Guest Essay: How To Harvest Wild Onions

Now that spring is on the way, it's time to get out in our fields and forests and bring home some wild goodness. My friend, author Hank Shaw, is an authority on hunting, foraging and cooking all manner of wild things—his four books on those topics are considered definitive guides—and his post on harvesting wild onions is particularly pertinent to this season.

Ramps, wild onions, wild garlic. These are some of our best wild foods come springtime.

More than 100 species of wild alliums call North America home—allium being the genus covering both onions and garlic—but it is the Eastern ramp, Allium tricoccum, that has been all the rage among chefs in recent years. They’ve become so popular I even see chefs here in California using them with abandon; no native ramp grows within 2,000 miles of San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Ramps.

Locavore issues aside, perhaps the trendiest thing about ramps right now is to bemoan their overharvest.

Is this happening? Certainly, in some places. I’ve seen some startling before and after photos. But most professional foragers I know harvest the same patches of ramps every year — and some of these folks have been picking for 30+ years. They know, as well as any good farmer, that you don’t eat your seed corn. The sustainability of any bulb, corm, root or rhizome harvest all hinges on how you pick the plant.

Here’s how you do it.

First and foremost, you must find your onions. Ramps are showy onions with large, wide leaves. They’re pretty easy to spot, especially in Eastern woodlands, where they can literally carpet the forest floor for acres. Most wild onions are not so easily located, although one, the invasive three-cornered leek of California and Oregon, A. triquetrum, is almost as gaudy as the ramp.

Wild onions in situ.

There’s an onion for pretty much every environment, from deserts to forests to streamsides to lawns to high above the treeline in Alpine meadows. My favorite is the dusky onion, A. campanulatum, which is common in the mountains from California to British Columbia.

Onions, being bulb plants, send up grasslike shoots first. This can be as early as January in the Bay Area for the three-cornered leek, to mid-July for Alpine onions. Onions, in general, like to live in large troops: It’s weird to find just one onion.

A great many onions have a rosy blush to the base of their stems. But not all. Your nose is your best tool when trying to figure out if that grassy shoot you are looking at is an onion. Anything that looks like an onion that also smells like an onion is an onion. Lots of bulbs, some of them poisonous, can look like an onion, but none will also smell like one, too.

A patch of wild onions.

Once you’ve found your onions, look at the patch. Are there only a few onions there? Or does the patch have hundreds or even thousands of plants? If there are only a few, consider moving on. I like to pick patches with at least 100 plants, and preferably patches even larger than that. Regardless, follow these rules when you do decide to pick:

• Pick only the largest individuals. See the photo on the left above? There are a dozen little onions in that image, and only the largest one is worth picking.
• Stick and move. Pick that large one and move on. Look for another large one. By doing this, you will scatter your picking activity and leave the patch thinned, without large holes in it.
• Take only 10 to 20 percent of any given patch. And that 20 percent number is only really for private ground or ground you have a very good idea that no one else knows about. Think about it: If I collect 10 percent of an onion patch, then you come along and take 10 percent, then two other people come… well, we’ve screwed that patch, haven’t we?
• If you really need some wild onions, but the patch is pretty small, pick one large green leaf from each plant. That’s what I do with my Chinese garlic chives at home and they never appear to really notice it. It’s a good way to get that flavor you crave without digging up the whole plant.

Read the rest of Hank's post to get more suggestions on harvesting these wild bulbs, plus recipes for home use, including pickling!

Wild onion photos by Hank Shaw. Check out Hank's books here.

Guest Essay: A Grain of Wheat

There's the old saw that the best way to teach kids to swim is to toss them into the deep end of the pool. While I may not agree with that theory (Hello…Red Cross swimming lessons???), the idea of learning by doing is a good one. So when my friend, hunter, forager and author Hank Shaw, found wheat growing in his yard, he decided to see what it took to grow, harvest, thresh, winnow and grind his own flour.

“I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” - John 12:24

How little we consider the grains that sustain us.

Tiny seeds that contain within them the power to change humanity, and by so doing render themselves almost invisible in their ubiquity. By the time The Gospel of John was written, somewhere around 70 AD, wheat, rice, barley, rye, millet, and, here in the Western Hemisphere, corn, had already dictated our existence for eight millennia.

Grain, or more accurately dependence on grain, is what separated farmers from foragers, Jacob from Esau. Grains underpin civilization: portable, easily renewable, nutritionally dense foods that can be grown in surplus and stored—or kept from those the holder deems unworthy.

Every culture that tamed a grain, although it could easily be argued that the grains tamed us, has held that grain sacred. In Japan, there is a saying that each grain of rice contains 88 souls, and to waste one is a sin. Similar proverbs exist all over the world.

So how did grain fall from sacred to commonplace? To become something tossed about without thought, wasted, even scorned?

I have been guilty of all of this. And chances are, so have you. I can distinctly remember times when I’ve thoughtlessly poured several cups of flour into a bowl to dust a piece or fish or schnitzel, then tossed the vast majority of it into the trash when I finished. It’s just flour, right?

Well, yes. But then, one day, I decided to make flour.

I started with acorn flour. Why? Well, I am a forager living in California. Here, the native people relied not on grain for their daily starch, but on flour made from acorns. California acorns have the decided advantage of being large — sometimes three inches long in the case of the Valley oak. And, again in the case of the Valley oak, these acorns can be low in tannins, and plentiful. Very plentiful. One old mother tree can drop a literal ton of acorns in a good year.

Making flour from acorns requires that you leach out the tannins first. You do this by shelling the acorns, breaking them up into small bits and soaking them in multiple changes of water. It is a lengthy, but not difficult process. (If you are interested, here are my directions for making acorn flour) When your acorns are no longer bitter, you must then dry them and grind once more to get flour.

When I did this, I became acutely aware of how much work this all was. How precious this flour truly is. I do my best not to waste a teaspoonful.

But acorns are not grains. Grains, by definition, are the seeds from grasses. They offer a distinct advantage in that they are annual. If my village is dependent on a grove of oak trees, many of which may be a century old, and you come and burn down my oaks, my village starves. But I can hide a sack of grain seeds in a hole. And when marauders have burned everything and left, I can replant, and, in a year, rebuild. From one seed comes many grains of wheat.

As it happens, I got a chance to see this first hand. No, marauders did not come to my house and burn down my oak trees. Rather, my yard became an impromptu wheat field.

Holly [Heyser, Hank's partner in crime] bands doves for the state fish and wildlife department. To do so, she is given bags of mixed grain to bait them into a live trap, so she can capture the doves, band them and let them go. Apparently doves vastly prefer safflower to wheat, because when the rains came in October this past year, it was wheat that began to grow in our yard. Lots of it.

I became determined to harvest this wheat. I had no idea what the yield might be, nor did I care. I wanted to see what it actually takes to harvest a grain of wheat.

In late spring I began with green wheat, called freekeh or farik in North Africa. You harvest it when the grain heads are fully grown, but the plant still holds moisture; typically when it begins to yellow.

Now if you’ve seen a wheat grain head in all its glory, it is a beautiful sight. You can see why gatherers all those millennia ago would want them. Large seeds (for a grass) that are, relatively speaking, easy to collect and remove.

I gathered a mess of green wheat and set the sheaves on a steel plate. To make farik, you then set them on fire briefly to burn away the little spikes on the grain heads, and to parch the seeds a bit. You then let all this dry in the sun for a day or two, which makes it far easier to thresh and winnow your wheat—literally separating the wheat from the chaff.

Read how Hank threshed his wheat. Read how Hank winnowed his wheat. And read one of the very practical reasons our ancestors may have ground their grains into flour.

Top photo by Holly Heyser; the rest by Hank Shaw.

"Watch Anchovies Fly!"

"Looks so good and smells even better!"

This could have been uttered at many moments during my marriage, and this video, courtesy my friend Holly Heyser, of her mate, Hank Shaw, a prolific author, blogger, hunter, forager and cook, is a testament to the patience (and sense of humor) it takes to live with a cook. Thanks, Holly!

More Hanksperiments.

Great Gifting: Booking It for the Holidays

Several years ago, so long ago, in fact, that the internet was in its infancy—if the browser names Mosaic and Netscape Navigator ring any bells, you're in the right era—where carrying a powerful computer around in your hip pocket, one that could answer virtually any question within seconds, was a concept left to science fiction fantasists, and people at dinner parties had to scour actual books to settle arguments about the name of the guy who was in that movie or else argue for hours over the name of the dog that was sent into orbit by the Russians (Laika, for those who care).

A well-loved (and well-marked) book.

Our house was pretty handy for situations requiring reference material, so much so that one visitor dubbed it "the house of books" for the piles that were—and still are—a major part of our living room decor. So when the holidays roll around it's no surprise that books will fill many slots on our gift lists, both for receiving and giving. In no particular order, here are a few of my favorite food-centric tomes ideal for the bookish on your list. And feel free to add your own pick by clicking on the comments link below!

Buck Buck Moose by Hank Shaw. The third book by this self-described "hunter, angler, gardener, cook"—who is a superb writer on those topics as well as a good friend of mine—is a thorough compendium of hunting, cooking and eating "antlered things." Perfect for hunters, it's also a thoughtful treatise on how these animals are deeply intertwined with our history as a species. Carnivorous cooks will appreciate it, too, since his meticulously tested recipes are great even if you can't easily obtain venison—simply substitute beef, lamb or pork.

Life Without a Recipe by Diana Abu Jaber. Memoirs are slippery beasts, the good ones treading the fine lines between tell-all and tight-lipped, between my-life-is-so-fabulous and Blanche Dubois, cringe-inducing drama. Abu Jaber, a professor of writing and literature who splits her time between Portland and Florida, writes with skill about growing up the daughter of an American mother, a Jordanian father and a powerhouse of a German grandmother. In this, her second, memoir, she continues the journey she began in The Language Of Baklava, weaving "a book of love, death and cake."

Better from Scratch and Crackers & Dips by Ivy Manning. Prolific writer and author of cookbooks on subjects ranging from how to cook for a mixed-diet family to fixing easy weeknight vegetarian meals to one of the best farmers' market cookbooks around, these two slim volumes are packed with recipes so good they're already as well-thumbed as my grandmother's Joy of Cooking. Better from Scratch will stun you with how easy it is to make things you usually buy from the store—often for a premium price—like granola, beef jerky, graham crackers and kimchi. Ditto for Crackers and Dips, where you'll have fun, spend less and enjoy crunchy, sweet and savory treats made from whole grains, real butter, cheese, fresh spices and no preservatives.

Oysters and Crab by Cynthia Nims. Seattle writer and cookbook author Nims is passionate about the bounty of the Pacific Northwest, especially the creatures pulled from the depths of the waters off our own West Coast. In Oysters she describes in detail the biology of these amazing shellfish and how they help purify the waters they live in. She then moves on to suggest the best methods of buying, cooking (or not!) and eating them, with more than 30 recipes. Our West Coast Dungeness is the star of Crab, but she also covers its Atlantic and Gulf Coast cousins, delving into the history and importance of the commercial fishing industry, then quickly moving on to how to buy, clean and—with more than 50 recipes—how to cook these beauties.

My Beer Year by Lucy Burningham. This book by Portland beer writer Burningham has a long but delightful descriptor: "Adventures with hop farmers, craft brewers, chefs, beer sommeliers, and fanatical drinkers as a Beer Master in training." With wit (as well as Wit), it describes how this young writer and mom fell in love with beer to the point where she decided to become a Certified Ciccerone, going through the rigorous and arcane training and testing regimen to become a beer expert. (And you just thought knowing an IPA from a Porter made you that, right?) Full of character and plenty of characters, its a great book for the beer fanatic in your life.

Pure Beef by Lynne Curry. The current dietary advice, as Michael Pollan famously said, is to "eat food, not too much, mostly plants." But if we are going to eat protein, its important to eat animals raised humanely, with their feet on the earth and the sun on their backs. In other words, pasture-raised animals rather than those raised in crowded, confined conditions requiring daily doses of antibiotics to survive. To that end, I heartily recommend Joseph, Oregon, writer Lynne Curry's book on buying, cooking and eating grass-fed beef, an incredibly well-researched and thoroughly recipe-tested primer on how to get the most delicious results possible from these tasty beasts.

Virgin Territory by Nancy Harmon Jenkins. Dividing her time between a home on the coast of Maine and an olive farm in Tuscany, Jenkins shares her contagious passion for the flavors of the Mediterranean, a diet she is convinced is one of the most healthful and flavorful on the planet. I've tried several recipes from this book, and I can't argue with that premise.

Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. If you have a bread baker in your life, or someone who's interested in learning to make bread, I can't recommend this book highly enough. My husband worked for two years to make what he considered the perfect artisan loaf, and was frustrated with what he felt were mediocre results until friends got him this book. It was a game-changer, and it apparently has some pretty good recipes for other good things to eat, though those pages remain remarkably unthumbed around here.

James Beard: A Biography by Robert Clark. As a fifth-generation Oregonian, I thought I knew plenty about native son James Beard. That is, until I read this biography of this world-famous cook, eater and bon vivant. A truly fascinating character in his own right, it follows Beard's upbringing in Portland in the late 1800s, his escape from his controlling-yet-supportive mother to New York and Europe and his lifelong love affair with the flavors and ingredients of the Northwest. In addition, it follows the evolution of the American palate with discussions that add depth and nuance to Beard's at times tragic yet joyful journey.

Buck, Buck, Moose: Cooking Antlered Things

When you think of hunters, no doubt visions of the bearded, raving, wild-haired Duck Dynasty clan come quickly to mind. Or maybe some of the swaggering, macho types crashing through the underbrush on reality TV or YouTube videos. Almost all guys, almost all promoting an over-testosteroned, libido-driven, "conquering nature" mien.

But that's not all hunters.

Take my friend Hank Shaw. A former newspaper reporter who covered California politics from the state's capital in Sacramento, he'd grown up with a mom who showed him how to find and eat the beach peas, sea rocket and clams that grew in or near the waters around the small town of his youth, and a dad and step-dad who loved to fish. He also began to hunt, and to write about the wild things and the wilderness for various publications and for his own blog, which was around the time our paths crossed.

Here's how he sums up his mission:

"Honest food is what I seek. Nothing packaged, nothing in a box, nothing wrapped in plastic. I eat meat, and I’m not keen on factory farms, so I either hunt it myself or, rarely, buy it from real people who raise animals humanely. Other than pork fat for charcuterie and the occasional octopus, I have not bought meat or fish for our home more than a handful of times since 2005. I am a constant forager, angler, hunter, gardener and fan of farmer’s markets. Eating locally and making good food from scratch is what I do."

Hank's first book, Hunt Gather Cook, was about his own evolution from forager and eater to the person he describes above, with sections on each of the three activities in the title. Duck Duck Goose, his second book, was about hunting the waterfowl that live in our waterways and populate the skies above us, as well as how to cook them from beak to tail feathers, to paraphrase the au courant nose-to-tail style of eating. As a non-hunter myself, but someone who cares very much about food and cooking, I find his writing and storytelling, not to mention his recipes, engaging, compelling and approachable.

His latest, Buck Buck Moose, is just what it says in the subtitle: recipes and techniques for cooking deer, elk, moose, antelope and "other antlered things." It's no surprise that I appreciate the sense of humor in that title, as well as Hank's meditations on what it means to take a life in order to sustain your own.

"I feel a deep kinship with the animals I hunt; most hunters do. We get to know them in a far deeper way than all but a few other sorts of human: We know their personalities, their foibles, their habits. Where they like to live, what they like to eat, and what they might do in any given situation. Yet most of us take delight in being fooled when a deer or rabbit shows us some new quirk of their behavior. Hunt any animal long enough and it ceases to be the Disneyfied caricature of itself most people know and blossoms into a clever, free-thinking entity—an entity not so different from us." – From "The Hunter's Paradox"

His book tour for Buck Buck Moose will bring him to Portland in early September, and I'd encourage you to attend an event if you can, as well as to buy the book. Here's the schedule.

• Sept. 10: Book signing and Demo in Portland at the Filson Store.
• Sept. 11: Butchery demonstration and class in Portland at the Portland Meat Collective. (Sold Out)
• Sept. 12: Book Dinner in Portland at Elder Hall

Top photo by Holly Heyser.

Guest Essay: Tidepool

The ocean exerts a strong pull on me, calling me with memories of waves lashing the shore or whispering over the rocks along its edge. My friend, writer, author and forager Hank Shaw, recently wrote a meditation about his own relationship with the abundance of life along its edges.

For as long as I have been me, I have collected the detritus of the sea.

Shells of tiny whelks and oyster drills. The calcified husks of sand dollars or sea urchins. Jingle shells. Sea glass, each with an unknowable story of how it entered the ocean to be tossed about, burnished and softened over time. Mostly white, green or brown, a fleck of cobalt sea glass I found on a beach on Block Island decades ago remains one of my prized possessions, for reasons my conscious mind cannot fathom.

But these were merely what I put into my pockets. The real draw of the place where ocean meets land is its living edge: the tidepool.

Sometimes it is merely a depression in the beach that became a shallow lake. A lake teeming with sand fleas, minnows of indeterminate species, seaweeds and the always entertaining hermit crab. In New England and along the North Pacific, sand gives way to stone. Boulders and crags litter the littoral landscape like forgotten dice tossed there by unseen giants.

These stones trap pools of water, and by so doing serve as bulwarks for an array of wonder.

Seaweeds of endless variety. Crustaceans ranging from barely visible to alarmingly large. Lots of fish, some tempting. I once found a rubberlips perch big enough to eat, if only I could have caught him. Snails — turbans in the West, winkles in the East — dot every hard surface; to me they’re like money scattered on pavement. Mussels jostle for position on the ocean faces of the boulders, grudgingly making way for the bizarre (and delicious) gooseneck barnacles, which remind me of the 1950s saddle shoes my mom once had in her closet.

I move through this kaleidoscope as I always have: As a child.

Some of my earliest memories are of tidepools. The boom and hiss of waves large enough to kill. The minerality of the air, a saline bite that mingled briny life and the reeking, iodine rot of decaying kelp or crabs. Or, once, a large hunk of whale.

An inexorable descent into a coating sandiness that I knew even as a child would take all day — or a proper, indoor shower — to fully remedy. The step-sink-slip, the tightening calves and exfoliating rasp of the sand that are the price, and the gift, of walking long distances on a beach. And there is always that clammy chill hovering over the pools, even in high summer.

The game is always different in the pools, but there is always action.

Read the rest of this marvelous essay.

Photos at left and right by Hank Shaw.

In Season: Looking at May with Josh Alsberg

My friend, writer, author, forager and hunter Hank Shaw said that May is "the start of the slow, fat times. Times when dinner consists of tossing things onto the grill and arranging them haphazardly on the plate, to be eaten with a crisp, cold beer or light red or white wine."

Josh in his element.

Though if you look at the following list—courtesy of Josh Alsberg at Rubinette Produce—of what you can expect to see coming from local fields and farms this month, it may be fat but it's anything but slow: from the first Hood strawberries and asparagus spears aplenty, look for fava beans, sugar snap peas, pea vines, lettuces (Butter, Leaf, Little Gems, Romaine), spring onions (done soon once the heat kicks up), fennel, new potatoes, chicories galore (Escarole, Frisee, Curly Endive, Treviso, Radicchio, Sugarloaf), dandelion greens, lots of herbs, cucumbers, early tomatoes, zucchini and other squash varieties, scapes of all kinds, beets, carrots, bulb garlic, spinach, green onions and scallions, spring cabbages.

Jeepers!

All of the above and more will also, of course, be making their debut appearances at Oregon's farmers' markets, many of which are swinging into their regular seasons with longer hours and tons more vendors. I'll be talking to Josh occasionally throughout the summer and fall in a series of posts titled In Season, quizzing him on the best the time of year has to offer with suggestions on what to do when we get it home.

Leek scapes.

Alsberg's roots—no pun intended—in the produce businesses began, oddly enough, when he was in sales and marketing for a local uniform company. At the time he was living in the Concordia neighborhood of Northeast Portland and wandered into the New Seasons store that had just opened near the corner of Northeast 33rd and Killingsworth. He was bowled over by their produce program, where employees were encouraged to cut open fruits and offer vegetables for customers to taste, and he ended up pestering the store's produce manager until he offered Alsberg a job.

Fava beans…divine!

He found he loved learning about the new types of vegetables that local farmers were bringing into the store and relaying that information to customers. That and a knack for making beautiful produce displays—known in the business as the "wet rack"—convinced him that he'd found his calling. According to Alsberg, that first job also taught him "what quality does and doesn't look like…what's going to be the best flavor not just on your tongue but on your nose."

He also learned which distributors he could (and couldn't) rely on to supply the quality he was looking to provide, a knowledge base that served him well when he became the produce manager and buyer at Food Front Cooperative Grocery. At Food Front his network of local farms and farmers grew exponentially, and produce sales at the co-op grew dramatically as well.

With six years under his belt at Food Front it was time for Alsberg to move on, a shift facilitated by his friend Ron Paul, who'd heard that Pastaworks owners Kevin de Garmo and Kaie Wellman were looking to move from their Hawthorne location. They wanted a new store with a new produce vendor, which fit right in with Alsberg's desire to feature as much local produce on his wet rack as possible as opposed to getting the bulk of his stock from packing houses.

Salad chicory.

"The incentive for me is that I'm growing my business," he said of the innovative approach he's taking at Rubinette. "For [supermarket] produce managers there's no reason to step outside the box as long as they're making their margins."

For Alsberg, stepping outside that box means working with new farmers as well as local favorites like Gathering Together Farms, Dennison Farms and Ayers Creek Farm. He's particularly excited by the possibilities presented by the Headwaters Farm Incubator Program, a 60-acre property east of Gresham that is owned by the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District (EMSWCD). The program, which leases out parcels for the development of new farm businesses, provides affordable access to land and farm resources, training new farmers who want to use organic practices and learn about soil conservation.

Golden beets.

Black Locust Farm, owned by Dan Sullivan, who cut his teeth at Gathering Together, is one of those Headwaters start-ups that has Alberg's juices flowing. You'll find Sullivan's arugula, castelfranco, chrysanthemums, escarole, peashoots, goosefoot, spigarello and raab proudly displayed on Rubinette's rack in the coming month.

In Alsberg's estimation, farmers are "the unsung heroes of the local food scene. Without guys like Tom Denison, Anthony Boutard, John Eveland and Frank Morton, we wouldn't have the exciting food scene we enjoy now." And his philosophy at Rubinette bears that out: "Learn from the farmers and treat them and their products with the utmost respect, while educating people about farms and farming practices."

The Great Wapato Hunt, Revisited

My friend, author, forager and hunter extraordinaire, Hank Shaw, had wanted to come up to Oregon to forage for wapato, a wild tuber that is rare in his home territory of Northern California. Anthony Boutard at Ayers Creek Farm had mentioned he'd found arrowhead in the wetland on his farm, so I asked if Hank and I could come out on his next trip north. I posted about our expedition earlier. This is an excerpt from Hank's post.

Arrowhead, wapato, katniss, duck potato, sagittaria. This is a plant of a hundred names. And there is a reason for that. The various species of sagittaria live all over the world—and all are eaten by someone. What you call it depends on where you live. If you are not familiar with them, wapato is one of the finest wild “potatoes” you will ever eat.

Wapato, also called arrowhead for obvious reasons.

There are about 30 species of arrowhead worldwide. They are an aquatic species, growing in great clumps in swamps and alongside slow-moving steams or rivers. They need permanent, or near-permanent water, and grow tubers ranging from the size of a marble to the size of a goose’s egg. You mostly eat the tubers, but my friend Sam Thayer says the young shoots—before the leaves are fully unfurled—are delicious cooked like spinach and have the same sweetish, corn-like flavor as the tubers. If you can find them, you want Sagittaria latifolia, which has the largest tubers.

As you may have imagined, the plant gets one of its names from the leaves, which are shaped like an arrowhead.

Buried in the mud underneath these leaves are long, clumpy rhizomes that are the heart of the plant. As the season progresses, the plant sets tubers (actually corms, botanically speaking) that grow and sweeten until they hit their peak in fall. To collect them, you need to get wet. The ideal situation is what we had in Oregon last fall: My friend Kathleen and I were invited to a friend’s farm, and he pointed us to the wapato patches in the wetlands near his fields. The water was barely calf deep, which allowed us to wade in and reach down into the muck to feel for the tubers. This is a far more effective method than twisting your feet into the muck—but only if you are wearing waders. Thayer, a well-known hard case, prefers to strip down to shorts, jumping into chilly water and using his bare feet to do the job. I am shivering just thinking about it.

Wapato tubers, peeled.

Sam does this because in his spot, the tubers are often in waist-deep water—too deep to do the reach-down method Kathleen and I used. I’d do it that way, too, if I had to. Here in my part of California, wapato is rare. In fact, I’ve only found it in a few places here, mostly tucked into corners of the Delta, where the picture above was taken. I hear it grows in rice fields, but I’ve never seen it there.

One advantage while harvesting wapato is that the tasty tubers float. Yep, when you dislodge them, they float up to the surface, making your job a lot easier. If you get into them, you can gather in serious quantity, too. Kathleen and I got this bag of about 5 pounds of tubers in less than 1 hour, in a patch no bigger than a master bathroom.

Read the rest of Hank's post and get his recipe for fried arrowhead chips. Photos by Holly Heyser (top) and Hank Shaw (middle and bottom).

Digging Our Roots: The Great Wapato Hunt

Indigenous people didn't have any problem finding sources of protein here in the moderate climate of the Northwest. After all, there were plenty of deer and fish, rabbits and crabs to be caught or hunted. And foraging for edible greens like fiddlehead ferns, sorrel and nettles, particularly in the moist river valleys and rainforests of the Coast Range, contributed to the diet of the region's earliest residents.

Success!

Starches, though, were a real problem, which my friend Hank Shaw pointed out as we were standing knee-deep in the mucky verges of the shallow lake at Ayers Creek Farm. Luckily there were starchy tubers to be found, like the ones we were looking for in the clay and mud beneath our feet. Lewis and Clark wrote that they stopped "to examine a root of which the natives had been digging great quantities in the bottoms" along the Deschutes River, and likened their appearance "to a small Irish potato."

Hank in his element.

A couple of years ago Hank had mentioned that he was pining to forage for wapato, also known as arrowhead or the duck potato (the Latin is Sagittaria latifolia), which is best found in October here in the Northwest. I remembered that Anthony Boutard had mentioned he'd seen arrowhead plants in the lake on the farm, and tucked the factoid away for future reference. When Hank announced he was coming up from Sacramento for a weekend event earlier this month, I immediately e-mailed Anthony and arranged a trip out to the farm. I also borrowing two pairs of waders, being as we didn't have the fortitude of those earlier foragers who would dig the tubers in their bare feet, wrangling them from the muck with their toes and collecting the rounded bulbs when they floated to the surface.

The harvest.

Anthony had flagged what he felt were promising spots, and though he didn't follow through with the threat of erecting a reviewing stand, the better to watch the impending man-vs.-muck competition, we waded out into the marshy shallows. Hank said that on previous expeditions he'd found the wapato with its green, arrow-shaped leaves standing alone, but here it was woven into a thick mat with other marsh grasses. The green leaves had turned brown and shriveled, leaving only the celery-like stalks standing. Fortunately they were easy to distinguish from the browned grasses around them, and it was fairly easy to reach down under the stalks and find the round, potato-y bulbs anchored in the mud.

Peeled wapato.

Ranging from the size of olives to that of tennis balls—it was thrilling to pull out one of those, let me tell you—the two of us managed to harvest almost five pounds in just 90 minutes of work, and that was in one patch about 12 feet in diameter. Which left plenty of bulbs to mature into future plants, not only in that spot but all around the perimeter of the lake.

Crispy, fried in duck fat.

Taking them back to the Boutards' house, we washed off the mud and peeled the bulbs with a paring knife, then Hank sliced them and fried them in duck fat from some breasts that we were having for lunch. The first bite? A crunchy, light French fry was my first thought, much less dense than a potato but with the same sweet, starchy flavor as its fellow tuber.

Most of them would be going home with Hank to be used in developing recipes for his blog, and he did offer to leave some of them for us, but I know where to find more—not just out in Gaston, but maybe someplace a little closer to home. After all, our own Sauvie Island was originally named by the Lewis and Clark expedition, which christened it "Wappetoe Island."

Photos of foraging in the field by Linda Colwell.

Hank Shaw's Guide to Cooking "Antlered Things"

On a weekend at the beach I started reading Hank Shaw's first book, Hunt, Gather, Cook, and was moved to write this:

"After reading the first couple of chapters, my usual single-minded march to the beach turned into a completely different experience. I slowed down and started scanning those patches of green with different eyes, wondering what that blooming shrub might be, whether its bell-shaped blossoms would turn into berries in the next few weeks and if they might be edible. What would I make with them?"

Yes, I'd foraged mushrooms and knew the names of a few edible plants, but Hank's way of writing about the landscape made it come alive in a way that I hadn't experienced before. And that's what makes his new book on hunting and cooking "deer, elk antelope, moose and other antlered things" so intriguing. You see, I'm not a hunter. But I have been gifted with a few care packages of venison in my day, and I know that Hank's advice on pulling the maximum amount of flavor from the meat, while not burying it under a mound of cheffy acrobatics, is going to make that next gift package—hint, hint, all you hunters—a meal to remember.

And even if those care packages are few and far between (sniff!) I know I'll gain a unique perspective I'd never get any other way, from a humane, thoughtful and, to my mind, incomparable writer on the natural world. So watch the video above if you care to, but please consider a donation to make this book a reality. You'll be supporting a great cook and writer in his effort to teach people more about their food and where it comes from, a mission I can totally get behind.

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Update from Hank:

Floored. Astonished. Gobsmacked. In less than 13 hours, we made our initial goal - the one that determines whether Buck, Buck, Moose will live or die. Not sure if we set a Kickstarter speed record, but it must be close. I am not an emotional man, but I gotta say I am genuinely choked up at the outpouring of support for Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and this venison cookbook.

Your efforts are a loud and forceful message to anyone who cares to listen about where the real priorities of North American hunters lie: Our trophies are at the table. Food is why we hunt, and your support of this book can be no louder affirmation of that fact. I salute you.

Now what?

The initial $30,000 goal makes Buck, Buck, Moose a reality. Every dollar spent beyond that goal helps us print more books, pay our subcontractors, save money for a second print run and to market the book when it comes out - without a big-name publisher to do that, we're on our own. And PR ain't cheap.

Finally, if we do really well, I'll squirrel away some cash to fund my book tour, which will start around Labor Day 2016. Every dollar chipped in now allows me to come to your town when the book is released next year. Visiting you was the highlight of my tour for Duck, Duck, Goose. Let me do it one more time!

So keep spreading the word. There are more than 14 million deer hunters in the US and Canada. We have a long road ahead of us to reach them. But it all starts with you telling your deer-hunting friends about Buck, Buck, Moose.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart!

~ Hank

Guest Essay: The Hands of a Gatherer

There is something essentially human about working with your hands, especially when you are gathering food to feed your family. My friend, journalist and author Hank Shaw, has made a career out of his passion for hunting, fishing and foraging, and in this essay he reflects on the reasons he chose this path and why he believes it's good for all of us to engage in. I encourage you to click through to read the entire piece.

My hands feel like they’ve been hit with a weed whacker. One finger is swollen, another scraped to hell. A burn here, a blister there. The tips are all tender, and I don’t know how many little puncture wounds I have that are in various stages of healing.

These are the hands of a gatherer, an angler, a hunter. A cook. They are my hands. This past week has been a maelstrom mashup of almost all that do in my odd little life, and my hands tell that story.

A burn from a catering job. Blisters from hammering away at a rocky shoreline with a steel bulb planter, looking for littlenecks. A nasty puncture wound from a rockfish spine. Another from an errant hook. A lattice of lacerations on the back of my hands – the price of picking blackberries. And with most of my fingerprints scraped off by hours of digging forearm deep into rocky sand in search of buried horseneck clams, it’d be a great time to commit a crime.

Hands, if you look closely, will often tell you how their owners put food on their table. Think of a fisherman’s calloused paws, or an artist’s delicate digits. People’s professions can be guessed at by the state of their hands. Mine are no different, only they tell this story more directly.

Lord knows I need not do this. I have been a writer by trade for more than two decades. I live in a suburb, surrounded by supermarkets. Were I to forsake them, I’d still have a farmer’s market available to me almost every day of the week, and friends who raise livestock far superior to any of the sad, factory-farmed meat you see wrapped in plastic. I choose to work for my food for a variety of reasons, but it’s in no small part because, well, we are hard-wired to do so. Every animal on earth does two things above all else: Reproduce, and eat. It’s what we do.

Yesterday I found myself standing above Tomales Bay, stopping to catch my breath. The hill I was climbing was steep, and I was carrying a bucket full of clams and seawater that weighed somewhere north of 35 pounds. Heart hammering against my ribs, I looked up, gasped for air — and understood why I do this: An oceanic breeze cooled my forehead, whisking away the beading sweat so it could meld itself into the mists that still hung in hollows of this coastal plain. I could smell the salt, but also the spicy perfume of a California summer, a mix dominated in this place by a native bay laurel and a seaside sagebush that I wish I could somehow wear as cologne.

Read the rest of Hank's essay and find out what we have in common with animals in the zoo. Top photo by Holly Heyser.

Guest Essay: Seeing

We've all watched the videos of people walking and texting, the ones where the texter falls into a fountain or splats into some wet cement. I see it around me when neighbors walk by, absorbed in their phones when they're walking their dogs or, worse, strolling with their children, missing the opportunity for connection. My friend, journalist, hunter, forager and author Hank Shaw, recently published an essay on this phenomenon, and has given me permission to post an excerpt. I encourage you to click through to read the entire piece.

I went for a walk today, and found myself surrounded by zombies.

One of the places where I wander around to read nature’s news also happens to be a spot that on any given sunny weekend is choked with walkers, runners and bikers. On those rare weekends when I venture out into this, I feel oddly out of place, like those people who stand still in Times Square while being photographed in time lapse: a rock in a raging torrent of humanity.

This is not to say that I sit motionless on a bench like some octogenarian feeding pigeons. I actually do end up walking five miles or so on a given day, but it can often take me several hours because, well, to read the signs of the natural world you must slow yourself down. Slowing down: A concept so alien to most modern Americans that they view it as a sign of weakness. On the contrary, an overly regimented life is one empty of wonder. And wonder is no weakness.

I honestly have no real way of gauging the inner lives of those earnest exercisers around me, but their exterior isn’t pretty. At best their eyes appear vacant, their minds focused on whatever it is they are listening to on their headphones. At worst they look like the damned in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

As I walk through this bustle, noting the comings and goings of flowers and fruits and leaves, checking to see what schedule life seems to be taking this year, I am almost never noticed, even though I might be picking up pine nuts off the ground or collecting seeds or elderberries or mustard greens in full view of the good people of the path. I used to think everyone just thought I was a crazy homeless person and were consciously avoiding eye contact. That does still happen, but I’ve learned to recognize the difference between that and those who truly don’t register my existence.

This obliviousness fascinates me. Why, if you are so intent on whatever it is blaring itself into your skull, are you out in nature at all? Wouldn’t a treadmill suffice?

Of course it won’t. I was once a runner. A competitive one, even. So fast there was no possible way I could truly appreciate my surroundings. But I did, or at least I told myself I did. Nature exerts a sort of osmotic pressure on us all, seeping into those who lack nature within themselves even if ignored, much the way a salt brine works in meat. Even something as simple as sun on your head and a breeze in your face makes a world of difference.

Yet to me, a forager, they all still seem zombies. The difference is one of degree, I suppose, a sliding scale ending with the wild animals who live along this path. As intimate as I am with nature, my life does not depend on it the way a squirrel or goose or scrub jay’s does. For those of us who slow down and take the time to really look at their surroundings, we at least get to borrow that sight a wild thing possesses permanently — a sight the cyclist or runner can never attain (at least while they’re hurtling through nature rather than looking at it).

So what, exactly, did I see? (read the rest of the essay)

Photo of ithuriel's spear by Hank Shaw.

Guest Essay: In Defense of the Chicken

My friend Hank Shaw is a journalist, hunter, forager and author. Recently he published an essay on what we think of as the most boring meat imaginable, the chicken. He excoriates those who brought this once noble bird to its current lowly state, and makes the case for why we should gladly pay $5 a pound for it. He gave me permission to post an excerpt, and I encourage you to click through to read the entire essay.

I bought a chicken the other day. To virtually every other American, this is an event akin to taking out the trash, or driving to work — a commonplace barely worth noting. But there’s something you should know: I have not bought meat for the home more than a handful of times over the past decade. So buying any meat is very much an event for me. You might ask why on earth, of all the things that I could have chosen to break my self-imposed fast on domesticated meats, would I buy a chicken?

Because of all the flavors I miss from the store-bought world — ribeyes, skirt steak, a huge pork chop, shrimp — chicken is the one I long for most often. Chicken. You read that right. Chicken deserves respect. It deserves to be reclaimed by the culinary world for what it has been for most of human history: A bird worthy of a king’s table, a gift for cooks to work magic on. A platter of home.

How Americans came to believe that $1 a pound chicken is as inalienable a right as free speech or the right to bear arms is a depressing story of industrial might over right. Suffice to say that when Frank Perdue said it took a tough man to make a tender chicken, he was right. He and his colleague John Tyson needed to be OK with debasing a once prized bird, to polluting environments and destroying whole communities. The industrial chicken is a wretched shadow of its former self. To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien: “they were chickens once… tortured, and mutilated… a ruined and terrible form of life…now perfected.”

The modern chicken has a breast so big it can barely walk or fly. It’s lethargic, to the point where even if a farmer gives it pasture to roam it won’t. It grows with frightening speed: In 1960 it took about 5 months to raise a meat chicken for market. Now it can be done in 6 weeks. In 1925, a chicken needed to eat 4.7 pounds of feed to gain 1 pound. Now it only needs to eat 1.9 pounds of feed to gain the same pound. Only tilapia, the Soylent Green of fish, has a better feed ratio.

This is the chicken you eat. And we Americans eat a lot of it. Chicken topped beef as America’s favorite meat in 1992. In 2006 we ate an average of 87.7 pounds of these birds, the highest poundage on record. And as you well know, we are not eating all this chicken as a whole bird.

Various shreds of it are glued together to make your McNugget. It’s injected with a saline solution to “plump” it and make the watery, flabby, tasteless meat even more tender; apparently teeth are no longer needed to enjoy your skinless, boneless chicken lump. it’s sliced and diced in so many ways that the concept of roasting a whole chicken — once a bedrock skill every cook possessed — is now so daunting it’s a challenge on Top Chef. (Incidentally, chicken used to be almost always sold whole, with the head and feet on, right up into the 1950s. Why? Consumers judged chickens like fish: Are the eyes clear? Feet fresh looking? People knew what a good chicken looked like. Now if you did that you’d create an incident, unless you are at an Asian market. )

No wonder the average consumer recoils in horror at the notion of $5 a pound chicken. Chicken has become our baseline, our lowest common denominator of meat. It’s our daily bread, a right like free bread in ancient Rome or free gas in modern Saudi Arabia.

Read the rest of this essay.

Top photo by Holly A. Heyser.

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled…Walnuts?

Yes, you read that right. And here I thought I was getting all crazy creative by finally making nocino, a walnut liqueur made from green walnuts, something I'd been meaning to do for several years.

The raw material.

But then, wouldn't you know it, my friend (and master forager) Hank Shaw has to up the ante by posting about the pickled walnuts he's making from green walnuts. Seriously? Pickled walnuts? Ack!

Here's what he wrote:

"There may be a few foods that are more English than pickled walnuts, but with the possible exception of fish and chips, I can’t think of one. Chances are, however, you’ve never heard of them. I hadn’t, until several years ago when I ordered the meat-and-cheese plate at a local Irish place called deVere’s. On this place was a black disk. I asked the waitress what on earth it was, and she smiled; she’d had this question before: 'It’s a pickled walnut. It’s good with the cheddar.'

"I followed her advice and stabbed the disk with my fork, adding a bit of cheddar cheese and a bit of cold roast beef to round things out. Wow. It was a bit like eating solid steak sauce, with a little floral aroma and a zephyr of bitterness that just barely let you notice it. I ate another disk all by itself: Fairly soft, puckery and strangely floral. And yes, there was definitely a Worcestershire-Heinz 57-A1-thing going on here. How had I never had these before?"

Starting the brining.

So being someone who can't resist a throwdown like that, particularly since he also mentioned that they're good in beef and lamb stews, in tomato salads—helloooo tomato season—as well as with scallops and shrimp, I decided to give it a whirl and try the recipe he provided in his post. My neighbor's tree was heavy with some perfect green, nutty orbs, so after inquiring politely if I could pick a few, I've started a batch.

Brining took a week, and I've just packed the salty results into quart jars (top photo) to see what happens next. Check back in a month or so to get the full report!

Quick Hits: Grassa, Ha & VL, Stone Cliff Inn

When it comes to meeting up with a friend for lunch, those of us on the east side of the river have endless choices in a panoply of cuisines, from American barbecue to Mexican tacos to African stews to Cuban sandwiches. And you can pretty much name your price point, from cheap to très cher. Downtown is another story altogether—in numbers, variety and cost—if you want to sit at an inside table in a heated room, and the past few weeks have been so unseasonably cold that those were pretty much required attributes.

Grassa's Aglia Olio.

So when a friend who works at PSU wanted to meet during her limited lunch hour, I suggested Grassa, Rick Gencarelli's pasta emporium on the upper side of downtown, an area recently bestowed with the tony-sounding title "West End." Walking in, some neck-craning is required to read the ceiling-to-floor blackboard menu before you step up to the register to place your order. Then you're given a number and directed to the long, shared counter-height tables and stools or the bar facing the kitchen.

We opted for two plates of the house-made pasta, and within 15 minutes they were placed before us. My squid ink pasta "Aglia Olio" was a basic pangratatto, the pasta beautifully black and tossed with olive oil, garlic, chiles, romano and crunchy toasted breadcrumbs. My companion's "Gigli"—lamb bolognese, pecorino and a sprinkling of fried mint—broke the comfort-o-meter with its warm, luscious combination of pasta and fatty meat sauce. At eight and eleven dollars, respectively, these were well worth the price, and we could have split a salad for not much more. Plus we were finished in time for a leisurely cappucino at Heart a half-block away.

Details: Grassa, 1205 SW Washington St. 503-241-1133.

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The day after my friend Hank Shaw's incredible booksigning/dinner at St. Jack where chef Aaron Barnett blew the roof off the building with his ducky prowess, we decided to take it easy and have a restorative lunch at what I consider the finest pho palace in PDX, Ha & VL. This postage stamp of a place has been known to run out of soup late in the morning, so I was somewhat nervous walking in a little closer to noon than I like. Plus Hank's home town of Sacramento has some of the best Asian restaurants of anyplace in California, which cannot, sadly, be said of Portland.

Ha Luu, maestress of pho.

I needn't have worried on either count. Since proprietor Ha Luu has started making two soups a day rather than just one, we were able to get a bowl of each. Mine was the Phnom Penh special, a perfectly balanced bowl of broth, noodle and bits of pork and seafood that makes me crave Luu's soups on a regular basis. Hank's pho ga (chicken soup for you non-pho speakers) was equally amazing, and he proclaimed that the pho here was as good as any he could get in his home town.

Details: Ha & VL, 2738 SE 82nd Ave., #102. 503-772-0103.

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The Stone Cliff Inn is one of those places that takes you by surprise. First off, it's a giant Doug fir-timbered lodge set high on a cliff overlooking the Clackamas River outside of Carver. It was built by the son of a local logging family, the Rosenbaums, on the site of a rock quarry, the rock from which was used to line the steep driveway and which forms the foundation of the lodge.

Inside you can sit in the vaulted dining room in front of the giant stone fireplace (left) or at one of the many windowed tables with a spectacular view of the river. The lunch menu features a decent middle-of-the-road selection of salads and sandwiches, but on it is also a very good and  plate of fish and chips with a hefty helping of fish, a decent cole slaw and some of the best sweet potato fries I've had in town.

If you're looking for a destination after a weekend drive in the country, this would be a fun place to go, or to take your Aunt Tilly for a nice lunch and a glass of wine. I'm interested in heading back when the deck is open and I can sit looking out on that great view with a cold beer to go along with those sweet potato fries.

Details: Stone Cliff Inn, 17900 S. Clackamas River Dr., Oregon City. 503-631-7900.