Crestwood Riverbank
Sunday, April 20

In terms of quantity, quality, and variety, this early spring tour, along the Bronx River, is the best of the year.

It's our only chance, for example, to find the strong-flavored, celery-like stems of the cow parsnip. Cooking tones down the flavor and creates delightful dishes from this little-known vegetable.

We should also come across large stands of ostrich fern fiddleheads at the peak of their very short season. This expensive gourmet food grows throughout the swamps adjacent to the river, but it's only in season for about 10 days.

We'll also find the asparagus-flavored false Solomon's seal, another great wild vegetable, along with the even larger true Solomon's seal.

Another plant available only on this tour is the pungent-tasting cuckoo flower, so hot it almost explodes in your mouth, somewhat like Japanese wasabe. And cut-leaf toothwort competes with it for fieriness.

Once you've tasted it, you can't deny that the wild leek or ramp is the world's best-tasting member of the onion/garlic family, and Crestwood is a great place to take a leek.

Virginia waterleaf tastes like parsley, only better. Wild ginger is similar to its unrelated namesake, but more delicately flavored.

Stinging nettle isn't delicate. It stings you. But, collected wearing gloves and properly cooked, it's as tasty as it is healthful. Its equally delicious sister species, the wood nettle, accompanies it.

More usual species also abound. There's more sour-flavored curly (yellow) dock than you'd know what to do with. Burdock does great here too, with huge, easy to collect taproots.

Japanese knotweed is a gourmet "nuisance" plant with a flavor like rhubarb. It supplies sourness wherever you need it, be it fruit dishes, soups, or salad dressings. This invasive plant sends up shoots that take over sections of the riverbank.

Chickweed, which tastes like corn on the cob, also does great here, as do the sweet-spicy shoots of the daylily.

Common blue violets are common here, but a less common white species also abounds, as do hybrids between the two.

If we're lucky, we'll even find gourmet mushrooms, rare in the spring. Morels and dryad's saddle have turned up on past tours.

You'll have to attend this field walk to believe it.