Finding food

 This time of year it seems I start focusing a lot on food. The garden is starting to produce, the berries are ripening and their are wild foods to be had. I love finding the blessings that God has all over for us! I find Gardening, Berry Picking and Wild food foraging to be rather addictive so we have spent the last two mornings doing those things. Here are some pictures of our excursions in finding food....

 Radishes from our garden. They are still producing beautifully. We have been eating a lot and having fun sharing some as well. I keep finding out more on how really good they are for you. Today I checked to be sure and yes you can eat the radish greens as well. I think we will try that soon.

Yesterday we went to some state forest and looked for June berries. We didn't find many of them but we did find..

 ~Wild Bergamont. Good for making tea. I picked some to dry. Megan also picked some to put in a vase and it looks beautiful there.

 ~ Wild Strawberries. We picked enough to put in our muffins for breakfast.

 We looked for fish but didn't have anything to catch them with anyway.

Today we took a walk down to the swamp behind our house. I was hoping to find immature cattails that we could cook like corn on the cob and eat. I have read about that but never found them at the right time and tried it yet. I also was hoping to collect some cattail pollen to put in baked goods. I had found a tiny bit the day before but hoped to find more. We weren't successful with finding either of those things but we did pull up some cattails and were able to get the low stem part for eating.

 Here are Mara and Jonathan trying to pull up some stubborn cattails.

 Here are the stem portions after they have been cut off and then had the outer part peeled off. This is the very lowest portion of the cattails stem. We did save the rushes that we cut off and we are going to dry them and hopefully make a basket out of them.

 We ate the cattails for lunch. Some we ate raw (the white sticks in the bowl) and some I cooked in bacon grease along with sliced radishes, garlic tops, purslane (another wild food), basil and salt and pepper. Mara and Jonathan and I really liked the stir fry but Aaron preferred the raw cattail. I didn't get Megan's opinion.

When we were out and about on Tuesday we went to our health food store (which just moved to a new, much bigger and lovely location) and they had really ripe bananas on sale for 49 cents a pound. I bought several bunches and have been having fun baking with them.

Today I made Strawberry banana muffins, Banana Zucchini Bread, Banana Upside Down Cake. Bananas are very yummy!

Our "finding food" yesterday included an evening family bike ride to town and a stop at Dairy Queen. We had some coupons that the kids had been given at the parade and they were "burning a hole" in our wallet. It was a beautiful night for a bike ride and the ice cream was yummy.

Do you like to find food? What have you been eating and enjoying lately?