Foraging for dinner

So, I had already begun to regress from a full consumer economy member to an active participant in agriculture. That is, of course, the whole point of this blog, these days. Now, it is safe to say, that I have further devolved into a hunter/gatherer (well, a gatherer). I have foraged for my first meal.

Last week, I heard a story on NPR about urban foraging. This compelled me to think of some of my weeds in a different light. One of the biggest problems I have faced with my raised beds is that the system that I used to smother the grass has failed to kill the Wild Garlic (and violets). Wild Garlic, aka Allium vineale, had become the bane of my existence. Sure it looks like harmless little chives, but damn that shit is resilient! Well, instead of hating it, I decided to try to eat it. That was the right choice.

First off, the only way to get rid of wild garlic is to pull it out by the bulbs. (This will not completely get rid of it, but is better than mowing it down.) Since the bulbs need to come out, I thought, perhaps I should just eat it. I consulted another blog about the possibility of eating the stuff - whether it is poisonous, tastes bad, that sort of thing. I decided to give it a try. I made a pasta con aglia e olio (pasta with garlic and oil). It was delicious. Here is the procedure I used.

1. Harvest the weed. This involves digging the bulb structure with a trowel. Wild garlic reproduces in two ways: a. using flowers (not common in urban yards, as it usually gets mowed before flowering), and b. laterally by creating little neighboring bulbs. Consequently, the bulb cluster has a huge variety of size.

2. Clean the plants. I started with about a 2" diameter clump of bulbs and dirt, shook off as much as I could, and brought the remaining plants inside. To clean them, I ran them under the faucet for a few minutes (being sure not to let any stones go down the drain), then I filled the sing with water and soaked the entire plants for a few minutes. The cleaning process was very time consuming. Most of the bulbs (and corresponding chive-like leaves) are too small to use. These I discarded. I wound up keeping about 15 bulb-chive plants. The bulbs were about a cm in diameter, the leaves were about 8" long (give or take).

3. Prepare the food. I boiled 1/2 a box of pasta (I used fancy-shmancy gourmet market pasts. I'm an Epicurean, so sue me!). While that was cooking, I separated the bulbs from the leaves and roughly chopped the tiny bulbs. Once the pasta was cooked and drained, I returned it to the pot, added EVOO (or olio) and butter, then added the garlic. I put both the chopped bulbs and the leaves in. The latter were prepared using kitchen scissors, cutting them directly into to the pot. I did not want to overcook the garlic, but I wanted to temper the volatile flavor a bit (as I would do with normal onions or garlic). Meanwhile, I sliced grape tomatoes in half (useful hint: use two round, plastic container lids, put them together with the tomatoes inside, run knife between the two lids - no fuss, perfectly sliced tiny tomatoes!). I tossed the tomatoes with the pasta, threw in some crushed red pepper (aka birdseed), and topped it all with salt, freshly ground black pepper, and freshly graded Parmaggiano Reggiano.

It was delicious. It was also super cool to turn a nasty headache of a weed (and the bane of my organic gardening existence) into a delicious meal. Yay killing two birds with one stone by turning weeding into lunch! Yay foraging!