Ramps Recipe - Ramps Pesto Potato Salad

This is a great green potato salad to make in the spring when our bodies are craving green things. I just tossed some cooked russets with ramps pesto and boiled eggs. This would also be tasty served with bacon crumbled on top.

Ramps Pesto Potato Salad          makes 6 servings

6 russet potatoes, diced
1/2 c. ramps pesto
olive oil
2 boiled eggs, diced
salt and pepper
6 strips bacon, cooked and diced

1. Boil the potatoes until tender and drain them Toss the hot potatoes with the pesto, adding a bit of olive oil to keep the salad moist. Add the diced boiled eggs, salt and pepper, and crumbled bacon, if using.

Ramps Recipe - 3 Onion and Beer Soup

This is similar to a French onion soup, although this version is vegetarian. The three onions we used were some accidentally pulled up ramps bulbs along with the greens, spring onion bulbs, and garden chives. The spring onions are the ones you see growing like crazy in the early spring all over people's lawns. The small bulbs are good to pull up very early before they start sending off smaller bulbs. This soup can be a bit bitter, but the addition of the Swiss cheese mellows it out nicely.

3 Onion-Beer Soup        makes 4 servings

2 c. mixed chopped onions, ramps bulbs and greens, spring onions, and chives
3 T olive oil
2 T flour
1 1/2 c. oatmeal stout beer
1 c. vegetable stock
salt and pepper to taste
croutons for serving
1/2 c. shredded Swiss cheese

1. Sautée the chopped onions in the olive oil until they are translucent and wilted, about 5 minutes.

2. Add the flour to the pot, and cook to create a light roux. Pour in the oatmeal stout and vegetable stock, whisking to prevent lumps. Bring the soup up to a boil, then reduce it to a simmer. Cook for 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

3. Serve with croutons and shredded Swiss cheese on top of the soup.

Japanese Knotweed Recipe - Knotweed Wine

This recipe takes a bit more patience, as there is the year-long wait to taste the wine, and a bit more in the way of equipment. An early taste was slightly viscous and very vegetal, but the one year wait really improved the characteristics of the wine, and it was dry, a tad tart, overall a good effort.

Japanese knotweed is a wonderful wild edible, but a horrible invasive species. It came originally from Asia, and has spread to the US from the UK as an ornamental plant for it's pretty white flower sprays in summer and fall. It spreads mainly through rhizomes underground, but the seeds have "wings" to better ride the winds. Japanese knotweed looks like a red-speckled asparagus in it's early stages in the spring, but the leaves quickly unfurl and the smooth, hollow stems grow very tall. There are several very distinct identifiers, including the jointed stem which looks like bamboo, a membranous sheath at each of the stem joints, and leaves that are broad with an oddly straight base and a pointy tip. Japanese knotweed will grow just about anywhere, next to water, on the side of the road and railroad tracks, anywhere there is ample sunlight. It will also grow in just about any type of soil, so it easily excludes native vegetation. The thick layer of decomposing dry stems will out-mulch all competitors.



Japanese Knotweed Wine      Makes about 1 gallon

4 pounds Japanese knotweed, leaves removes, chopped
3 pounds sugar
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
juice of one orange
one envelope champagne yeast
1 gallon water

1. Place the chopped knotweed stalks in a straining bag, tie the top off into a knot, and place that in a sterilized 5 gallon bucket.

2. In a large pot, bring the water, sugar, yeast nutrient and orange juice to a boil and pour it all over the knotweed in the straining bag. Let it cool until about 70°F, and sprinkle the champagne yeast over the top. Stir the liquid and cover the bucket.

3.Keep this concoction in the bucket for a week, then strain it into a gallon demi-jon and top it with an airlock. Allow it to sit until the fermentation stops, then decant the wine into smaller bottles for aging.

Japanese Knotweed Recipe - Knotweed Dessert Bars



We put his recipe up last year, but it really is good and the knotweed is at the optimum height right now. This should be made ideally with the thickest, but shortest stalks you can find so they will be fleshy without any woodiness.

Japanese Knotweed Dessert Bars     makes a 11" x 7" pan

Crust:
1 c. flour
1 c. confectioners sugar
6 T cold butter

Filling:
2 large eggs, beaten
2/3 c. white sugar
1/4 c. flour
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. grated fresh nutmeg
3 c. chopped knotweed stalks, leaves removed

1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease the 11" x 7" baking pan.

2. In a food processor, pulse the crust ingredients together to resemble coarse crumbs. Press the crumbs into the bottom of the pan evenly. Bake the crust for 12 minutes.

3. For the filling, combine the eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla, and spices with a whisk. Stir in the chopped knotweed pieces and coat them evenly. Pour the filling mixture over the warm crust and spread it evenly.

4. Bake 30-40 minutes, until the egg mixture is set and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool. Cut into 1" squares and serve.

Unbaked Knotweed Bars

Ramps Recipe - Ramps Bagels

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) are an easy item for many foragers to start with. In the spring, areas of wet forest are blanketed with the green leaves that grow mostly in pairs. The leaves are lanceolate, 8-12 inches long, flat and wide. The leaves are smooth and have almost a rubbery feel, and lack veins. When bruised, they emit a distinct garlic smell. Many communities in Appalchia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania hold festivals in the spring to celebrate the ramps, featuring this foraged food in local specialties. The leaves are gathered and chopped up to add to dishes, imparting a oniony/garlicky flavor. Ramps can be found at farmer's markets and in fancy restaurants. We gather them to use immediately, and then clean and chop more leaves to freeze for use all year. We add the chopped leaves to soups and biscuits, and pretty much anything that you would add garlic or onion to, like scrambled eggs, potatoes, dips, and beans.

In autumn, it is the bulbs that are dug up and used like onion bulbs. It may be a bit harder to find the bulbs, since all that is visible is the dried flower stalk, usually still bearing black seeds in clusters of three in an umbel. Push aside the leaf litter and you will see the tips of the bulbs. Sometimes there are clusters of bulbs to dig up.

I had beeen making plain bagels since I came across a recipe on Serious Eats. It seemed like a logical and delicious step to make them flavored with freshly chopped ramps greens for the spring. We eat them with plain and vegetable cream cheese.

Ramps Bagels          makes about 12 bagels

19.25 oz. King Arthur bread flour
2 1/2 tsp yeast
2 T white sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 c. finely chopped ramps greens
12 oz. hot water (120°)
2 T demerara sugar
1 egg, beaten with 1 T water

1. In a food processor with the dough blade, pulse together the flour, yeast, white sugar, salt and chopped ramps greens.

2. Add the hot water slowly through the chute, and contnue processing until the dough is elastic, about 30 seconds.

3. Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl, cover and let it rise for 1 hour.

4. Divide the dough into 12 portions, about 2 oz. each.

5. Prepare a water bath by mixing 16 c. of water with the demerara sugar and bring it to a rolling boil in a large pot. Heat the oven to 500° F.

6. Shape the portioned dough into 7" snakes, pinch the ends together to form bagels. Alternatively, form balls with the portioned dough and poke a hole in the middle. Widen the hole with a few fingers. Allow the shaped bagels to rest on sheetpans sprinkled with cornmeal for 10 minutes.

7. Boil up to 3 bagels at a time in the water bath, cooking for 30 seconds on each side. Tranfer the boiled bagels back to the sheetpan and brush with the eggwash.

8. Bake the bagels for 15 mintues, flip them over on the sheetpan, reduce the heat to 350°F and cook them 10 minutes longer.

Japanese Knotweed Recipe - Cold Dessert Soup

This recipe is based on a Hungarian recipe for a chilled sour cherry soup. The soup is smooth, served cold as a dessert. The color is a lovely shade of spring green, and the soup would look wonderful garnished with some violets. This was a real taste surprise.

Chilled Japanese Knotweed Dessert Soup     makes about 6 servings

4 c. chopped Japanese Knotweed, leaves removed
4 c. water
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
10 T raw or demerara sugar
1/2 c. sour cream

1. Combine the Japanese knotweed, water and the cinnamon in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Cook for 10 minutes, covered. Remove the knotweed from the heat.

2. Whisk the sugar into the saucepan, mixing until the sugar is dissolved.

3. Purée the knotweed mixture in a blender. Pass the purée through a fine sieve or through several layers of cheesecloth to create a smooth texture and remove any large pieces.

4. Whisk the sour cream into the hot soup. Chill and serve.

Garlic Mustard Flower Stalks Taste Great!

Garlic mustard stalks

In the spring, the second year growth of the garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) really takes off. First a few clusters of basal rosettes appear, meaning a bunch of leaves growing on stems from the ground. Then very soon afterwards, a flower stalk will shoot up. It is topped by a cluster of unopened flowers that look like a small broccoli flowerette, and there are a few triangular leaves growing on the stalk. Before the stalk gets too tall, about 5-8 inches high, we pick them in bunches and cook them as a wonderful green side vegetable with dinner, dressed with butter and salt.

We ordered a great reference book by John Kallas, in Oregon, called Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate. He has lots of information about leafy greens in the wild, but we disagree with him regarding the bitterness of garlic mustard. In our experiences here in southeast Connecticut, the flower stalks are not bitter at all, and we give them a gentle 3 minute boil to wilt the leaves and stem. The triangular leaves that grow on the flower stalk later in the season, even when the seed pods are present, taste much better to us than the kidney-shaped leaves that grow from the basal rosette all year long. We make a pesto from the tough basal leaves, where the peppery taste is stronger. We even like the green seed pods lightly boiled and served with butter and salt.

We have also managed to make a great mustard condiment from the hard, black seeds. The taste is very fiery, like a horseradish, while the color is a dark brown like dijon. Robert ground them in a coffee mill, and mixed the ground seeds with vinegar, salt, water and honey to make a strong mustard.

Garlic mustard seed Mustard