Picking Chokecherry
Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Berry Season Has Arrived! Finally!

Yes, finally!  We now have Oregon grape gracing our wild salads and it has been SO missed!  This week, we began bringing home chokecherry, a month later than it’s supposed to show up.  In fact, many trees still haven’t ripened yet.  We have two strains of chokecherry in the valley, picked one strain for the first time this week and it makes a very dark-coloured juice after boiling.  At first, I thought I’d boiled it way too long, but all that did was concentrate the flavour.  The second batch from that picking got boiled last night for the proper 5 minutes, and it was still that colour.

Black ChokecherryI like to use chokecherry in making vinegar for salads, pancake syrop, and using the leaves, dried crushed berries, and bark in teas and hot cocoa.  Chokecherry really adds to the richness of cocoa!  We don’t drink coffee, but when my daughter added some of the concentrate to a friend’s cup of coffee, supposedly it tasted really good.

While I was boiling the chokecherry last night, I paid a trip to the baking soda box as well, saving myself roughly $10 off grocery store pricing for toothpaste and facial scrub.  I also made another batch of anti-bacterial hand soap.  I have a jar of herbal infused vinegar in a corner of the counter for my next batch of vinegar hair rinse.  That will save another $3 roughly.  So all totaled, I’ve saved an estimated $15-$17 because of last night’s efforts.

We have half a turkey roaster filled with dried purslane to pound up, as well as more dried nettle to crush as well.  My daughter brought in more Mountain Sage to dry and we finally crushed our first round of dried narrow plantain leaf this week.  Broadleaf plantain is growing well finally!  Looking forward to gathering their seeds later this fall.  Gathering salsify roots to do more test boils.  See how the stringiness changes as the plants die.  Got three more on a hike a few days ago.  So foraging is slowly picking up steam.  Not a good year so far, but we’ll see what we can lay aside for the winter this year.  If the roots soften up decently, we’ll have a root veggie this winter, and if the false Solomon’s Seal berries thaw out nicely, we’ll have wild peas for dinners as well.  I need to test that theory now that we have a decent handful in the freezer.

Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 7: Drinkable Salads

They come in all shapes and sizes.  Some come with attitude, some come placidly.  But ALL are at the mercy of critters, birds, and now US!  Yes, the wild adventures continue as we realize summer is turning to fall in our neck of the woods, and we have to consider how we’ll continue trying to save money as plants wind down for the year.

The idea of drinking our salads came up in conversation and research turned to things that grow nearby that can be turned into tea with a bit of honey.  So far, we have three tea blends.  According to a book on edible plants of Canada, evergreen needles can be used in teas, just not every single day, particularly for one species of Pine.  It was interesting to see how this book spoke positively about Ponderosa Pine, while everyone else spoke negatively.  The only negative is that if you want to have kids, don’t ingest Ponderosa pine while pregnant, it contains an element that will abort the child.  Otherwise, all warnings seemed to pertain to various tanins.  Tea in general has tanins as well, with green tea having more tanin in it than black tea believe it or not, and the reason most teas are black is precisely because of the tanins in the water.  However you don’t see tanin warnings on boxes or bags of store-bought tea.

Thanks to schedules being what they’ve been lately, we haven’t had time to forage for our usual salad fixings, but one outing did give us a fair bit of tea fixings.  So we’ve been drinking our salads for the past week.

Two teas that have gone over well so far have the following ingredients:

You will need:

To serve in mugs for four or more people
Use two quart jars or of similar size

Tea #1

Add:
two or three juniper berries per jar
handful of fresh chopped apple per jar (half that for dried)
a couple pinches of mint per jar
three large pinches of crushed nettle
three or four large pinches of crushed chokecherry leaves
handful of fresh halved rosehips split between two jars (half that for dried)

Tea #2
two pinches of fir per jar
one clump of dried apple per jar
two small pinches of nettle per jar
one clump of dried kinnikinnick per jar
a few rose hips per jar
two or three pinches of chokecherry leaves per jar
a teaspoon or less of crushed dried chokecherries

Add the above ingredients to each jar.  Heat up your kettle.  Pour into jars and let steep while you start dinner, or pour into jars and let steep all night ahead of tomorrow’s dinner.

Simply add honey to taste.

Even a third tea recipe, and the first one we tried being a carbon copy of tea #1 above but with pine instead of mint, tasted not too bad.  All three of these combinations tasted better when the emptied jar’s tea components were dumped into the second partially-emptied jar’s water and allowed to steep in the fridge over night.  Dividing up the difference and adding hot water to melt the honey, gave the tea a mellower texture and allowed the flavours to infuse better.

We still plan on having our wild salads if we can get a few more foraging days in for green leafy additions.  But we’ve just entered the season for Juniper berries here, and will be foraging for more of those soon!

In other non-shopping news, the boxes of windfall apples we gathered awhile back are slowly getting processed.  We have four pie packets and three cobbler packets in the freezer.  We have several month’s worth of apple sauce in the freezer as well, and have begun drying chopped apple for use in tea, gerbil food, and my daughter’s pemmican experiments.

Yes, my daughter is making pemmican and made her third batch this week.  Apparently this third batch was the best so far.  She used a flour mix of coconut, acorn, chokecherry, and ground dried apple to toss with the ground up stew beef she cooked.  She threw in ground up dried purslane as well.  I think personally, that this will be the recipe she goes for in the future.

Preparing the Kinnikinnick for drying was an exercise in amusement!  I couldn’t help taking pictures and posting the following homemade meme to Facebook!

What looks, cores, bruises, and tastes like an apple but is NOT an apple?!After posting that meme, I turned on the oven the next day to actually dry them, then went to get my daughter from work.  Upon entering the house, she promptly declared the place smelled like apple pie!  I had neither seasoned, nor made apple pie, only dried the bearberries in the oven!  So not only do these little things look, taste, bruise, and core like miniature apples, they also smell like them!

We also managed to find more Oregon grape that hasn’t shriveled up yet.  Hopefully we’ll be able to harvest way more next year, but we didn’t know these were edible till late in the season.  We have a decent amount to keep us from buying dried cranberries for a little while, but not for the entire winter season sadly.

Another plant we need to keep bringing more home of before they die off for the year, is nettle!  That stuff, while a pain to harvest if you’re not careful, has so many uses in our hygiene and dietary requirements!  Both it and dandelion!  I haven’t mastered how to cook burdock leaves and flowers yet to add those to our salads or sauces, but apparently after cooking they taste like artichoke.   We’ll have to experiment more with that next spring.

Our own garden is slowly releasing stuff for us.  We are regularly harvesting basil and mint and those plants are making their way indoors.  Our purslane dirt bag has largely taken, though a few in the middle appear to have died.  The potatoe plants look almost ready for harvesting as well.  Attempts to grow comfrey plants from seed took half the year, but we now have tiny seedlings.  Comfrey will be used for medical purposes once it grows big enough.  We may also try growing our own kinnikinnick over the winter and see how that experiment turns out.

Shopping in the woods has led to the discovery that not everything about a given plant is known by everyone, and we are having to piece information together.  Eventually I need to start recording what I know of each plant and making posts about those, then updating them as I learn new things.  Needless to say, these wild adventures aren’t ending anytime soon.

Wild Adventures with Marilynn Dawson
Marilynn Dawson Saving Money - Groceries

Wild Adventures Part 6: Processing Continued. . .

Home tea blendI sit here tonight drinking a test cup of nettle, dandelion, chokecherry leaves, semi-crushed dried berries and stems, and homegrown mint leaves and stems.  I mixed one part dandelion to two parts of everything else more or less, and one part mint roughly.  The resulting tea had a very grassy taste with a decidedly nettle scent, but with a bit of honey, tastes very mellow.  Not bad as it grows on you.  That mix of tea is now in a little labelled container up in the tea cupboard.  There’s enough chokecherry crushed to make tea for a long time this winter!  Nettle has a decent amount in the cupboard too, but I only had enough dandelion root for the blend I put together this evening.

infused shampooThe first bottle of infused shampoo is in the shower now as well, along with infused facial scrub and leave-in conditioner.  We also made more of the chokecherry vinegar as well, meaning I need to pay back the VISA for yet more buckets of salad mix and salad dressing.  I also need to pay back the VISA for a second bottle of shampoo as shortly, all of us will be using the same shampoo instead of different bottles.  I’m looking forward to updating that spreadsheet needless to say!

The flour attempt with dried rice pulp resulted in very fine almost salt-like granules coming out of the grain mill.  Trying to crack dried chokecherries with the hand grain mill threatened to tear up the countertop, so we resorted to pounding in the mortar instead.  Eventually I was able to use the mill to break the berries down further, but only got them so far.  Using a metal strainer, we managed to get maybe half a cup or more of chokecherry flour to date.

The first batch along with the rice made about one cup that I threw into the breadmaker using the basic white loaf recipe.  The resulting loaf proved dense, meaning I probably should have chosen the whole wheat bread recipe instead, but otherwise, the loaf did not taste much different than normal.  I’ll be testing again soon.  The second reason for denseness may be due to the fact the chokecherry flour has no gluten in it.  We’ll see how the next loaf goes.  We have lots of dried berries to crack and grind now!  We’ll have to see how much flour we actually get out of it.  Rumour has it this flour can be used in place of corn starch for thickening soups and sauces.  I’ll have to try that out soon too.

infused facial cleanser and conditionerFacial cleanser, shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, tea, salad dressing, salad greens. . . all a mix of foraging, vinegar, baking soda, and more liquid glycerin soap than I thought I’d end up making. . . eucalyptus oil thrown in here and there for good measure. . . eventually I’ll be able to clean both the house and myself using far fewer chemicals!  The wild salads have more nutrition in them than what we were doing before as well.  Add to that saving money on those aspects of grocery shopping, and it’s a win, win, win situation.