National Public Radio presents winter foraging with Debbie Naha.
Chickweed, purple dead nettle, field garlic, spicebush, hairy bittercress.
This poor plant needs a new name.
Wow, Debbie, I didn’t know you could find all those edible plants in wintertime!
Why don’t we come along on your walk to find these wild greens?
And then we’ll cook up a delicious pasta dish.
Take it away, Debbie!
This is purple dead nettle.
It starts to get a little bit of purplish tinge to the leaves.
And you can always tell it’s in the mint family by checking the stem,
and the stem will be square.
You can’t, like, roll it between your fingers, it’s a square stem.
A square stem!
That’s neat.
What’s next, Debbie?
So this is field garlic.
This is a plant that you can always find in the winter.
It grows in clumps that come up.
They kind of look like long grass, but it’s not grass.
You can cook them up like you would any onion.
You can use the tops like you use chives, you can chop them.
And you wind up with garlic breath, you really do.
Once you know it, it starts popping up all over.
I see you, field garlic.
This shrub is spicebush.
And spicebush has these little buds that are winter floral buds.
The bark of spicebush is usually an olive kind of color, and it has speckles on it.
And the speckles are called lenticels.
They’re actually little breathing pores for gas exchange.
And then the final test is the scratch-and-sniff test,
because nothing else smells like this plant.
Mmm, yeah.
Mmm, smells like a spicy lemon!
This is one of my favorite plants, it really is.
Hairy bittercress.
It just needs a new name; it needs a PR makeover.
It grows in this rosette shape, which means that these leaves are all
radiating out from a central point.
It tastes like watercress but milder, like not as peppery as watercress.
Mmm, yeah.
Doesn’t look very hairy to me.
This is chickweed.
It’s a weak-stemmed plant so it doesn’t stand up straight.
Inside the stem, there’s like an elastic thread.
It’s like a little rubber band inside there.
And it’s very mild-tasting.
Yup, that’s chickweed.
You found a lot of greens there, Debbie.
Now will you show us how to cook them?
This is field garlic.
So we’re going to be separating the bulb from the greens.
And I’m going to take the bulbs and give them a quick sauté.
And we’re making spicebush tea.
We want to keep them submerged for at least 20 minutes.
So in this colander here, we have our rinsed chickweed and dead nettle and hairy bittercress.
And we’re going to use a box of penne pasta.
So we’re going to wilt our greens here.
Ooooo!
Then I’m going to scrape this field garlic.
We’ll add the chopped field garlic tops.
And the final ingredient is the cheese.
So here we have our penne pasta with wild greens of winter and hot spicebush tea.
Thanks Debbie!
That looks delicious.
Mmm, good!