Foraged Feast follows Medicine Making Workshop

This past Sunday, Suburban Foragers held their third workshop in a series of Medicine Making. This workshop featured herbalist Elana Fine, Paul Tappenden, Adrienne Gomez and Brooke Smokelin. They gathered medicinal herbs and identified native edible and medicinal plants. They finished with a foraged feast to tie everything together.

The group started with a forage and harvest. Since the cloudy forcast spelled rain, They worked quickly because wet leaves are not so great for tincturing. Tincturing is extracting nutrients from harvested plants.

They headed straight for the hops vine and were happy to find that some of the flowers had turned from a pale green to a tawny brown, the preferred state for harvesting hops. Everyone clamored amongst the branches and filled our bags.

The group moved on to harvesting rust-colored stalks and seed heads of the Common Dock, a member of the Buckwheat family, or Rumex. Suburban Foragers are currently stocking up on the seeds with the intention to grind them into a flour.

"Next time you pass a dock stalk, do take a look at the seeds.  They have a remarkable geometry to them, triangular and multi-dimensional, yes, like the buckwheat you'd buy at a store, but there is a certain "wildness" to these seeds," Tappenden said.

On the way back up to Smokelin's house, they  harvested some Virginia knotweed seeds, wild mint, raspberry leaves and some almost-ripe pears.

Back at the house and excited about their luck with the hops plant, they decided to "take it in" in as many ways as they could that day, to really let the essence of the plant be amongst them and to teach and share what gifts it has.  So first, Tappenden made a pot of hops tea. The tea was bitter for some, but enjoyed by others. In a previous workshop, Smokelin explained how individual palates will always differ and develop at separate paces. Fine added honey and Tappenden added honey and vodka to his concoction. They then smoked hops flower and mullein leaf combined and found it a very smooth and relaxing herbal blend.  Then they made a hops flower tincture.

They also made vodka based tinctures of freshly harvested raspberry leaves, jewelweed, dogwood (kousa) fruit, and the haws of the hawthorn tree. Throughout the entire workshop, they drank delicious dandelion wine that Fine had made a few years earlier and an elderberry "soda" that Tappenden served up from freshly made elderberry syrup combined with seltzer.  The concensus of the group was that both were delicious.

Their meal included:

• Nettle and mugwort consommé, which tasted as rich and nutritious as any chicken broth according to Tappenden.
• Gomez's Suburban Delight: freshly harvested watercress mixed with apples with Fine's home made vinaigrette with plantain oil, local honey, mustard seeds, and apple cider vinegar
• Tappenden's specialty of Sautéed Wild Greens (Dandelion and Nettle) with onion, garlic, olives, almonds, and goat cheese over his Summer Serve-All Standard of rice pasta and garden tomato and garlic sauce.

"It was truly a wonderful day had by all who attended, filled with foraging, harvesting, medicine, food, and friend making, learning and sharing, and delighting in the gifts of nature together," Tappenden said. He encourages everyone to try to attend the next workshop.