Garlic Mustard and Other Wild Edibles

My first encounter with wild edibles was quite a few years ago before I had kids when I was visiting a good friend in Massachusetts.  A friend of hers was coming over for lunch and arrived with a huge handful of stuff she called wild ramp which she had found on the side of the road. I was not too crunchy at this point and the idea of eating some plant found on the side of the road was completely foreign to me. So needless to say I was a little nervous as my friend sauteed and served this road side find. I put aside my fears, tried it, survived, and it was delicious.

Since then I have been open to the idea of wild edibles but had not done much to explore what was available to me so last spring when my step brother told me that the weed that permeated our yard and woods was in fact garlic mustard and that it made a great pesto I was ecstatic. My girls picked, I pesto-ed and we loved it. We also found that we had a large amount of wineberry (wild raspberry) plants all around and harvested a few pints of berries last summer. Since they were so interested in the fact that food was growing wild in the woods I got them a pack of Wild Cards: Edible Wild Foods which list all sorts of wild edibles (there’s a iphone app too now). They still grab them almost daily and hunt our yard and woods for wild plants that we can try.

This year they have started again with picking large amounts of garlic mustard and plopping it, muddy roots and all, on my counter for me to prepare. The other night with a particularly large amount of garlic mustard on my counter I decided to saute it with the chicken I had defrosted. I served the chicken sauteed with garlic mustard over some pasta and it was a hit. So I suggest you take a good look at those “weeds” growing around you, you just might have an untapped wild edible garden.

Have you ever tried any wild edibles? What’s your favorite?