Wild Edible Plants You Can Add to Your Everyday Meals

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Wild rice must be cleaned before use. Spread the grain to dry in a warm, airy place and parch it for 3 hours in a moderate oven, stirring occasionally. PHOTO: FOTOLIA/LUCHSHEN

Discover how you can use these wild edible plants to incorporate into your meals. Foraging for these wild plants will provide great flavors and health benefits to your daily diet, and best of all, they are free for the taking.

WILD RICE

(Zizania aquatica)

This plumy grass, 4 — 10 feet tall, grows in shallow waters of eastern North America from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The grain is harvested in late summer or early autumn by paddling a canoe among the plants and knocking the mature seeds into a tarpaulin.

Wild rice must be cleaned before use. Spread the grain to dry in a warm, airy place and parch it for 3 hours in a moderate oven, stirring occasionally. The husks can then be rubbed or beaten off and blown away as the rice is poured back and forth between two containers. To cook this delicacy, wash 1 cup of grain and add it gradually to 1-1/2 cups of salted boiling water. Cover the pan and simmer its contents to tenderness (about half an hour). The result is delicious as is, or in a gourmet version of just about any domestic rice recipe.

WINTER CRESS

Barbarea vulgaris and Barbarea verna

These two look-alikes are widespread in the East (B. vulgaris on rich low-lying ground, B. verna more often in cultivated fields). The rosettes of glossy, lobed leaves spring up readily during mild winter weather and are an excellent source of early greens.

Winter cress — a mustard — is rich in vitamins and has a slightly peppery flavor that goes well in mixed salads. The young winter leaves are also excellent shredded, flavored with chopped green onion, vinegar, salt, and sugar, and topped with minced bacon (drippings and all). Later in spring the greens take on a bitterness which can be removed by boiling in two waters. When the bloom develops, the leaves become too bitter to eat . . . but the buds can be cooked briefly — no more than 5 minutes overall — in two cups of water and served like the broccoli they resemble. Lemon butter and Hollandaise sauce are good additions to this wild vegetable.

CHUFA

(Cyperus esculentus)

This spiky-leafed, yellow-flowered sedge grows all over the United States and Canada on rich waste and cultivated ground and in mud flats. The edible tubers (also called "earth almonds") that cling to the roots are gathered in late autumn or early spring.

"Nut grass" has been cultivated for food in Europe and the U.S., with good reason. Chufa tubers are highly nutritious, with a pleasantly nutty flavor, and can be eaten raw. More often, though, they're boiled . . . or well dried in a slow oven and ground into powder which can be used as a supplement to wheat flour. Or try roasting the tasty little morsels like chestnuts. Chufa is also the source of a coffee substitute just clean the tubers, dry them well, and oven-roast them to an even brownness. Then grind the product and brew it in the usual way. (With the price of "real" coffee expected to soar, it's worthwhile to line up replacements.)