TRAIL TO TABLE

from Mountain Life – Blue Mountains – Spring-Summer 2023

What Draws Us Home

Neighbourhood foraging begins with a short walk

words :: Deirdre Buryk illustrations :: Asta Kovanen

Have you ever heard of an invasive plant with leaves that taste like garlic and roots that taste like mustard? Or Ontario’s very own lemon zest that comes in berry form? How about a root so robust it tastes like coffee (well, almost)?

Most of us walk by this cornucopia of food—guilty as charged. I grew up in a city where the assumption is that food does not get picked from the street. You pick it up from grocery stores and restaurants only. That was until I developed a new relationship with nature and started to connect directly to the environment by picking my own food. It is truly a gratifying experience. And it all begins with taste. The natural variations in geography and seasonal fluctuations reveal themselves in subtle bursts of flavour. There is so much biodiversity to discover in your own terroir. With easy-toidentify trail-to-table finds, neighbourhood foraging can begin with a simple walk.

If you like your coffee black, you will like chicory. Just like dandelions, chicory root is harvested and toasted into a caffeine-free alternative to coffee. You can use every part of the plant. The lobed green leaves serve for salads, same goes for the purple-blue aster flowers. And the root can be pulled out in the fall (leaving 1 inch of the root top to re-bury for possibility of new growth), washed, bitter outer layer scrubbed off and dried for steeping. Sometimes chicory is called coffee weed for this very reason. You will also see names like blue dandelion, blue sailors and blueweed. Chicory is known to help with high blood pressure, upset stomach, constipation, liver disorders and rapid heartbeat. Who knew such a superfood was hiding in that back corner of your local park?

Garlic mustard is exactly what it sounds. It is garlicky, it is mustardy and it is a delicious green. It also is one of Canada’s most aggressive invaders, and threatens biodiversity. You will see these tall green plants rising in the spring from roadsides to vacant lots. Anywhere there is a bit of sun and soil, there is garlic mustard. So go wild when harvesting these plants. In the first year, garlic mustard grows just a cluster of leaves shaped like a rosette. A strong root system develops, and those that survive the winter make flowers with hundreds of seeds in their second year. They look a lot like they could be a part of the carrot family (in fact, they are a part of the Brassica family). The telltale sign of garlic mustard is when you pluck a leaf off and rub it in your hands. If it smells like garlic, you’ve found yourself an invasive garlic mustard plant. The good news: It’s not only delicious, but high in vitamins A and C. The root can be shredded like horseradish, and the stems and leaves give off a strong garlic flavour, perfect for pesto.

You can find Saskatoon berries (also known as serviceberry or Juneberry) in woodlots, side roads and planted in town or city parks. The purple stains on the sidewalk are a dead giveaway. These berries grow on a small, gray, barked shrub or tree that can span up to 10 feet. In spring, the berries go from a matted, deep red to a dark purple-blue, which is when they’re at their sweetest and ready to be picked. At this stage they will be plump and juicy. They look like a blueberry with a thicker skin, but their taste is more like a sweet cherry with a deep almondlike flavour from the seeds in the berry itself. They’re packed with more vitamin C and antioxidants than blueberries.

These upright berry clusters poke their red cones from their branches all year round.* The berries make a rare splash of colour in winter’s whiteout and they perk up into wet, sticky, ready-to-harvest berries by the fall.

Sumac has a naturally zesty citrus flavour. When I was a kid, we would pluck a few berries and see who could suck on one without making a funny face. Impossible. They were like sucking on lemons. In fact, sumac was used in place of citrus in Europe before the Romans introduced lemons. When you harvest your own sumac, soak it in water to release the acid and add a bit of honey to turn your berries into a sumacade (you will need to filter through the water twice to remove any dirt or furry bits). I personally like to dry my sumac and grind it into a spice. The beautiful speckles of red with a zip of tartness are a great way to finish a dish. *Not to be confused with poison sumac, which looks nothing like staghorn sumac.

From backyards to parking lots, this tenacious plant is immediately recognizable. Most consider dandelions weeds because they grow so abundantly and are a pain to remove, but once you realize their benefits to our bodies and taste buds, you may see them differently. Dandelions pop up in the spring, summoning bees out of hibernation with their early blooms. The jagged leaves are at their best when young and tender, and by late spring they develop yellow flowers and hollow stems (a stand-in for a straw in a pinch!). In the fall, dandelions that survived the angry gardener have bitter leaves and produce a second flower that can be used in teas, wines and salads. The long taproots, best harvested in fall, get sturdier as the seasons shift and those meaty roots can be roasted before steeping into a coffee substitute. Dandelions have been used to aid digestion, help treat UTIs and improve kidney and liver function.