April 30, 2011: In 2011, in my continuing quest to meet and greet as many useful native plants as possible, I took a foraging walk on the Bus Trail at Tiger Mountain with my friend Brook Hurst Stephens of LearntoPreserve.com. It was led by Langdon Cook, author of Fat of the Land. Here are some the highlights.
Indian plum/osoberry leaf. Langdon mentioned that a local chef (I believe it was Ashlyn Forshner of Tilikum Place) is using them as a garnish. Taste like cucumber or bitter melon, but they had a nice sweet finish to me. Per Wikipedia: Native Americans eat them, make tea of the bark, and chew its twigs to use as a mild anesthetic and aphrodisiac.
Indian plum blossoms. For a picture of the fruit (and examples of other blossoms and other stages of many of the plants in this set), please see this slideshow of a Washington Park Arboretum native plant walk.
Wood sorrel (Oxalis oregona) leaf: delicious! Lemony. Probably one of my favorite foraged edibles so far. Here's a recipe from Langdon for salmon with wood sorrel sauce.
Close up of wood sorrel
Fiddlehead fern nestled into the base of the plant. Pick them when they are closer to the ground.
You'll need to clean off the brown covering of the fiddlehead.
Fiddlehead fern, rubbed clean of its little brown fuzz jacket.
Langdon compares a variety of fiddleheads. Not every fiddlehead is edible or tasty, so know your ID before picking. On the left is the rubbed clean lady fern fiddlehead. On right is the bracken fern fiddlehead. I don't have my notes on the middle one, I believe it was a wood fern of some sort and probably not worth eating based on this blog post from Langdon.
One of the helpful points of the walk was when Langdon pointed out areas for future foraging or particular environments to watch out for. This type of environment, he said, looked like a good oyster mushroom area.
Red huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium) plant, recognizable by its bright green branches. See the fruit here.
Langdon discussing one method for berry picking - laying out a blanket under the bush and shaking the berries off.
Oregon grape bloom, preparing for the later berries. From Pojar: "The tart, purple berries of both Oregon-grapes were eaten, but generally not in quantity. Often they were mixed with salal or some other sweeter fruit. Today they are used for jelly, and some people make wine from them." (See the berry here.)
Salal berry plant bud. Salal berries, per Pojar, "were in many places on the NW Coast the most plentiful and important fruit for aboriginal peoples. They were eaten both fresh and dried into cakes...For trading or selling, the salal berries were mixed with currants, elderberries, or unripe salal berries. [They] were also used to sweeten other foods and the Haida used salal berries to thicken salmon eggs." See the blossoms here and the fruits here.
Claytonia sibirica (Siberian Spring Beauty, Siberian Miner's Lettuce, Candy Flower or Pink Purslane)
Snag - result of pileated woodpecker foraging
Thimbleberry leaf. Langdon highly recommends the berries from this plant. They are fragile and best enjoyed out in the wild. The leaves are very soft and sometimes called "toilet paper plant" for that reason. See the blossoms here and the fruit here.
Aged rose hip.
Rose hips have a hairy, seedy inside that will generally need to be eliminated by passing through a seive or food mill.
Devil's club. They have, as Langdon has written, "a cool, resiny, evergreen sort of flavor" that he has used to flavor a chocolate sauce.
Devil's club buds
Langdon noted that you should avoid foraging near a telephone pole as they are treated with creosote.