps, why should we be meant to? It’s in that moment of futility, in the face of such abundance, in the glimmer cast by those shining multitudes, that you can truly start to understand Nature. This abundance is for everyone, and there is more than you could ever ask for specifically to accomplish that purpose. And as the ephemeral nature of this feast draws it to a close, another will surely just finish being set on the table. I guarantee it.

So, despite whatever set-backs we may face, I say if you want to experience faith, you come foraging with us….

Re-wilding: Planting

—>Let me preface this by saying that I’m sorry that I didn’t take any pictures of the seeds or of them being planted; I feel like a fool for not doing so (in the interest of transparency, of course). Allow me to make it up by taking many more pictures as soon as the first shoots appear….

As I mentioned in the previous post, we planted the remainder of the wild seeds the other day with the beginning of Spring. These included: Turk’s cap mallow (Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondi), American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana), sunflower (Helianthus spp.), and mullein (Verbascum thapsis). Additionally I went ahead and planted the prickly pear seeds (Opuntia spp.) that we had, because why the hell not? In an earlier post I’d described how and why we had already planted the passionvine seeds.

The Turk’s cap mallow was planted in a ring around the outside of where we had planted the passionvine seeds. Turk’s cap does best in partial shade and the climbing passionvines, coupled with the crape myrtles they’re planted around, should provide adequate shade to make the mallows happy. That said, they would have been alright planted out in the open instead.

The beautyberries, being a, purportedly, easy plant to sprout, were simply interred along the fence-line, along with some left over mallow seeds.

The mullein and prickly pear I planted in an open area of the yard, more in an effort to keep track of them than in any real concern for their well-being. Mullein is an easy plant to grow, I hear. I have seen them more often than not in drier areas of Texas, but that could be coincidence. The plants which I collected these seeds from came from here in town, so I expect them to be fine. Opuntia, being cacti, does have prerequisites. However, I have seen plenty of medium to large stands growing in the well-watered yards of some of my neighbors, so who knows? At any rate, I never expected to have good luck with the seeds, as it is much easier and efficient to propagate cacti from cuttings instead.

As I outlined in the original manifesto for this project, we were embarking on this experiment not only in the interest of trying to prove a method of providing free supplemental nutrition for ourselves (and others), but showing that at the same time we’d be enhancing and restoring the natural habitat which we call home. To that end we have taken a rough census of the other animal species which share in our immediate area and as this project goes on, we will try and note any increases or additions to their populations. As of right now, our home-area is inhabitated by a pair of mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos), a pair of cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis), around five or seven house sparrows (Passer domesticus), a flock of fifteen to thirty white-winged doves (Zenaida asiatica), a flock of perhaps thirty to sixty grackles (Quiscalus spp.), three wild cats (Felix domesticus), two wily dogs (Canis lupus domesticus), and three crafty humans (Homo sapiens). There are species of wasp (order Hymenoptera, sub. Apocrita), cranefly (family Tipulidae), field cricket (subfamily Gryllinae), fire ant (Solenopsis spp.), among others. Dead Short-tailed shrews (Blarina carolinensis) have been found, presumably executed by our Felix domesticus. Markedly absent are the common Texas toads (Anaxyrus speciosus) which are abundant in other areas of town. My guess is that North Bryan is drier and more open than the low wetlands of College Station, particularly around Wolf Pen creek, where we used to live. Perhaps, if these plants sprout and thrive, more cover will become available rendering the soil cooler and more damp thus allowing the toads a place as well.

Illustrating this positively-correlating relationship is the crux of our endeavor. We are dedicated to showing how people and their environment can be and are connected; that people can gain real, physical benefits from restoring their natural habitats. We can have a positive relationship with our environment, because we are inherently a part of it; all we have to do is remember that.