Early Spring Salads and Sauteed Maple Blossoms.

        Here in Victoria spring is well under way! While some plants are just putting out their first buds, others are already flowering and a few have even finished blooming already. This time of year finding delicious wild greens for salads is just too easy!

I'm a little picky when it comes to my wild food, there is tons of things that are edible, but not all of it is exactly worth eating, but despite that I was still able to find a meal almost completely made up of wild plants.

Lets start with my salad. Normally I am going to have pictures of where I found my plants in the woods, but my camera was dead when I was gathering these greens, so you'll just have to enjoy the picture I got after returning to the kitchen:

 At the front of the picture I have separated a few of each species so you can all see what I've mixed here, most of these greens were found growing together under a Douglas fir tree, one of my 'salad bars'.

When looking for wild edibles a good spot to look is the base of trees. There plants don't have to compete as hard with grass due to lack light and it is also often damp and protected at the base of trees so the plants can get large and juicy. :)

So here are all our plants, moving clockwise starting at the top left: Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), Cleavers (Galium aparine), Chickweed (Stellaria media), Stonecrop (Sedum divergens), Purple dead-nettle (Lamium Purpureum), and everyone's favorite, Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale).

Here they are all mixed and chopped up! I always cut my wild plants into small pieces for salads. unlike domestic lettuces a lot of wild greens have very fibrous stems, which only really bothers you when you don't cut them up fine enough before adding to a salad. 

 

I found this beauty when I was out for an evening walk with my dog. We have here some big leaf maple flowers (Acer macrophyllum)! These are great to collect as they are usually above the 'dog-zone' along the sides of paths and they grow with great abundance. They're also easy to ID, I'm sure even non-planty people can recognize our massive majestic big leaf maples. 

 Here are the blossoms all cleaned and ready to cook with! To clean them I simply put them in a salad spinner, filled it with water, swished them around a little, drained, and spin them.

 

I figured some wild carrots (Daucus carota) would compliment the maple flowers well so I dug a few out that I had grabbed from a field a few days before. Always exercise extreme caution when gathering wild carrots as they have a lot of poisonous lookalikes. I will usually choose carrots that are growing in a well drained location (its' lookalikes prefer wet conditions) where I can observe last years flower heads. I also always make sure all my wild carrots have that distinctive carroty smell. None of the wild carrot's lookalikes smell and taste like carrot.

 After chopping up the wild carrots and maple blossoms I sauteed them for maybe 5 minutes with some chopped garlic, and a combination of sesame and olive oil. after that just add a touch of salt and pepper and its ready to serve!
 For my wild greens salad I mixed up a bit of olive oil, balsamic and apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard, and garlic powder. this is my usual salad dressing, its simple, delicious and extremely good for you!

and here we have the entire meal! don't be deceived by all the green, I actually found the blossoms and wild carrots surprisingly filling, and there is nothing quite like a early spring wild salad to make you feel awesome.

Until next time!

Happy hunting!

- Katy

Disclaimer: Always exercise extreme caution when gathering wild plants for food, triple check your identification and never eat a large quantity of any wild foods without extensive experience with the species in question. If you are unsure about any plants, don't eat them until you have checked your identification with an expert.