Foraging at Home

Each year around this time, I begin to get excited about the first round of harvest. Sure, there was the overwintered harvest, a bit worse for wear, and I've been picking individual radishes, lettuce and chard leaves, flower petals, green onions and herbs throughout the spring. But at the beginning of June when the farmer's markets re-open in New England, it's time to start thinking again about how to manage and make best use of the glut of fresh vegetables. Specifically, the big bunches of greens, and there will be several more posts about that.

But for now, it's time to start making space for the first harvest. Check the pantry and dig out the last few jars of green tomato salsa and chutney to mix with beans and fresh herbs as a salad or to serve warmed over rice. Stir a jar of quince jam and some cinnamon into a container of plain yogurt. Open the freezer and pull out that last bag local corn (remembering what a pain it was to cut it all off the cob last August!), the last container of pesto for a pasta salad, bake the last bag of chopped up fall apples into a pie. Decipher which re-used yogurt containers have mushy vegetables from making vegetable stock all winter long, thaw them out and mix with curried lentils for stuffing handheld veggie pies. Bake any remaining bags of blueberries into muffins.

This activity reminds me that it's been a while since I evaluated our stock of raw nuts and seeds, cold-pressed oils, whole-grains and whole grain flours. Many of these are kept in the fridge or freezer, but those stored at room temperature need to be checked for rancidity (easy to smell/taste it!) and if they are still okay, use them up as soon as possible.

It may not be quite as exotic as combing the deep forest for rare mushrooms, but foraging at home has its own rewards. It's a great way to save money by not wasting food, it facilitates buying local on as big a scale as your household can manage, and you may receive some culinary inspiration along the way. That said, I'm off to put together a black bean-corn-mango chutney-cilantro salad!