Food of the Wild Soup

I’ve wanted to make something like this for a long time: collect several wild edibles and put them together into a great-tasting dish.  Here, I’ve combined fiddleheads, stinging nettles, shitakes (yeah, well, they’re wild somewhere; I don’t know my wild mushrooms well enough to be safe) and arame (Japanese sea vegetable) for a soup in honor of the wild foods of both land and sea.

Food of the Wild Soup

First, soak about ½ cup of arame in cool water for 10-15 minutes. If you do this first, by the time you finish the other steps, the arame should have plumped up to twice its original size, which means it’s ready.

While that’s happening, please heed the warnings and follow the directions for preparing nettles seen here.

After you’re done blanching the nettles, you’ll need to do the same for the fiddleheads (but a minute or two, once, is long enough).

Next, you need a dashi, which is a Japanese broth flavored with sea vegetable (usually kombu) and bonito flakes. If you don’t have these weird ingredients – I never do – use a vegetable stock and improvise with some dried nori (the seaweed they wrap sushi in) and some fish sauce (or fish stock). Put 4 cups of dashi/stock on the back burner, add some grated ginger if you like (I like) and a teaspoon of soy sauce, and just let it start simmering.

Meanwhile, heat a small amount of oil (not olive oil, here. Safflower, grapeseed, peanut would work) in a skillet. Add 5 or 6 chopped shitake caps and 1 small leek, sliced (white part only). Add a pinch of salt and a dash of sake (optional).

Add the fiddleheads and nettles, season with salt and black pepper and stir to incorporate.

When the shitakes are slightly browned, add mixture to the dashi. Keep heat low. Add the arame.

Before serving, take about ¼ cup of the broth and add to 2-3 tablespoons of red miso to dissolve. Add the dissolved miso back to the pot, stir and serve.

I serve this with udon noodles, which I prepare separately to prevent them from sucking up all the liquid in the soup.

Here are some other articles and comments about nettles:

"The Common Stinging Nettle" by Euell Gibbons, writing for Vermont Weathervane

"Stinging nettles -- I cooked them and lived!" at Chowhound

"Stinging Nettles Need a New Name!" at OrganicMania

"Mini Specialist| Food Found: Stinging Nettles" by William Snyder, writing for WSJ

Check out these recipes:

Nettles pasta with fava beans, from No Recipes

Spring Tonic Nettles Soup, from Wild Food Ways

Olive Oil: Cancer-Fighter or Carcinogen?

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine my kitchen without extra-virgin olive oil within reach of the stove-top. I have other oils, but, honestly, they are for occasional usage. I can do almost all my cooking, from sautéing to baking, with olive oil. Since I started my foray into self-taught, gourmet cooking by way of Italian cuisine, my reliance on -- and love for – olive oil makes sense.

            So, imagine my dismay when a group of friends at a wild plant foraging workshop discussed casually the carcinogenic dangers of cooking olive oil at high temperatures. Canola oil, they claimed, was the high heat oil of choice. Really? Considering both the presence of olive oil in the typical Mediterranean diet and the famously low instances of cancer among eaters of said diet, I was highly skeptical.  According to The Olive Oil Source, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are released when petroleum, petroleum products, coal, wood, oil and other substances are burned. Exposure to PAHs is pretty widespread, too. We breathe them in pretty much any time there’s smoke (including tobacco smoke), and we are exposed to them through asphalt, agricultural burning, waste incineration, creosote-treated wood products, cereals, grains, flour, bread, vegetables, fruits, meat, processed or pickled foods.  Of the over 100 PAHs identified by the EPA and The Department of Health and Human Services, a few of them have been found to be carcinogenic to lab animals with the assumption being made that they are probably (but not definitively) carcinogenic to humans. The same risk exists in eating charred meat as with eating burned oils. The fear is that heating oil above its smoke point could release PAHs that cause cancer. However, the studies show that the potential risks posed by PAHs in olive oil are no more than many other oils and foods. Since olive oil (and many other foods) contain antioxidants, the release of PAHs is somewhat compensated for until the oil is burned or spoiled.

            The studies mentioned above show that links between PAHs and cancer are not conclusive (and, in fact, do not isolate olive oil as more or less dangerous than any other oil or food). So, where did this olive oil scare come from? The simple answer seems to be Sheryl Crow. While there have been no studies to link cancer to olive oil, the singer claims that in her battle with breast cancer, her nutritionist warned her of the “danger.” Apparently, the authority of this “expert” was enough to set off a slight media panic, getting people all worked up about olive oil.

            Now, I’m not going to tell ANY cancer patient or survivor that the steps they take to ensure their health are in vain. It could be, that in being vigilant about her exposure to PAHs, Crow was able to boost her body’s immunity . . . but there is just no way to know for sure, and there seems to be no reason, in my mind, to stop cooking with olive oil.  The only reasonable advice seems to be to avoid heating olive oil (or ANY oil) past its smoke point. For olive oil, some sources say the smoke point is around 375 degrees F, others, 400. All I know is, if my oil starts smoking, it’s going to taste bad, burn the garlic, etc. Most people would not be so silly/extravagant as to try to deep fry with olive oil, but sautéing your veggies on the stove-top is not likely to burn the oil unless you’re not being careful.

 

So, how does a food myth like this one become sanctified wisdom repeated by well-meaning, health-conscious folks? I blame “nutritionism” – a term coined by Senator George McGovern in 1982 – and recently made (in)famous by Michael Pollan in his most recent book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Pollan describes nutritionism as the belief that eating is for purposes of nutrition, and that the nutrients in our food are what’s important.  As benign as this belief may appear at first, it’s actually reductionist . . . and wrong. In truth, we eat for a whole bunch of reasons, not just in order to obtain “nutrients” – taste, pleasure, social interaction, community, celebration, seduction, emotional soothing – all are reasons to eat.

            But, according to nutritionism, we’re supposed to avoid certain nutrients (such as saturated fats) and chug others (antioxidants, omega-3s) . . . right? Well, maybe.

            When we look at traditional cuisines, such as those of the French or Italians, we see the presence of all manner of foods that have been demonized by food science – fatty meats, cheese, butter, sugar, bread. If we were to trust nutritionism and its adherents and flame-fanners, then the French should have gone extinct years ago.

            Miraculously, the French survive . . . and so does their food. The same is true for Italians and their cuisine as well as those of many other Mediterranean cultures.

            Pollan and I concur: maybe it’s not the food scientists, nutritionists and celebrities we should be relying upon for our food wisdom, but upon, rather, the grandmothers – the memeres and the nonas – and other traditional cooks who have been feeding, and not killing, their families for years.

Amaranth

Amaranth

One rule about food is that is should never remind one of infectious disease.

The tiny, innocent-looking grain, amaranth, has the unfortunate resemblance, when cooked, to the chicken pox. Y’know those clear pustules that pop and weep? That’s what I was reminded of when I recently cooked up a batch of Amaranth with Peaches and Bananas.

Quel horreur.

But, I must say that I think part of the problem with amaranth is learning to cook with it. The grain has a tendency to stick to the pot, and it is recommended that it be mixed with another, looser grain, such as quinoa, or cooked in a double-boiler or microwave.[i]

Why bother? Because this tiny grain – the size of a poppy seed – is legendary for its fortifying power. It’s an ancient grain, beloved of the Aztecs, and is now identified as having higher levels of protein, iron, magnesium and phosphorus than some other grains, and has a balance of amino acids that make the proteins more accessible to digestion. In addition, the grain has tremendous taste for its size.[ii]

But the texture part . . . must be dealt with in the kitchen. This is why I think recipes are so important, and in this case, flexibility in the recipe is most preferred. Cooks will need to do their own experimenting to determine the best way to avoid the pox. I found that the recipe I was using called for far too much liquid – a full cup and a half more than is recommended by The Joy of Cooking. Not only do I think that the excess liquid made the porridge too soupy, it took too long to cook. Additionally, the recipe called to use both water and milk (in this case, a nut or soy milk because the recipe was macrobiotic). I tend to hold off on adding milk to my grains until after I’ve finished cooking them – I think they retain their character more and the milk doesn’t have a chance to curdle (which seems to happen more easily with the nut and soy milks).

I am also loathe to add soft fruit until the final minutes of cooking, while the recipe I was following called to add them at the beginning. Big mistake. The result was fruit that turned absolutely snot-like in consistency. Again, I was reminded of the flu-like symptoms that accompanied my own rather intense case of the chicken pox many years ago – not good.

So, did I eat this pile of pox? Yes, yes I did. And it wasn’t horrible. The flavors were good, wholesome, balanced. I like the slightly peppery note of the amaranth alongside the mellow fruit and sweet maple syrup. Almond extract goes well with the peppery-peachiness, too. But, I think a vast improvement could be made by leaving out the milk until the end (instead of cooking it in, I pour it on in my bowl), cutting back on liquid altogether (1 cup of amaranth to 2 cups of liquid) and only adding soft fruits in the final minutes of cooking (peaches, plums, bananas – I might even leave the bananas out until I put the porridge in my bowl. Hard fruits, such as apples and pears, I’d add earlier).

Hopefully, I haven’t inadvertently dissuaded my audience from trying amaranth. If you have an interesting amaranth experience or a recipe, I’d like to hear from you.

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[i] Rombauer, Irma S. The Joy of Cooking. New York: Scribner, 1997. 245.

[ii] Rombauer. 245.