From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.
You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher.
My guest today is often referred to as America's best known forager.
Why? Well, Steve Brill made world headlines in nineteen eighty six when he was arrested for foraging in Central Park. It might not have been such a bad thing for it raised awareness for eating wild edibles and, Brill has made a career of teaching wild foods and he's authored two books, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild and Not So Wild Places and the Wild Vegetarian Cookbook. You can find these on his website at WildmanSteveBrill.com, where you can also find out about his classes in the New York metropolitan area and all sorts of recipes, articles, and information about foraging. So wild man, Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm happy to be here.
So, you know, Steve, I love storytelling and I know you've told it ten thousand times, but I just in the last twenty years, but I I would love just to hear just whatever you want to share with you, the big story, the arrest story, the turning point probably in your career.
Okay. Back in nineteen eighty six, I was leading a field walk in Central Park hunting for wild edible plants, renewable resources, things they cut down as weeds that people have been using for food and medicine for thousands of years, how to recognize and identify them, harvest them safely and ecologically, and how to use them. And in the search for plants, it turned out that there were already two plants on the tour, undercover New York City Park Rangers. I love Spokane plants. The skies was nature lovers.
They were a man and a woman. They said they were married. They never held hands. They never kissed or any other funny business. I figured they'd been married a long time.
The man paid me with mark bills. This was in the 80s when Central Park was sort of a drug supermarket. People were selling all kinds of stuff from the benches. But they gave me the mark bills and every time I found an interesting plant, I'd hold it up. The man would take a picture. I'd be sure to hold it near the camera so he could get a good shot of the specimen. Only I was the specimen.
At the end of the nature tour, I showed people that you could eat the leaves of the dandelion in March, when they first come up. They get bitter later on and ate one. The male ranger ducked behind the tree, took out a hidden walkie talkie. Alright. There he is on eighty sixth Street. Go get him.
Every park ranger in New York City popped out from behind the bushes.
They they surrounded me in case I was going to climb up a tree, put me in handcuffs lest I bumped them on the head with a dandelion.
They, searched me. I don't know if they were looking for weeds or weed, but they hauled me off to the police station in handcuffs where they, took fingerprints and mug shots. They searched my backpack. Fortunately, I'd eaten all the evidence.
And then they charged me with criminal mischief for removing vegetation from the park because I ate a dandelion, gave me a desk appearance ticket that said I had to appear in court and could face a year in jail if convicted, and then made a really bad mistake, they turned me loose.
I went home and called every TV station, newspaper, wire service, radio station I could find in the phone book.
Next day on the way to the newsstand, five cops came after me, but they all wanted my autograph.
I was on front pages of newspapers around the country.
I went, got called immediately to go into Central Park and appear on CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. I was on page one of the Chicago Sun Times. I even made, BBC News in London.
The coal miner strike is in its fifth week, and in New York City, they arrested the wise men of Central Park for eating a dandelion.
They eventually took me to court, so I served Wild Man's Five Barrow Salad on the steps of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse with some of the best herbs and greens of the five boroughs of New York City, pass this out to reporters and passers by passers by on the street. The press ate it up, and I got in all the newspapers and TV stations a second time.
After that, so many angry letters came into City Hall that the mayor ordered the parks commissioner who had sent the undercover agents after me to turn over a new lease so to speak.
And the Parks Commissioner negotiated with me, dropped the charges and hired me to lead the same foraging tours I was leading when I was arrested. I worked as a New York City Parks Naturalist teaching foraging for the next five years. I left when the administration changed and I have to say that getting arrested for eating a dandelion was definitely the second best thing that ever happened to me in Central Park.
What was the first?
Nine years ago, I was leading a singles tour in Central Park and there was this wild single woman who attended the tour. We started dating.
First she took me to the Galapagos Islands and Wow. Then she took me to Antarctica.
And six years ago, We got married and, three and three quarters years ago, we had a baby and her name is Violet and she loves nature as much as we do.
Oh, congratulations.
And you were, I was looking at your website, and I know you were just playing the Brillo phone there. Yes.
You shake your hands into cups, clap them in front of your mouth, air from the hole between your thumbs goes into your mouth, and if you hold your breath like you're going to swallow or yawn, it creates an echo and the different shape that of your different shapes you make with your mouth, create different notes. It's easier to describe than to do. It takes a bit of practice but if you go to wildmanstevebrill dot com, there is a Brillophone section, Brillophone page and you can see me doing this.
Worth the price of remission here alone.
So, that's it. So how did you get interested in wild foods and foraging? And did you grow up in the city?
Yes. I grew up in the city.
My mother showed me a couple of berries in the country on vacation when I was a kid and I never forgot that, but it was really when I was an adult at a time when I was experimenting with vegetarian cooking and teaching cooking classes that I discovered wild foods. It It started, when I was hungry and I started doing recipes from the sides of oatmeal boxes and raisin boxes, became more involved with cooking as time went on.
And basically taught myself So, I also suffer now from a severe So, I also suffer now from a severe case of CCD, compulsive cooking disorder, where I run into the kitchen at inappropriate times and experiment with recipes.
For example, the last thing I made last night when I should have been doing bedtime with my daughter, which delayed bedtime a good ten minutes, was a black locust ambrosia drink. There's a flower called the black locust, grows in, in the Northeast and it has flowers that taste very sweet like vanilla. You collect them in the springtime and I made many recipes with them. What I did yesterday was put half a cup of black locust blossoms, which I had in my freezer, into a blender with three cups of soy milk, two tablespoons of lecithin granules. Lecithin granules are made from soybeans But lecithin is the same substance that's in egg yolks that give egg yolks their flavor, color and emulsifying properties.
So if you want egg yolk type effect and you're a vegan like me, that's what you should be using.
I put in as thickeners, quarter of a cup each of raw cashews and silken tofu. Silken tofu is the softest tofu.
That way there's not enough or cashews that you can taste either of them, but you get an instant thickening effect without having to cook anything.
The sweetener I used was liquid Stevia which is an herbal sweetener that's been used for hundreds of years in Central America, much more healthy than sugar or other refined sweeteners.
And I blended that up in the blender, took all of about five minutes and made a wonderful sweet vanilla flavored drink. If you don't have black locust, you could probably use vanilla beans and get something similar.
I love experimenting with wild food and with healthy and tasty vegan recipes. I usually use herbs and spices in drinks, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, things like that. But this did not need anything. It was just perfect the way it was. That's great.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
Sure. Yeah. I love black locusts. I'm in the northwest and, they grow there too. Well, yes. They grow here, but they're not native. So what why people, well, it's one of the hottest burning firewoods.
So it was planted, here by settlers and, also for fence posts. Right? Yeah.
It doesn't decay.
Yeah. Exactly. And so, right across the street from me, I can in my little suburban neighborhood, I can walk across the street and pick those blossoms and they're getting there. They're just starting to come out a little bit, just spring starting just early, early spring right here.
So speaking of which, I was out picking some chickweed the other day because on earthmentor dot com this month, the members were all studying Chickweed and I looked in your first book and I love the way you say it that in late winter it's a blessing for the victims of FWS Forager Withdrawal Syndrome. I think that's beautiful. Right. Right.
So can you tell us a bit about Chickweed and your favorite ways to use it?
Okay. Well, it's a small plant. First of all, you have to identify it with a hundred percent certainty.
If you get the wrong plant So What should I be confused with?
Well, there's an a plant called door weed which has alternate leaves. That means leaves that are single on the stem. Chickweed has opposite leaves, leaves and twos. It's a small plant.
Stem is sort of like a string with a very fine row of hairs along the edge. You have to look really closely to see that.
The leaves are spade shaped, maybe about a quarter of an inch long, smooth edges, no serrations and has a tiny white flower that looks like miniature carnation and it is actually related to carnations, a family called the pink family.
The flowers are white. They have five petals that are cleft, so it looks like ten petals and it grows along the ground. In the winter you find it growing in mass against walls and other places that provide a little bit of shelter or maybe some solar solar heat since the walls get warm from the sunlight.
It's incredibly nutritious. As a matter of fact, back in the day herbalists used to use it for convalescence and it turns out it has more vitamins than a health food store and that would certainly give people the nutritional support that they need to heal and regenerate.
So, I put it in salads.
It's excellent in salads. It has sort of a corn on the cob flavor. I'll also cook it in soups that cooks in about five minutes. There it has a taste that's more like spinach.
And I also apply a waterless cooking method that people used to do in England and yes, there are a few good recipes that actually do come from England.
This is what people did hundreds of years ago with spinach.
You wash off the plant, chop it to bite sized pieces, shake off all of the excess water and then put it in a heavy pot, no steamer necessary, no additional water.
You turn the heat on low, cover the pot, and let it cook for about five or ten minutes until just wilted.
Don't cook it any longer and it cooks in the water that clings to the leaves. While it's cooking, I'll saute some garlic in olive oil very lightly.
You never want garlic to get dark brown or it gets really, really bitter.
And then you stir that into the cooked chickweed along with some tamari soy sauce and you have one of the best cooked vegetable dishes you've ever eaten in your life and very, very helpful.
Chickweed is also used medicinally. The tea is supposed to help with weight loss. I don't really know if that works or not. And it's supposed to be a gentle diuretic for water retention.
Good for the kidneys. It's good for the blood. And as I said before, it's loaded with vitamins.
Now I know something else is good for, but your toddler's probably out of diapers by now.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's right. It's used for diaper rash.
Diaper rash. It's one of the reasons.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We we we love we loved it for that with our kids, that made oil.
I think in in her old babyhood, I was pretty lucky. My daughter only had diaper rash once, but one thing that all babies have is pain when they're teething.
Mhmm.
And, what I did then is something that Native Americans must have been doing for centuries that I rediscovered.
I gave her twigs of the black birch tree to chew on. And this contains methyl salicylate, also known as oil of wintergreen, which is chemically related to aspirin.
It's in low enough concentration that it doesn't pose any health risk even to delicate babies. But it is a pain killer and it goes right to where the pain is in the teeth and it tastes really, really good. So she would chew on that and stop crying. It worked every time.
That, that's I wish I knew that at the time.
But as we don't, I don't think we have any, we have a lot of, members of, the Willow family out out out here with, you know, with salicylates in it and all the cottonwoods and things.
Yeah. But if they don't taste really good, the kids aren't going to chew on it. No.
The kids aren't going to want it. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. One thing I really miss out here is, sassafras trees. There's none out here at all.
Oh, yeah. I have my first my first tour of Central Park a few days ago and we pulled out some of the saplings. Nice thing about Sassafras is that because it can't tolerate shade and it's only a medium sized tree, it proliferates like crazy so that before a forest overtakes it and kills it, somewhere where there is adequate sun more fassafras will continue to grow. So there's an area in Central Park, lots of areas.
There's one particular place that's just convenient to get to. We've been collecting fassafras for twenty six years. It just keeps growing. We pull out the smaller saplings and I have people wash off the, the root and simmer it for about twenty minutes and it makes delicious tea.
And I tell them if they chill the tea and add some chilled sparkling water and a sweetener, they have root beer. I also have them peel off the soft outer layer of the root which technically known as the cambium which has the living cells and use that in place of cinnamon.
I make a vegan ice cream with that.
Root beer flavored ice cream comes out really well.
I'll use instead of dairy milk, soy milk or nut milk or oat milk and put that in a blender with the other ingredients which then go into an ice cream machine.
The sweetener again I use liquid stevia.
The thickeners I will use raw cashews and silken tofu as in the other recipe. I'll also make it extra creamy by cooking some of the soy milk in with agar which is a gelatin like thickener that's a seaweed and some arrow root which is another natural thickener.
So I put that in the blender with some lecithin granules which give you the egg flavor, a little bit of grape seed oil that gives you the fat content that ice cream normally gets from butter fat from the heavy cream which is not good for you but the grape seed oil is very heart friendly.
Puree that in a blender with the Sassafras Cambium and then put that into an ice cream machine and you get an incredibly delicious and healthy Sassafras ice cream. Of course, I use the same principles with berries, with wild nuts, with black locust flowers that I mentioned before and almost any kind of sweet, wild or commercial foods.
Well, that sounds good.
I'd like to What are some of the things you've been doing with Sassafras or did with Sassafras when you were Well, you know, personally, when I was living I haven't lived on the Easton since, since ninety five.
And at that point, I was just kinda starting to get into stuff. And I and when I would I was working at Wilderness Awareness School for, about about twenty years I've been involved there. But at the time, we were out in New Jersey. That's why and then we moved out to Washington State in 'ninety five.
And, it would always be kinda part big part of the nature walks, especially with the kids because they wanna know the root beer tree, you know. And, because you could scratch it and sniff it and, you know, the kids are, Wow, it really does smell like that. Or tell them about Native Americans, how they use that as toothbrush.
Yes.
Well, it has quite a history.
In the 1500s, people shifted from America, it's a native tree to Europe and made a lot of money.
And they kept making more and more claims so they could make more money until they finally claimed that Sassafras cures everything. But that was a mistake because everything includes sexually transmitted disease and suddenly the bottom dropped out of the sassafras market because anyone seen holding a cup of sassafras tea was suspected of having syphilis or gonorrhea and sassafras went back to being a folk remedy until in recent times the FDA removed it from the market on the basis that if you take equivalent of only about two hundred cups of sassafras tea a day made from artificial concentrate every day for only two years and you just happen to be a rat, you'll have a higher chance of developing liver cancer.
Oh wow. Change safra, who will be active constituent into a carcinogen.
Humans do not. And furthermore, beer which is fourteen times as carcinogenic to humans as Sassafras is to rodents is still on the market and sassafras is not, which proves two important points. One, there's a stronger beer lobby in Washington than a sassafras lobby. And two, there are a lot of rats in the FDA.
That's beautiful.
And, yeah. And we've also we'll we'll buy it dry because we have a, in because we we'll make our root beer that way, And we have an e book in on our mentor in the e book section that my wife put together on making your own root beer, and it uses dried Sassafras.
So, you know, I'd love to ask you about some different plants and, before I ask you about a few of those plants, just so because a lot of folks listening, it's early spring, spring's coming on. It's the very first time that many people are actually attempting and braving going out on their own because, you know, not everyone has a wild man Steve in their backyard in Central Park to go teach him these things. And so a lot of people, you know, find mentors and people online and and whatnot. Like, we have a lot of video demonstrations, things like that. We do our best to help folks out who don't have. So, Sure.
Well, one misconception though.
People people think I only do Central Park. I do tours throughout the greater New York area. Okay. Go ahead.
And your schedule is on your website there.
Yes.
And, and, so if if if I'm wanting to go and identify, learn the fine tuning the stuff to to to learn about identifying plants, I did notice in the first part of your book you have a great simple section for people on just learning about, you know, looking at different leaf patterns and flowers and whatnot. And so what's a good approach for people to start like if you're going to do this?
Well learn the easiest to recognize things that have no poisonous look alikes first, things like Sassafras, dandelions, chickweed, mulberries, cattails.
There are dozens of easy things that chicken mushroom, tough balls in the fungus kingdom are very, very easy to learn and not mistake anything else. Follow the plants throughout the seasons. Be a little bit patient. See how they change and when you're sure you know what you have, you can start using it.
Then start branching out and adding more species to your list of certain plants every year.
And bring kids on, with you. Kids need very badly to learn about the environment.
A hundred years ago, every school class in America, the teachers, who actually knew about nature back then, which most of them don't now, would take the kids outdoors and teach them to identify the trees and the flowers in their local ecosystem and that's sort of completely gone from the curriculum now and it's more important than ever. So bring kids with you. They have a built in affinity for nature that needs to be nurtured otherwise it gets lost.
And I do a lot of work with schools. I do schools, day camps, scout troops, birthday parties, museums.
I work with everyone, all ages. My daughter is three and she identifies a lot of plants.
That's one of the main reasons I was got involved with Wilderness Awareness School back in the early 90s was because I saw that as how important that was, that type of environmental education.
And I said, well, if I'm going to have kids someday, I want them to be able to go to a school like this. And, you know, and, nearly twenty years later, I have, my eight year old spends, one day, one day a week out in the woods all day playing around.
Where are the best places to forage? Where should people look out for dangers or hazards?
Well, the worst places to forage are near heavy traffic and long railroad right of ways. You get a lot of pollution there.
Best places I find are urban parks that are not well maintained. People think you have to go out into the forest but forested areas are shady and many of the plants that we use for food and home remedies, not all of them, there are some delicious forest plants, but the majority of them grow where they can get some sunlight. The edges between trails and forests or lawns or meadows and forests are often the best places.
And, if you can find an area with lots of varied habitat, you'll find the greatest variety of plants somewhere that has some lawns since there's some delicious lawn weeds, some wooded areas, some wetlands, trails, lots of edges, as I mentioned, between forests and open areas, some thickets. That's where you're going to get the most stuff.
And and, and also, yeah, especially while in parks, then you wanna look out for places where the dogs might have heavy traffic Yes.
Although, if there's something covered by dog excretia, you're going to see it and avoid it.
If they spray stuff, that's invisible. And, any kind of animal pollution, which you can get in the forest too and there are animals there, that will wash off the stuff that comes in through the roots from, from sprays and chemicals does not.
Does not. So that's Yeah.
Of course, you should rinse rinse off. Well, we'll do some trail nibbling of things as we walk. But when we take things home in quantity, berries or greens, herbs, we always wash them off. I'll put things into a colander and set the colander into a bowl where the top of the colander is higher than the rim of the bowl and run lukewarm water through it. That way the leaves or berries are swimming around in three dimensions and, you do a rotary action with your hand to get the water circulating even more and that cleans things up really, really well.
For some plants, you'll then drain them and put them on a tray to pick out any debris, especially if you're foraging at the end of the winter when there's a lot of dead plant material along with the new green growth.
Okay.
And something too I wanted to ask you too is one of the things like you already explained a great way to learn and all and looking for things that don't have poisonous lookalikes.
But in reality, there really isn't as far as the ratio between what can be harmful and what isn't is I mean, it's really a small I mean, there's not that many poisonous plants really. So would a strategy, if someone wants to get into this, just kind of first learn what could be hazardous and just check those off your list, you know?
That certainly helps. Although it can be hard to find some of these plants.
It took me quite a few years when I was teaching myself before I was able to find poison hemlock or water hemlock, which are, two of the most common poison plants.
And one that was not listed in any of the edible books which is related that we have in the Northeast that's very common is white snakeroot.
And that's one you don't want to mess around with. The pioneers who didn't have the capacity to cut down the forest to make pastures for their cows, but the cows browse in the woods.
And in August when things were pretty drying, there wasn't too much else around. The cows would, out of desperation, start eating this white snake root plant which was poisonous.
Fortunately for the cows, they had a way of getting rid of the poison. They'd excrete it in milk.
That was not fortunate for the pioneers that died of a disease called milk sickness that depresses the central nervous system so that your breathing gets shallow, your pulse gets lower and lower and you lose consciousness and die.
The scientists in the nineteenth century trying to figure out what was causing this disease which did not occur in Europe asked a Native American shaman by the name of Mother Shawnee, and they obviously used the right approach because she helped them. Now one thing you should never do, if you want shaman.
So she told them that the white snake root symptoms of poisoning from this plant were identical to the symptoms of milk sickness. So then the scientists did an experiment, they fed it to a calf which couldn't excrete the poison through the milk. The calf died, they told the pioneers, you've got to cut down the trees and put up fences and keep the cows out of the woods. No one wanted to believe it. It was just too much work. One doctor even said, if this were true, I would have learned in medical school. My professors know everything.
I'll do my own experiment. So he took the white snake root, ate it and died and he still didn't believe it. That's because he was dead. It took years before white snakeroot, milk sickness was eradicated.
And meanwhile, a very famous American died of milk sickness and didn't even know she was famous. Turned out that when she died, she had an eight year old son who became president of the United States.
Any idea who that might be? You're a history buff. There's one president whose mother died when he was eight and that was a Abraham Lincoln.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. Take home message, never drink the milk from Abraham Lincoln's mom's cow.
Okay. I won't.
That's Of all that we just said, that's the one thing folks that I want you to remember.
So, so, yes, that's so in other words, once again, the deadly poisonous plants, not a whole lot and learn those you could learn those first and just stick with the ones like that we're talking about here early spring, chickweed is wonderful. Now tell us about, well my favorite plant too, which is why it's in the logo of my company, which is dandelion of course.
And so that's the mother of wild edibles, Right.
Well, as I mentioned in the beginning, it made me world famous and I use leaves and salads when they first come up and I also cook with them. Dandelions have a slight bitterness to them, which is fine when they first come up in early spring and then when new growth occurs in the fall. And in my area in the Northeast with global warming, the dandelions are around more and more in the winter because we're getting limpier and wimpier winters every year.
The dandelions when you cook them they shrink which concentrates the nutrients but it also concentrates the bitterness. And what I found that works really well is a two phase cooking where you first cook them, saute them and then you add a sauce and cook them further in the sauce and all the bitterness is gone. Let's try an example. What are some of your favorite ethnic cuisines?
Oh, boy.
Let's just say something like Indian food like or something. I don't know. I I like everything. Italian, Indian, you name it. Alright. If you if you Irish.
Alright. If you want if you want to cook, if you want to cook Indian style dandelions, you'd first saute them. The Indians use ghee, which is clarified butter, and I'm a vegan. I don't like all of the cholesterol. So the oil, the vegetable oil that has the most buttery flavor is corn oil and you could use half corn oil and half grapeseed oil, if you wanted or half olive oil and then you'd use typical Indian spices. You heat up the oil and throw in some yellow or if you want really, really hot, some black mustard seeds until they pop along with some cumin seeds, some coriander, even some black pepper or jalapeno or two, again, depending on how spicy you want it.
And then you saute the dandelions for about five or ten minutes and then you would add a curry sauce or a coconut sauce. Take some coconut milk, put it in the blender, with a thickener like arrowroot or kudzu, some turmeric to give it a yellow color and, I'd put in a little bit of silken tofu and maybe some lemon or lime juice to give it a bit of a yogurt type flavor and texture and then add that to the blend. You could add some curry powder or some curry spices as well and let cover that and let that simmer for about ten minutes and you'd have a really nice Indian dandelion dish.
Nice. Nice. How about, how about lamb's quarter? It's one of my favorites.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love that. I make vegan cheeses and I have some Lamb's Quarter quiche from last year still in the freezer. I may make that for lunch, whole grain pie crust and I make vegan cheeses where I'll take some extra firm tofu and cook that in a little bit of olive oil, maybe mixed with corn oil and put in some brewer's yeast which gives it a cheesy fermented flavor, a combination of Tabasco and paprika to give it the sharp edge that cheese has and because you're using two ingredients again, you can't taste either the Tabasco or the other hot herb, a little bit of paprika adds to the complexity.
If you want the cheese to be yellow, you add some turmeric to it and cheese has acidity.
I'll again use two vinegar something like, boshi plum vinegar if I want it hot with some brown rice vinegar and wine vinegar and that gives you the acidity and I'll cook the tofu adding the, vinegars in at the end and you get something that is very similar to cheese and it tastes delicious.
Now what about something simple for people using lamb's quarter or even even dandelion that we were just talking about, you know. So what if, like, you know, because sometimes if someone's starting out here and they listen to all this and, I mean, that's really great and creative and I could see someone getting into that, especially if they, you know, have your books or cookbooks and stuff.
But what about just, like, okay, you're you're coming in, you brought some of these dandelions, some of these lamb's quarters home, you're just you're just not sure, what to do with them.
Okay. The lamb's quarter lamb's quarter you'd put into a salad or you could add them to any soup. They cook in about five minutes, about the same as spinach. Or you could saute them in some olive oil with garlic, a little bit of salt or a seasoned salt, some pepper.
And they're just perfectly delicious that way. If you want to, add some tomato sauce at the end and let them simmer for another minute or two, they go really well in tomato sauce.
Oh, nice. Alright. So that's that's so that's a way that folks can just get going right away. Then as you explore more and gather more, you could, you know, rewind the tape here, if you will, and, write down the things that Steve was talking about and try that.
Now, something I always call the supermarket, the supermarket of the swamp is cattail.
And what what are there's I mean, you can practically eat the whole this whole whole plan.
I mean, everything from the roots to the shoots to the to the pollen. I mean, really.
Yeah. I love I love cattails. Just one, I tell people they you separate the green leaves, pull the leaves outward, and there's a white central core, and you grab that with two hands and you pull it up, meow, and up comes the cat tail. However, never ever pull out a cat tail for there's an animal rights person watching.
What do you use?
Of course, tastes like, like cucumber or zucchini. It's really, really delicious.
And I'll put it in any kind of recipe, raw and salad, sauteed in casseroles and soups. There's a French stew that's a combination of tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini, and I use cattails instead of the zucchini. The recipe is called ratatouille and with a cattail instead it's called catatouille.
And, it's much better to eat a stew that contains tail of cat over one that contains tail of rat.
The green flower heads are delicious.
You get them around here in June and you clip them off and steam them or put some oil maybe with some chopped up garlic or some other spices mixed in with the oil and bake them. They're absolutely wonderful. They tend to be dry, so I'll serve them with a sauce, really any kind of any kind of sauce from tomato sauce to hollandaise sauce to vegan butter sauce and I've got recipes like that in my cookbook.
Mushroom sauce goes well with them also. Then the moist sauce goes extremely well with the dry green cattails and the pollen was always problematic for me. You can use the pollen in place of flower. You shake it off into a bag and then sift it.
But every time I went to get the pollen, the wind would blow and the pollen would all be gone. There's only about a two week period. And then I discovered, this isn't my own, I read about this from another forager, if you get enough of the green cattail flower heads before they turn yellow and produce the pollen instead of eating them all, which is the big temptation, keep half of them in a paper bag at room temperature for a couple of weeks and they will form pollen on their own and the wind won't blow them away so you can get the pollen that way. I may I put the pollen in muffins and pancakes that makes beautiful golden pancakes and muffins.
Oh, that's you know, how do you process do you ever dig up and process the roots for the starch?
I've tried that a few times. It's incredibly labor intensive. It works much better in books than when you actually do it yourself.
That's why I'm asking That's why I'm asking you because I always have such a hard time with that. I wanted to see if you had any tricks.
It's it's really, I don't think I don't think it's worth it. Sam Thayer, who's in the Great Lakes area, will do things that are very, very labor intensive with wild plants and cattail rhizomes seems to have some success with it, but I think you're just putting in way, way more time.
I did this in Central Park. I went into the mud. I tried to yank, chop, and dig those things out very very hard back breaking work.
Put them in some in a shopping bag, went to a friend's apartment who lived in Manhattan.
We went on, went up the elevator, and then there was a trail of mud and dirt going from the door of her luxury apartment to the elevator. I I don't think the doorman spoke to her after that. And we went up to her apartment and then then we, put everything out on her balcony and she had a garden hose and, we just sprayed and sprayed and sprayed it and finally all the dirt washed off into her neighbor's balcony. I don't think the neighbor ever spoke to her after that either.
And we finally got the cattails clean, got all the money out of them and put them into a large bowl of water and worked all the fiber with our fingers to loosen the starch, remove the fiber, let the starch settle to the bottom and we got enough starch to thicken a soup of maybe six servings which is very delicious but not worth all of the hours of labor. So that's one I don't really I don't really recommend. It's an older book.
Thank you.
But but it's very it's very you can't believe all the stuff you read in books. And I started foraging. I used Peterson's Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants and unfortunately the man wouldn't know what a kitchen was if one fell on his head. You write a book about food, you don't cook and you don't know anything about food or cooking, you're gonna have mistakes.
One of the things he had in there was skunk cabbage which contains calcium oxalate crystals which can sting your tongue very very painful. Yeah. And he says that if you dehydrate it you get rid of the calcium oxalate. So I put young skunk cabbage leaves in a food dehydrator for a week and then I made a pot of chili and put in the skunk cabbage leaves.
I took one taste.
Ow, oh my tongue, ow water, oh that lame brain, ow my tongue my poor tongue water.
Oh that nin can poop more water. That lame brain after a whole hour, my tongue finally starts to feel better. I took the whole pot of stung cabbage and flushed it down the toilet.
And in the books I subsequently wrote, I wrote one, the day you find skunk cabbage is the night you go out for dinner And two, if you do find skunk cabbage, leave it for the skunks.
Well, you know, it shouldn't the plant's kinda giving us a little naturally war natural warning signal there, you know?
I mean, it smells it should be like, no. Don't touch me, you know? And I don't know. Like, I agree with you with that book, like, some of the books, like, I am just not into processing wild foods that say I have to change the water four times. Like, what's the point?
Well, it it depends. Pokeweed is incredibly delicious.
Uh-huh. Is it?
Yeah. It's incredibly delicious. You do have to change the water a couple of times. It has a deadly poison. You die by vomiting so much that you die of dehydration.
But it's one of the best tasting plants in the world and it's loaded with Vitamin A so that the pioneers who are deficient in Vitamin A after a long winter with no fresh fruits or vegetables and had to plant their fields and do a lot of heavy physical work in the spring so they could finally get some fresh produce in the summer, their lives were saved by Pope we'd same thing with black people who were enslaved and given absolutely horrible food by their masters. The Native Americans showed them how to use pokeweed and if they were dying of vitamin a deficiency that would save their lives.
Again while that is cooking, I do the same thing I do with the chickweed. I saute some garlic in olive oil and add that to the cooked boiled pokeweed along with some tamari soy sauce. It's out of this world. And I have this reporter from National Geographic Magazine, man, by the name of Joel.
And he came to my home for dinner and he had pokeweed for the first time. He absolutely loved it. Then he asked me what it was. Said, Oh, Joel, that's pokeweed.
By the way, Joel, do you happen to know that if you pick pokeweed at the long time of the year, if you use the wrong part of the plan Uh-huh.
Or even if you don't cook it the right way, you could get very sick or even die.
I think I've had enough.
Joel lost his appetite completely. He turned as green as the pokeweed.
I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die.
He went home soon thereafter, assured that his fate was sealed. But the next morning a strange thing happened. He woke up.
I'm alive. I'm alive. I'm alive.
He was so happy. He wrote a wonderful article about me in in National Geographic magazine, which I have on my website in the press clipping section, and Joel still lives on to this very day.
Now you're you're using the the the young greens as they're coming in the spring we're talking about. Yes. Which is actually, by the way, when you when we're talking about greens, usually it's springtime where we're actually eating most of the greens off the wild plants. Right?
Yeah. Although, there are things like lamb's quarter and sheep sorrel, axiatic dayflower, that go right through the fall. Field garlic you get in the spring and the fall.
So more there are more greens in the spring than any other time of the year, but there are still a number of things that persist summer and fall.
Pokeweed is one of the definitely one of the most delicious and one of the last ones that beginners should be using. By the time they use Pokeweed, they should no longer be beginners.
Exactly. Exactly.
What about, you know, I miss from the East Coast. I love talking to you because I'm from the, you know, New Jersey. I'm from New Jersey. So I Right. You know, grew up there. And I even remember your arrest on the news because it was on my local news. You know, I remember that from from high school.
And, something that we only see in landscape out here, but it's common, back east. And I love talking about to me Coast things because, and Midwest whatever because I'm in the Northwest, and sometimes people who are learning from us, I I don't get to cover all these because they're not right near me. But one of those is is sumac, and I love mentioning that because people always think poison sumac. But gosh, the the sumac bush is a completely different plant.
Well, there there is a, sumac called squaw bush that grows in the West Coast.
I haven't been there so I don't know where to find it. I know where it's planted in Central Park, but you can certainly use that. Sumacs are a group of shrubs and trees and they have cone shaped clusters of dry red berries that are erect. Poison sumac is a rare plant that grows in swamps and it has white berries that droop down. I've actually only seen poison sumac twice. I would love to see it a third time because I've had a digital camera for the last five years and I'd love to get some pictures of it.
What you do with the edible Sumax is you get the berries when they are ripe depending on the species it can be from mid summer to late fall and you swish them in cold water and strain out the berries and you have a pink lemonade. What I've discovered that you can do is use the same water over and over again with different batches of berries until you get a concentrate that approaches the acidity of lemon juice and then you use it in place of lemon juice.
I make instead of a lemon sherbet, I make a sumac sherbet. I'll put the sumac concentrate in some water with my sweetener which is the liquid stevia, a small amount of cashews and lecithin granules as a thickener and some grapeseed oil so it doesn't freeze solid like ice and then put it in an ice cream machine and I've got an incredibly delicious, delicious sherbet.
Love it, family and I love and this stuff is full of vitamin C and all these red berries must certainly have antioxidants in them.
Oh, that's a great I love these little twists that you put on these things. I've just made the lemonade, but now you're like, hey, why not try a, a sorbet or something like that.
And I found, Stephen, you probably of course, you say you come up with probably a lot of your recipes is that, a lot of times you could just take the wild edible plant and just find a regular old conventional recipe and just replace like, you can stick stinging nettle in a lasagna. You know, use a spinach Oh, yeah.
That's wonderful. I love stinging nettles. Really interesting plant also loaded with nutrients back in the day when people had anemia.
When people had anemia they would be given stinging nettles. What they used to do is get lots of stinging nettles and put them in a cloth or towel and wring the towel so that the juice would drip out. Then you're getting the stinging nettle in a raw stage where it's not going to sting you. When you cook it the stinging is gone but you lose some of the medicinal properties.
And when you dehydrate it you also lose some of the medicinal properties neither dried or cooked stinging nettles will sting you.
So people who had iron deficiency anemia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century would be cured by this use of the nettle juice. They didn't have juicers then but apparently you put enough of this into a cloth and you ring it, you will get a certain amount of the pure juice out of there and the concentration of minerals.
People who are constitutionally weak, I guess what you'd call today chronic fatigue syndrome or allergies, some of them were cured with the nettle juice as well. And in modern times people, scientists wanted to see what the difference was between nettles that were dried and put in capsules and freeze dried nettles because freeze dried nettles you put put it in a vacuum and all the water departs immediately, they will still sting you. But the scientists who were doing this experiment had a problem. The stinging nettle capsules kept disappearing from the laboratory and they called the security people and they did an investigation. Turns out one of the scientists themselves was stealing the stinging nettles and, he was fired. But before he left the other scientists being scientists and therefore being curious asked why did you do this? You've ruined your career.
And he said, I tried one out of curiosity and my hay fever symptoms that I had all my life went away and then I had to keep using them to keep the symptoms away. Well, the scientists then did a controlled double blind study with the freeze dried stinging nettle capsules and they found that about one out of three people with severe hay fever and allergies is helped by these and they do sell freeze dried stinging nettles in health food stores now but they can't put any medicinal claims on there because the FDA would shut them down. But this is a very, very good remedy if you're the one out of three people that it works for.
Right. Right. Well, I got a yeah, I'm going to start this year trying to use more nettle during hay fever season for sure.
So just one last question because my inner parent is sensing that your toddler's movie might be finished soon.
Oh, she's she's she's actually sitting here and put nail polish all over my nail.
That's cute.
Yeah. I wanted to end on something sweet, and I saw in your in your book here that you have a recipe for one of my very favorite, early spring desserts, and that's using Japanese knotweed. And that grows pro pro pro prolifically invasive in where I live. And I don't know how it is out of the East Coast, but I love that you, you know, this is in the rhubarb family. Right?
Yeah. It's extremely invasive, very, very common.
And I use it, for a sour flavor. Anything that I would want to taste sour, the Japanese knotweed goes into it. So I've got a whole bunch of Japanese knotweed recipes on my website and, I love this stuff. You can simply steam it. You can put it into soups.
And when it gets a little older the skin gets tough. So what I do then is I peel off the skin, the knotweed has knots in it. And I'll use a chopstick and I'll put that through the knotweed so that it's hollow all the way through. And then I stuff that with vegan cheeses and cook it in tomato sauce and it makes knot ziti, k n o t ziti. And that's absolutely delicious.
But this is any anywhere anywhere you want anywhere you want a sour flavor and sour contrast really well with sweet. So any fruit dessert, one part fruit, ten parts fruit, one part not wheat works wonderfully.
Mhmm.
And you can make a great crisp too with that. Like, just use it instead of a you can find a rhubarb crisp recipe or something and just use, or something and just use it in place along with some apples or something. Right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I probably have recipes like that in my cookbook or on my website. That's a great resource.
It is. It is. And I encourage everyone to definitely visit wild man stevebrill dot com because, it's not just, there's you really get you you sense the personality of Steven, wild man Steven, and who he is, and and, you know, your adventures, your press coverage, your all the your radio shows, and your articles, and recipes, And, so, so much for taking your time with us today and sharing some of your knowledge and passions. And it's it's been really an honor and a pleasure to finally get to meet you.
Well, they're the same here and I really appreciate all the all the publicity.
Hope we can do another show. Maybe in the fall, we can do one on wild mushrooms.
Hey. That would be great. Or and Okay. Yeah, thanks so much. And you have a you have a great day.
Thank you. Happy foraging.
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