Category Archives: Around the Farmhouse

The Dining Room and Living Room Tour: Unpacked and Settled In

Remember when I gave you the house tour right after we moved in and showed you all the scary piles and the crap everywhere? Well, we finished unpacking long ago and there are still generally piles of scary crap all over our house because I have the equivalent of 3 full time jobs and a very poor relationship with laundry, but when I do clean my house it’s much different than when you saw it the first time. This first picture is our dining room table. During the first house tour we were still pretending this was the living room. We like having festive lights on all year round so Philip decorated our window with them. We love it!

Look how clean that floor is! The dining room table has no mail on it! Chick is running up the stairs to position herself for maximum barking impact when the mailman comes.

This is my single most favorite piece of furniture besides my desk. It’s from the early thirties and was shipped over here from Italy.

Just another view of my dining room. I’m only showing you the dining room and living room this time so I want to give you lots of opportunity to enjoy it. If you ever come to visit me you will not recognize them because they will be covered in crap.

Looking from the living room to the dining room. Chick is not a restful dog.

I love this picture because of the light streaming in from the ONE window in this room. The curtains are usually drawn to keep the glare off the tv.

We like chairs, not couches. Though I miss having an alternative place to fall asleep if the bedroom is inhospitably loud. When we hang out together we each like having our own chair. The purple one is mine, the blue leather one is Philip’s and the dark rose colored one near the floor lamp is Max’s.

Lastly – this is the tv cabinet. It’s my mom’s and she’s taking it back to put in her apartment. We don’t know what we’ll do. We’ll have to find some kind of replacement. I’ll worry about that another day. The shelf to the right is filled with my cookbooks and gardening books.

Some day the stars will align and the upstairs will be all tidy and looking pretty and I’ll give you the tour of that. I’m just happy to have it on record that every once in a while my living room and dining room are neat and tidy and pretty and inviting.

Hope you enjoyed the mini-tour!

Stitch Needs a Facelift but Pippa Doesn’t

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You may have noticed that my blog is all jacked up? I have. My drop-down menu disappeared and there’s a weird overlapping and blacking that happens sometimes when I do a search and scroll down. It’s weird. I’ve been wanting to change things a little for a while. Then I spent two weeks learning to use a new theme over at Better Than Bullets and it exhausted me before I even got it just how I wanted it.

So if things get even funkier and more messed up in the next few weeks – please be patient and don’t give up on Stitch and Boots! I have some updated pictures of my dining room and living room to share with you and I’ve also got a recipe for laundry detergent to post. Not only that – but some yard work has happened and this week I’m planting some culinary herbs in pots outside my back door that I’ll want to show you.

Now I just have to get up the nerve to dive into the world of themes and fonts and try to make Stitch both functional and attractive again. I think I’m going to need a lot more sustaining beverages to accomplish this!

Meanwhile – enjoy Pippa being adorable! Her new nick name (in case you haven’t already heard) is Squeaky Pumpkin. You know you want to touch her belly!

10 Food Blogging Trends That Need to End

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1. Rehashing the rehashed recipes ad infinitum…

Here are some food trends that have been done to fucking DEATH: bacon, candied bacon, bacon jam, doughnuts (the new cupcake), kale chips, buffalo anything, pulled pork, quinoa, bacon in desserts, red velvet anything, chocolate chip cookies, cookie dough anything, loaded baked potato soup, green smoothies, anything with chia seeds, s’mores anything, homemade marshmallows, and sweet potato fries just to name a few. You’re just following the fumes of trends that have been driven into the ground.

2. Photos of food spilling and dripping over the sides of dishes.

It’s not arty – it’s gross. It makes my fingers feel sticky and rather than wanting to grab a spoon or fork and eat your food I want to grab a sponge or a dish towel and clean up after you.

3. Stuffing cookies with candy or other cookies.

Stuffing food inside other food. This over-the-top stuffing of food inside other food has become one big gluttonous denial that heart attacks and diabetes could happen to YOU.

4. Supporting the packaged crap industry

There is apparently a continuous contest to see how many ways one can cram processed crap into their home baked goods. Disposing of whole bags of fun-size candy bars in a cake recipe is sick and needs to stop. Please refer to #3.

5. Hyperbolic food writing.

We get it – food can be emotional for some people. Suggesting that a single dish of food is “life changing” is ridiculous. Talking about food as though it can heal all the wounds of life is also ridiculous. Be real. Stop trying to flog emotions out of us with the promise of life-changing pasta. We’re not simpletons.

6. Striped paper straws

Time for a new prop for food photo shoots involving any kind of sweets or sweet beverages. My eyes are so tired of seeing the same striped straws everywhere. What annoys me about them aside from their ubiquity is the “old fashioned wholesomeness” bloggers seem to be implying as if jaunty little straws can neutralize the potential for heart disease and obesity represented on the endless parades of plates piled high with processed-crap-stuffed baked goods.

7. Fondant.

Fondant doesn’t taste good. The first rule of food is that it should nourish your body. The first rule of food worth talking about is that it also taste good. If it neither nourishes nor tastes good it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, you may as well be sculpting cakes out of play-dough.

8. The evils of “mouth-feel”

Never describe to me how food will FEEL or ACT in my mouth (or in yours). The second you start talking about food in people’s mouths I am imagining masticated food and that makes me lose my appetite which is the opposite of what your writing is trying to accomplish. It’s not funny. It truly grosses me out. I don’t want a “party” or an “explosion” of any kind IN MY MOUTH. So get out of my mouth, please, and keep me out of yours too.

9. Fluffy cake flavored drinks pretending to be martinis

Calling any beverage in a martini glass a martini. It’s not the glass that makes it a martini – it’s the use of gin + vermouth that makes it a martini. The only other version of a martini that’s still a martini is vodka + vermouth. If your drink contains anything else – it is most definitely NOT a martini so give it a new name.*

10. The cast of characters ingredient shot.**

Unless you plan to not have an ingredient list with your recipe (which would be a dumb move) no one needs to see the ingredients all grouped together on your kitchen counter. It adds insult to injury when every item in the photo is labeled – it suggests that your readers are so new to the world that they don’t know what butter looks like. Trust me – we know it when we’re looking at eggs just like we understood what you meant when you listed “2 eggs” in the ingredient list.

*A splash of olive brine and a garnish of an olive or a lemon twist are the only other variations allowable for the drink to still bear the name “martini”. If you’re using flavored vodkas – it’s not a martini.

**My friend Sarah’s words for it. Brilliant.

A Walking Tour of San Francisco: Chinatown Groceries

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Last Friday I went into San Francisco to meet a friend I hadn’t seen in over 15 years. I did a lot of walking, as I always do. If you want to see more of my walk in San Francisco you can read A Walking Tour of Down Town San Francisco: Angelina Style over at Better Than Bullets. This post is all pictures of groceries in Chinatown.

Starting with those chicken feet. A big bin of chicken feet. As a vegetarian who prefers that animals not be killed for eating I am happy when people use as much of an animal as they can. But I have to say – the sight of those toenails is about as unappetizing as food gets. I’d rather eat fried brains than suck on a chicken toe for juices or eat soup that was stewed with chicken toenails. If I was going to eat a human being – I would definitely not eat their fingers or toes.

What I love best about Chinese markets is how unpretentious they are – there is such a melee of STUFF. Such a jumble of dried goods and grains and nuts and packages of mysterious ingredients (only mysterious to me, not to the regular shoppers of the markets) and the bins and boxes used to hold all these interesting edibles are always bedraggled and funky. It may sound like an insult but it really isn’t. I think this is how people have been shopping for a thousand years before there were fancy big-ass grocery stores with shiny shelves and precious rustic (new) bins for vegetables*.

Like so many shops in Chinatown – the windows of this one don’t look like they’ve had a good scrub-down in ages. I don’t really know what that stuff is in the window. Maybe pastries of some sort? Except that I think they were selling live seafood too.

This fried skin interests me because it still has the ink markings on it. Waste nothing! I couldn’t figure out what it originally was. I thought maybe fish except that I don’t think fish scales would puff up like that with frying. I have no idea.

This shop has all kinds of packaged up fish. Are they cured fish? The fish in the bags in the front here aren’t vacuum sealed and they aren’t dried. Are they pickled in some way? Being in a bag on a warm day in San Francisco with no refrigeration makes me think these fish are preserved in some way. I’ll tell you what – this market was the stinkiest one I passed. What’s in those jars up high? Next time I want to explore more closely.

All of these pictures were taken on Stockton Street except for the chicken feet. Grant Street is pretty much all shops exploding with tourist crap and jewelry stores. Stockton Street is where most of the real markets are for kitchen supplies, food, and useful groceries. I think this is sugar cane.

When shopping in Asian grocery stores or Chinese shops like this one the thing that impresses me most is how much dried and pickled food there is. I think this is because the Chinese have had an established culture for so much longer than most others and traditions run deep – think about all those hundreds of years when there was no canning or refrigeration to keep foods good. People of all cultures relied on dried, fermented, salted, and smoked foods for getting through lean seasons until the last 150 years when people figured out how to can foods in sealed jars. While all cultures have a food history rich in dried foods – I think Chinese people still rely a great deal on dried and fermented foods out of tradition rather than necessity. Who’s going to fare the best in an apocalyptic situation? I’m betting on the Chinese people both in China and in the United States. People who know how to make meals from a handful of dried mushrooms and fish and fermented soybeans have a leg up on those who rarely use dried goods or keep much in their pantry. By the way – if you want to read more about the history of food preserving you should read the book “Pickled, Potted, and Canned” by Sue Shephard.** I don’t rely on dried goods much in my own cooking but I plan to play with my dehydrator more and explore the potential there.

That concludes my food tour of Chinatown. I hope you enjoyed it!

*Full disclosure: I love all grocery stores and food markets. I love those fancy ones too – I just don’t feel the same sense of curiosity when in them and sometimes it annoys me when stores get a little too precious over a carrot or charge $5.99 p/lb for tomatoes during the height of tomato season. But seriously – put me in a grocery store, open food market, or farmer’s market and I’m going to be in my happy place.

**No one I mention that book to ever wants to read it but it’s a truly interesting read – very entertaining and informative. It’s not some boring book about making jam. It’s a book that talks about how the cod industry grew a nation and how salt pork made exploring by ship possible and how dried goods made fighting wars on other people’s turf possible. Please ask for a copy for Christmas if you like food at all. I get nothing for recommending it to you. No affiliate links here and no sponsorship. In fact, the copy of this book I read was checked out from the library. (See if yours has a copy) and as I’m talking about it I realized that I want a copy of this for myself – so I think I’ll ask for it for Christmas.

An Olive Update: the first taste test!

Fermentation Fail: witness my moldy pickle

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It was time to check up on my fermenting pickles. The cloudy water was not encouraging. When I opened up the jars the smell was: garlicky dill with a hint of food-gone-bad. It almost smelled right but really didn’t. I suppose that they might be safe to eat when you consider that people have been burying fish to rot them for eating joy for hundreds of years.

But I am not a person who buries things until they’re rotted just-so. My dog does this. There is nothing finer to her than to bury a bit of rawhide in a good rainy spot, let it acquire a strong odor of dead body, and then dig up the blackened delicacy to eat at my feet.

I don’t know what I did wrong. The cauliflower I fermented two years ago never went bad. I had it in the cupboard for months before we finished it off. I was completely confident in it and we enjoyed eating it. I followed essentially the same process. An acquaintance of mine has suggested they got too warm. This is a very real possibility as September and part of October was pretty hot and there isn’t a truly cool spot in the house to store pickles.

I’m disappointed, obviously. Such a waste of pickling cucumbers. But as with all skills – there is a learning curve and some failures are expected. My olives seem to be doing alright still and I can start a new fermentation project using winter vegetables like cauliflower, carrots, and possibly some greens. My friend Cam suggested fermenting mustard greens like her mom did when she was growing up. She says she’ll see if she can get the recipe for me.

On the bright side of the food preserving front – last night I didn’t want to make dinner. I was too tired. But hungry. So I pulled a jar of my tomato sauce from the pantry and whipped up a super easy and quick marinara sauce and had spaghetti with roasted cauliflower and it was so good! This is why I do all the canning work I do.

Have any fermenting tales to share? I want to hear them!

Georgia O’Keefe Should Have Painted Figs

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My too-dry-dried figs sat on my desk for quite a few days before going into storage. So I had a lot of time to look at them. And it came to me one day that they looked like small mean vaginas with teeth. I put them away the next morning.

Can I offer you a fig?

I didn’t photograph my Thanksgiving dinner. I cooked for three people. I missed having my sister with us. Needless to say – we kept our meal simple and we watched Miss Marple while we ate. Here’s what we had:

Casserole: poblano peppers stuffed with tofu, corn, and zucchini on a bed of green rice (rice with pureed tomatillos, cilantro, and lime juice) and topped with a cashew cream sauce.

Mashed sweet potatoes: plain for my mom but for ours I added salt, pepper, and butter.

Salad: romaine lettuce, apples, walnuts, and cranberries with a vinaigrette.

The salad and yams were predictably good.

The casserole was an experiment – something I thought up to use the last of the summer peppers and tomatillos and summer squash. It turned out really good – it was delicious! Except that I have come to realize once again that I really don’t like peppers and can’t eat them. Except for pickled jalapenos, crushed red pepper, and cayenne – peppers do NOT agree with me. They made me burp for hours. So if I did this casserole again I would not use the peppers. I would just do a bottom layer of the green rice, then do a layer of the tofu and vegetables, topped with the cashew cream. I’d eat that again in a second. I don’t love rice, as you may have observed from the lack of it in my recipes. I don’t hate it but I never crave it and generally speaking – I’d be fine never eating it again. Even so – the rice layer of the casserole was really good! I think what I liked about it was the tanginess of the tomatillos and because I precooked the rice and then mixed it with the puree – it was a little bit like risotto – not fluffy and dry – but not soupy either. It was perfect.

About cashew cream: it’s really good stuff! I have discovered that you need a blender that doesn’t suck to get it really smooth and creamy. If you have a blender that has issues with blending things you may have to do small batches and add a little extra water to it. I could smell my blender motor burning. Nice. But it managed to get the job done with a lot of coaching. Cashew cream is rich without being heavy and it browns nicely like cheese does. I definitely want to play with this again. It’s certainly not a low fat food so using it won’t be less fattening than using cream or cheese – but it is a really nice vegan option and it is full of good protein and nutrition. Biggest problem is that cashews cost a fortune. So I won’t be using this a lot – but it’s worth experimenting with some more.

Over all we had a really nice Thanksgiving. If you want to hear all about my thankfulness you can read my post Gratitude for All of You over at Better Than Bullets.

So how was your Thanksgiving? I hope you all had a good time with people you love!

Salt Curing Ripe Olives: First Batch

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First of all – this process is known as “oil curing” not “salt curing” but since the actual curing is done by the salt and the oil is just a finisher – I think it’s ridiculous to keep calling it oil curing, even though that’s what it’s traditionally known as. I like to be specific as much as possible. Henceforth everyone will be confused about what I’m talking about – except for me. Once again I am following curing instructions by one of my favorite food bloggers Hank Shaw. His post “How to Make Oil-Cured Olives” is a must read if you want to try this. There are other articles you can read about this – but make sure this one is part of your research.

My dad has a rental property in the town of Sonoma on which he has a small vineyard of pinot grapes and a small orchard of olive trees. They are all varieties of olives grown specifically for pressing oil which he does at various community presses. I have missed out on his olive adventures because they only started maturing while I was living in Oregon. He said I could come pick some for curing before the big harvest for pressing which happens in a couple of weeks. So my friend Sharon and I headed out to his place yesterday for some olive picking.

The orchard is very pretty. I love olive trees. However – the first thing we noticed and what I ought to have realized before going up there is that the olives are very small. Olives for pressing have a much smaller flesh to pit ratio and tend to be much smaller than eating olives – I know this because I’ve read a whole book about olives. Never the less – we both picked a small bag of the small ripe ones to cure. Since I didn’t get to use many of them for curing I am going to come back to help my dad and his crew pick them for pressing. Hanging out in olive orchards, even little ones, is really peaceful.

We were disappointed in not having had more olives to play with but Sonoma is absolutely covered in olive trees so we kept our eyes peeled for promising trees. We ended up finding a couple of trees in front of a house-turned-radio-station on a main street and got permission to pick them. These babies were ripe and nice sized. In the end this is what I came home with:

1 lb 3 oz of my dad’s small olives

2 lbs med olives from Sonoma (town tree)

Hank suggests putting them in old (but clean, obviously) pillow cases. Because I wanted to keep my two varieties separate and because I didn’t have many of either I cut my pillow cases down in size. I used about a 1 to 2 ratio of salt to olives (in pounds).

Here’s an informative image to demonstrate the size of my olives to each other and to a quarter for reference. I am annoyed by quarters being used for sense of scale but when I tried using a thumb tack for contrast it wasn’t effective. Oh well.

Hank hangs his olives out in his back yard. Since I don’t have anything rigged up yet or a good spot chosen I just hung them on a rod in my tall bucket. These will live in my office until they’re done or until I find a good spot in the yard. They will eventually start dripping black olive juices. Yum. I’ll keep you posted on the progress. I’m hoping to get a lot more ripe olives to cure in the next few weeks. I definitely have enough green ones at this point. Tomorrow I will jar up my first batch in their second brine with flavorings. I’m pretty excited. I want to do it right now but I need to get back to the paid job.

If any of you have salt cured olives and want to share your results or methods that have worked for you – please do!

Further Adventures in Olive Curing Plus a Fig Experiment

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My mom and her friend have been bringing me free food. I don’t like fresh figs but I love them dried. Fresh figs are really expensive and I haven’t had access to any free ones to experiment with until now. So I was excited to haul my dehydrator out of the shed. First thing I discovered is that whole figs don’t fit in my dehydrator so I had to cut them in half. Second thing I discovered is that figs take a lot less time to dry than I thought. I over-dried mine. They are now as hard as tree bark. Ooops. I wish I could get my hands on more to do a second trial with but I may have to wait until next year.

I plan to soak these before using them. I think I’ll make some fig bars with them at some point.

I am still shamefully lagging on my olive project. Between big transitions at work that are requiring a lot of extra attention and all the stuff going on around the house – and my kitchen always being dirty – I have yet to get my olives in their second (stronger) brine. The top of the brine has some mold growing on it. Having experimented a little with fermenting things and reading all about it – I’m not worried about it. But I do want to get to the next step.

My friend Sharon who is learning to cure olives with me already has had hers in the second brined for two weeks with flavorings. I got to try some at her house the other day and I’m pleased to report that they were really good! I want mine to be saltier than hers are – but they had a really nice flavor and the texture was perfect. So this method of curing can definitely get you good results. We’ll see how mine come out in another few weeks I guess.

Walnut season is done. DONE. And I felt sad about it the way all you strange sun loving people get sad when summer is over and the air changes. Two weeks is as long as walnuts were dropping. I foraged a total of 15 lbs and 1 little oz of them. I’m really happy to say that my mom’s friend who brought me figs also brought me a big bag of walnuts! So now I have a more respectable haul.

Here’s the jar of pickled habanero peppers that I’ll be giving to my sister’s close friend Emily. I’ve known Emily for a long time and now she’s a grown lady with a husband and two kids. She and her husband like super hot peppers. I don’t but I couldn’t resist pickling some of these because of their beauty.

I’m trying to menu plan now. I’m not doing a very good job of it. Here’s what I plan to make during the following week.

Menu “Plan” for the Week of 11/12/12:

Lentil soup (done!)

Stuffed pasillo peppers – stuffed with seasoned tofu and baked in a cashew cream sauce served with Mexican brown rice.

Baked potatoes. What? You have to have something easy.

Salad(s) with apples and walnuts, feta, and dried cranberries.

Kashmiri-style eggplant in yogurt

I just got what might be the last three eggplants grown by Imwalle Gardens. That means epplant is OVER. I don’t buy them out of season so when you can’t get them locally grown any more it means no more for a long time. I have wanted to make this eggplant dish for a long time but it requires you to shallow fry the eggplant – I’m not big on frying and I could probably broil them but I want my first time trying this dish to be as rich as the recipe is – because the last time you eat fresh eggplant for a year deserves to be special.

The stuffed peppers is a vegan dish I have been wanting to experiment with. I haven’t ever tried such a thing and I don’t have any recipe for it. I do have a recipe for the cashew cream sauce. My friend Sid made the most amazing spaghetti squash dish that was like a lasagna with layers of squash, marinara sauce, tofu, and then topped with a cashew bechamel. The bechamel was wonderful! So it’s time to play with creamy vegan sauces.

What are you cooking this week?

Foraging for Walnuts Brings Me Back to the Beginning

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I’ve been foraging for blackberries my whole life. I also remember picking gooseberries on Mount Shasta when I was a small child. I used to find and eat miner’s grass and also sour grass. Things I learned from my mom. But it wasn’t until I moved to the JC neighborhood in Santa Rosa that I really became a forager in earnest. I rediscovered my love of picking wild blackberries and the first year in Santa Rosa my friend Sharon and I learned to make blackberry jam together which started my love of food preserving. I was taking classes at the Junior College and walked to school from my house early in the morning for math class. After the first storm that year I noticed walnuts on the ground.

I know a walnut when I see one. Who doesn’t? The Stemples had several walnut trees in their back yard and they always had huge bags of walnuts in their mud room. The truth is – I never really liked walnuts. They were “okay”. I’d eat them if someone put them in baked goods but I always wished people would stop putting walnuts in their cookies because I thought it ruined them. When I first saw the walnuts on the ground I wasn’t that excited about them but I was curious to know if all walnuts are edible and if you could eat them fresh out of the shell or did you have to do something to them? I picked up a few and carried them around with me. Eventually I ate one of them and didn’t get sick.

The walnuts were all over the ground and I started picking them up as I walked, filling my backpack with them. I still didn’t really like them but I couldn’t resist collecting them. Something clicked (I think it’s called OCD) and the repetitive activity of collecting nuts and hoarding them in my garage was soothing and fun and addictive. So I ended up with an enormous quantity of them. All picked up from my neighborhood streets. It was free food. Food I didn’t like, of course, but FREE. And satisfying to collect.

Eventually I had to force myself to stop. A person who doesn’t like walnuts doesn’t need a year’s supply of them. I decided to try eating them in different ways to see if I really didn’t like them. What I discovered is that I really dislike walnuts in baked goods. Period. I won’t shun your gift of banana bread with walnuts in it, but only because I’m used to my mom baking nuts in everything and I’m pretty polite about gifts. But I’ll wish you hadn’t polluted your banana bread with walnuts. I tried walnuts in other ways and discovered that I love them lightly roasted and put on salads. When you do that they remain crisp. To me – an uncrisp nut is an abomination. I also discovered that I love candied walnuts – just to eat out of hand or on a pear salad. Deborah Madison introduced me to walnut sauce and it is one of my favorite sauces in the world. It’s creamy and rich and wonderful. I make it very smooth – no grit.

Every year for 5 years I collected a year’s supply of walnuts and ate them all. I was lucky that when I lived in Oregon a dear friend of mine had access to free walnuts and gave me tons of them because there weren’t a lot to forage in McMinnville. But I missed foraging for them myself. I missed the yearly activity that signaled deep fall. They nearly always start falling after the first real rainstorm. Which we just had a few days ago. While foraging for olives with my friend Sharon she mentioned that she was finding walnuts on the ground and I very nearly dropped the olive project to go collect nuts.

Instead I stuffed down the panicky feeling that I would miss my chance to gather nuts and hoard them in my tree trunk… and waited one whole day to go out looking for them. Yesterday Chick and I walked to my old favorite walnut trees and I gathered a bag full. Many of them are smaller than I like but will still be good. Chick didn’t think much of the walnut collecting. She would much rather forage for poop. Still, she did her best imitation of a patient dog and I felt right again. Like time is flowing in the right direction after being stopped for years. I know I keep saying shit like this – but it’s true. This is where it truly started for me and to walk the same path I’ve walked year after year to the same trees, trees that I’ve come to think of as quiet personal companions, it makes me feel like I just found something that’s been lost. It feels wonderful. It feels peaceful and makes me happy.

Once you get into the foraging mode it’s impossible not to see food all around you. Or to wonder about things that MIGHT be edible. To someone. This old cactus in our neighborhood caught my eye yesterday as it has caught my eye every time I’ve walked by it in the last 12 years. But this time I saw it differently.

Are those “prickly pears”? Can you make jam out of those? And is this the kind of cactus you can make nopalitos from? CAN I EAT THIS CACTUS?

I wouldn’t dream of trying to take any part of it because it is a masterpiece in this yard – it is clearly not food hanging over the sidewalk waiting to be plucked at by strangers. Taking any part of this plant would be grand and mean theft. But it amuses me how you look at things differently after years of foraging.

Cheers to my fellow foragers out there!

Things I’ve foraged for so far:

blackberries

gooseberries (only the once but it was memorable)

miner’s lettuce

sour grass

walnuts

elderberries

nettles

plantain

rosehips

hazelnuts (for others, I hate hazelnuts)

Indian plum (my friend Nicole introduced me and Max to it – it’s a leaf that tastes like a cucumber)

mushrooms (not very successfully – I did find an old bolete, an old chanterelle, and Philip and Max found me a lobster mushroom)