Central Park
Sunday, June 1

Central Park provides a great window into the world of wild foods of mid-spring. Making a meal with these plants is simple at this time of the year.

For an appetizer, try simmering field garlic bulbs in diluted vinegar with Italian seasonings to make an outstanding pickle.

It's the peak of the season for wild greens, and we'll be finding great quantities of wild vegetables. Spicy mustard greens, such as garlic mustard, hedge mustard, and poor man's pepper, abound on lawns everywhere.

Offset their flavor in a salad with milder-tasting greens such as violet leaves, Asiatic dayflower, and chickweed, also abundant; or more piquant greens such as greenbrier or sheep or wood sorrel. With the inclusion of tender, cucumber-flavored cattail shoots, you'll have the best salad you've ever eaten.

And wild mushrooms will provide a gourmet side dish. We might find wine-cap stropharias, dryad's saddle, or chicken mushrooms on this tour.

Burdock root is one of the few wild root vegetables that remains in season throughout the warm weather. Add razor-thin slices to soups or rice. And at this time of the year only, you can also cook the immature flower stalks, which taste like artichoke hearts.

Pokeweed, another seasonal potherb, is superb boiled in 2 changes of water (it's poisonous raw, if you use the wrong parts, or out of season!) and flavored with tamari soy sauce and garlic lightly browned in olive oil.

And for an exotic dessert, why not stew apples or pears with the sassafras and wild ginger we'll be finding, add nuts, then add the sweet, vanilla-flavored black locust tree blossoms that will be in season?