Roasted Yam Berries

Jonathan's parents are visiting and we just had a foraged lunch.  Gwen and Ralph brought boiled peanuts from the south, we supplied some homemade pear juice from our neighbor's pear tree, and we roasted up some chestnuts and the yam berries (aka Chinese Yam or Cinnamon Vine)!  (Oh, and there are some huckleberry chocolate cordials in there for good measure.)

Today's foraged lunch

In the past we've boiled the yam berries, or "air potatoes" as we like to call them.  But I thought roasting would be a good idea, and they came out great!  It was so easy.  I went out the door and harvested them, just shaking the vines slightly and collecting the little guys in a bowl.  Came in and separated the berries from the other dried leaves and flowers and stuff that got in the bowl.  Then I added some olive oil to coat them, and sprinkled a generous amount of salt on top.  I spread them out on a cookie sheet, and popped them in the oven that was heated to 425 degrees.  After about 12 minutes I tested them with a fork and they were completely tender, even though they were hard like marbles when I put them in.  They tasted great!  What a fun party food, perfect for a foraged lunch!

Roasted berries from the Chinese Yam (Dioscorea batatas)

Jonathan's mom, Gwen, with the roasted yam berries

PawPaw Wine

Yes, we made wine. Or actually, mead. Jonathan started it a few months ago. We got inspired by Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation, and used his honey wine recipe.  Jonathan combined frozen pawpaw fruit pulp from the previous year, honey, and water, and started it fermenting in a wide mouthed container with a towel on top. After a few days he moved the concoction into a gallon jug with an airlock on top. It took several rounds of straining to get the taste just right. Sweet, fruity, with a little zing. Just delightful. We had some last week and it was perfect. We had some last night and it had gotten a little yeasty. There is clearly an art to making homemade wine.  We'll just have to try it again!  Here we are with the wine and one of the pawpaws. 

Pawpaw on NPR!

Check out this great segment about pawpaws on NPR.  The link includes an audio segment and a short video.  I learned that Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark all ate pawpaws!

A Bit About My Home

I have the great good fortune of living in the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden.  I moved here in the summer of 2007, when the garden was well underway, having been designed and maintained by my husband, Jonathan Bates, and our housemate, Eric Toensmeier (with help from many, many people, including members of the Western Massachusetts Permaculture Guild).  This is the mission they developed:

"Our urban forest garden is an intensively managed backyard foraging paradise, a megadiverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants from our own bioregion and around the world. The forest garden is the unifying element of a larger permaculture design for food production, wildlife habitat, and social spaces that encompasses the entire property."

This is what the place looked like in the beginning, 2004:

Looks like your regular urban lot, and well, it is.  (Or should I say it was.)

Here's the same view, taken in 2008:

And a similar view in the summer of 2010 (note the persimmon tree on the left, the lotuses in the water garden, and the hardy kiwi arbor - three of my favorite things in the garden):

It's from this urban back (and front) yard that I get most of the things I write about in this blog.  It is a delight to live here.  May this blog inspire the creation of gardens like this in all places!  Food Forests For All! 

Giant Ground Sloth's Delight

But first, an update on the chestnuts.  I did go back for more, and collected seven pounds!  It was pretty fun.  I wore thick leather gloves to protect my hands.  Could have used some more bug spray.  But I was just in awe at how much food was on those trees.  Incredible.  We simmered the nuts in 120 degree water for 20 minutes in an attempt to kill the weevil eggs before they hatch.  Eating an itsy bitsy bug egg is one thing, but a full blown worm in my chestnut?  Uh, no thanks.  Now the nuts are spread out on beach towels on our kitchen floor to dry.  Our kitchen is always full of "projects".

But today I want to talk about pawpaws.  Asimina triloba, our beloved North American fruit.  When we were kids a lot of us learned the song, "pickin' up pawpaws, put 'em in your pocket", but that's as close as we ever got to an actual pawpaw.  Well, they are native to this region, easy to grow, pest free, and amazing!  (But really, I don't think you could fit them in your pocket.  Maybe one per pocket, unless you have some mighty big pockets.  They're about the size of a mango or large potato.)

What are they like?  Slice them open and you'll find loads of cream-colored custardy flesh surrounding a set of large dark brown seeds.  Describing the taste is something that has eluded many.  They taste kind of like melon-banana-fruitpunch-vanilla-floral-custard.  They taste like something from the tropics.  It's really mind blowing that they grow right here. 

Some ideas for cooking with them are to make them into a smoothy.  I like this best using frozen pawpaw flesh and milk.  I bet frozen yogurt would be great too.  If you used frozen yogurt you could use fresh pawpaws and still get that chilly, slushy texture.  I also like to make a baked pudding recipe that I found in Joy of Cooking.  Oh!  And this year Jonathan made pawpaw wine!  That will deserve its own post here.

And you can't go wrong with eating them fresh off the tree.  That's how giant sloths and other megafauna ate them.  Pawpaws evolved alongside these giant animals and that's why their seeds are so big!  Who else but a giant sloth, mastadon, or camel could eat a whole pawpaw and poop out the seeds?  Dude! 

Chestnuts. Sigh.

It's chestnut time!  Oh, what a wonderful time of year.  We've been closely monitoring the trees we collect from.  We went by them this weekend and gathered a small batch of nuts.  One of the branches had broken and so the nuts on that branch were open and ready for the taking.  We went by again yesterday and the other nuts are still not quite ready.  But they will be soon, and we are not the only people who know about this group of trees.  It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.  We want to be sure to get some, so we're going back this weekend to see what's shaking.

I fell in love with chestnuts while living in Budapest, Hungary during my junior year of college.  Vendors would roast them right there on the street.  They smelled so good in the crisp, fall air.  My host mother, Ilona, would make THE MOST AMAZING dessert: Gesztenye pure (chestnut puree).  Oh, it was heavenly.  And I just looked online and found a recipe, so I am definitely making it this year. 

But really, you don't even need a recipe for enjoying chestnuts.  Just roast 'em, like the Christmas Carol says.  They are nutty and sweet, creamy, and tender.  A perfect way to welcome in the fall. 

As they say in Hungary, Jo etvayot!  Bon appetit!

Yam Berries! Yam Berries!

The yam berries are ready!  We have a beautiful Chinese Yam (Dioscorea batatas) planted out front, and it is full of aerial tubers - little "air potatoes". 

I am thinking up ways to prepare them.  The simplest would be to boil them up and serve with butter, salt, pepper, and maybe some rosemary.  I'm also thinking about using them for a Spanish Tortilla.  Or maybe roasting them to make some little round "fries".  Seems like a fun snack food!  They're just about the size of a Junior Mint.  You could sneak some in your bag and take them to the movies!

I've read that the large taproot is a staple crop in Japan, and quite delicious.  But we don't really have enough plants to go eating their taproots.  So, we'll enjoy the "berries".  I'm waiting till next week to cook with them (we have a video shoot at our house and want to keep them on the vine for that).  I will let you know how my experiments turn out!

 (photo of taproot, leaves, yam berries, and pruners for scale)