Harvesting and Eating {A photo journal of our effort to harvest some of our food every day - Mostly from the wild}

 We love to learn about wild foods and then find them, harvest them and eat them. This summer it was my goal to harvest something every day that we would then eat. We didn't manage to do every day in June (we got off to a bad start being out of town the first day) but we did quite a bit and have renewed our challenge to do it every day this month. It is going good so far.

 We aren't limiting ourselves to only wild foods - garden foods are okay too but we are trying to use a lot of wild foods and with our garden being less than stellar this year wild foods are sometimes all that we have available.

Here are some of the things that we harvested and ate in June:

Cooked Nettles. (So good for you!)

 Mara picked fiddle heads one day and prepared them into a delicious sauce to have over toast. It made for a very yummy lunch!

 Fiddle head sauce.

 The Chinese Cabbage came up volunteer in the garden. I am quite happy about that as I really love the stuff. It makes wonderful salads!

 We don't drink as much tea in the summer but we are still enjoying our peppermint tea from time to time.

 Radishes from the garden!

 A yummy salad with Chinese cabbage and other harvested greens.

 When eating over at Mom and Dad's, Mom wanted some greens to cook so I went out and pick a bunch of Lamb's Quarter for her.

 Rhubarb! Our plant did decently this year and we enjoyed a very yummy rhubarb crisp.

 I found this sweet treat at the lunch table one day picked by my sweet Megan. I did share them with the others.

 Fried Greens. Tasty!

 Radishes are such a fun spicy treat.

 Purslane was a nice addition to homemade pizza.

The other day I went up to find this cute little package on the counter.

 I looked on the other side to find this. Mara had been out in the ditches picking wild strawberries.

 Besides veggies we do also "harvest" some eggs every day. I thought this little egg gatherer looked rather cute with her messy hair, dirty jeans, baby in basket over her arm and her hands full of eggs.

 Dewberries are to be found many places at our new property. They are yummy.

Those were some of our treats in June. We did also eat cat tails and used a bunch of chives in cooking and I made and used sprouts.

Here is what we have used so far in July:

July 1st.

 This is a pretty pitiful gathering but it is better than nothing. Some greens from the garden to add to our salad (made mostly with store bought items).

July 2nd

 I went out and gathered purslane and other greens including Amaranth and Lambs Quarter.

 I pureed them with whey.

 I had decided to make greens noodles so I put Flour (some white, some wheat and some rice), salt and eggs and this green mix into the food processor.

 Then I rolled it out thin and we cut it into strips. Perfection is not necessary.

 Next step is to boil them though some of them I dried and then threw in the freezer to use later.

 Then I combined the cooked noodles with an Alfredo sauce made with some homemade goats milk cheese. Pretty yummy!

July 3rd

 Stir fry is a super easy way to use foraged greens and other things too.

July 4th

 The girls got up early to go out and pick wild strawberries. They wanted to get enough to make muffins but I think the picking isn't so good anymore. We made crepes instead and homemade almond pudding and pulled out some blueberries we picked and froze last winter so go with the strawberries that they did get.

That was the yummy start to our 4th of July. I hope you had a great day too!

I will try to share more wild foods next week!