Forest Survival Food
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- Опубликовано: 30 мар 2024
- We have had a lot of folks ask us to talk about foraging. Spring was a hard time for many people living in rural areas in the 18th century. When food ran out, and before new food had grown in the garden, foraging in the woods was often turned to as a means of survival.
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nettles are surprisingly high in protein. finding fats and oils is the hard one. i spent 6 months in in a tiny tent in the mountains back in my youth surviving on a homemade muesli. oats, nuts, dried whole milk, whey and dried fruit. i caught trout, ate a few grasshoppers, collected pig nuts, visited the coast for a day or two of silverweed, lush mussels, winkles, urchin roe. sand dabs roasted with wild parsnip, dulse, and samphire. still had to buy oil/fat to thrive
This made me so hungry
That's really interesting. Sounds like you would need some animal based foods with fat to make up for he deficiency
I remember reading that while Modern people are trained to avoid fat ,back in Medieval times paradise was sometimes seen as a place where edible fat was everywhere.lol.
@@clairv.74 This! I wish life was still like this. It's My dream to buy a piece of land and go back to living a simpler and more fulfilling life, one were I ain't overworking Myself just to make someone else rich, while barely being able to scrape by Myself. I'd rather work Toward My benefit, not someone else's, especially someone who wouldn't even know My name.
@@clairv.74 you would think since we're so efficient at converting sugar into fat, we'd be able to use that and just take sugar with us..
I was stationed in Northern Germany in early 90s, and the nearby city had a day of mourning for elderly man who passed, at the end of WW2 when there was no food, he knew about edible plants that grew there. He foraged and taught others how to so so, and identify edible plants. He is credited with stopping a famine.
Nettles- blanched and then sautéed with onion, and served with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar- are an INCREDIBLY tasty food. Don’t be deceived by the palates of people who thought lobster was disgusting and tomatoes were poison! Stinging nettles are a LUXURY on the table and if you’ve never tried them, you should.
Super easy to pick using just a ziplock baggie as a glove. Pinch them off just where the stem starts to get bigger around than a chopstick. Blanch for two minutes in salted boiling water, and thank me later.
When I was a boy in the 1940s and 1950s because of WW2 and the shortages that lasted until about the mid 1950s (officially in some places 1954), everyone foraged, grew gardens, hunted, reused virtually everything. I remember seeing tin cans made into useable items and vividly remember tin can lids used to cover holes in fences and walls when we went to town which was a rare event because of gas shortage. There was a saying, " Use everything twice or more than twice " and people did. Old junk piles were raided for parts and metal. Old clothes became rags, quilts, and more. People learned to live.
There's an old American farm saying:
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without!"
My family's summer cottage on a lake, passed down for a century, has numerous lids covering holes in the walls. Summer use only, so the outer walls are the only walls.
My parents as well! After they passed away, and I was looking through their things, I would wonder why they kept so many things! The strangest things too! But I remember my mother telling me “waste not, want not” 😊
@@wayneantoniazzi2706 I think current gen has forgotten those teachings for the most part. I get flack for reusing stuff all the time.
and food. we trow things away because they have an exsperation date. stupid.
Foraging is my favorite thing.
As kids we survived on a lot of cat tail shoots and crawfish, and dandelion greens.
We were pretty poor. But we were never hungry.
Oh and I remember picking wild blackberries. So good!
Dandelion greens are awesome tasting. I snack on them all season because they're full of Vitamin K. I have MS, and I megadose Vitamin D to treat it, but too much D will calcify in the blood unless you also consume Vitamin K. So I can munch on dandelions and honestly say it's for medical purposes.
Crawdads are the best; fun to catch, good to eat
don't forget poke salad
@@chomama1628 Oh my family used to do that too. We had a pretty big section of our town that was just wild blackberries. Familes would bring their kids and have them pick what they needed.
1:12 "other times not so much" - that was put very nicely.
My great grandmother lived through WWI and WWII and was so used to foraging for food that she wouldn't abandon the habit even when times got better. Often to my grandmothers and mothers great embarrasment who were ashamed and afraid that people might think we were poor.
Foraging is also so satisfying physically and emotionally. It tastes good usually, is cheaper, and gets you moving, and is a source of pride and knowledge.
She sounds like an amazing woman and a skill set lost
My grandmother as well! She ended up teaching my mother my mother taught me and it’s just engrained in who I am. Every year I fill my freezer up with things like fiddleheads and wild leaks, etc.. 😊
My mom grew up in post-war Germany and she told stories about accompanying her mother, going in the woods to collect stinging nettles whenever they had to cover a stretch of time where they didn't have enough food.
Stinging nettles are one of the most nutritionally dense plants on earth. They are high in amino acids, protein, flavonoids, and bone-building minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc, and one of the greatest sources of vitamin K.
And they taste great. Nettles soup in spring is a delicacy. Add a few shrimp and it's perfect for dinner guests.
@@natviolen4021How would you describe the taste?
@@asinatrafanatic2697 It's hard to describe. A bit like herby, aromatic young spinach. A mild yet distinct taste of spring.
@@natviolen4021 Sounds lovely!
Yeah right
My Fiancee and I forage every warm season for food to save for the rest of the year. Our cupboards are full of mushrooms and dried plants like bayberry leaves for seasonings, and our freezer is full of blanched wild greens like stinging nettle and lamb's quarters. These things suppliment the venison from my hunts and the vegetables we grow in our garden.
Thats the life right there! Lamb is so good to my favorite
@@warmonsterj lamb's quarters is goosefoot, a chenopodia closely related to quinoa.
Spent last summer in hammock and forged for most of my food! Burdock root was a new one for me ! Stinging nettle , mushrooms ,fiddleheads and dandelion has been a staple in my diet for a few years now! If you know what to look for dandelion are avaliable as soon as snow melts and if you're garden is well mulched the dandelion greens are bigger earlier!
@@kirkvoelcker5272 i didn't know that
Lambs quarters are very tasty. But try to pick ones that are growing in an area that hasn't been treated with fertilizers as the plant is said to concentrate nitrogen in its foliage.
I once spent 2 weeks in the bush with just a pocket knife, flint stone and snare wire. Had to trap, forage and gather water. It was an all day event to gather enough food for 1 meal a day. It sucked so hard! Lol but was a great life altering event. And gave me great appreciation for our ancestors. PS Fireweed tastes like crap but high in vitamin C.
Try making fireweed jelly. I know that's not what you're going to do in the situation you were in, but as you said it's high in vitamin C, so a great addition to any pantry
If you ferment fireweed, or find it already white and fungusy. It can be used for a delightful tea that tastes much like Red Rose orange pekoe.
We have loads of plantain, dandelion, and nettles on our family's property.
Plantain is one of my favorite-tasting greens. It does take a little boiling first, though. About six minutes.
Plantain is my favorite medicinal herb lol
I'm an especial fan of plantain seed heads. They taste like white button mushrooms, with a hint of dill.
In Poland major foraging herbs are nettles, sorrel, hogweed and goosefoot(lamb's quarter). My grandma often cooked green borsch from sorrel leaves, and my mom still cooks it from time to time. It can even be preserved for winter - chop young leaves thinly, salt them well to draw moisture, then tightly pack into small jars to pickle them. Pour some vegetable oil on top to prevent spoiling. I'm not really a fan, but it tastes well enough with potatoes and chopped hard boiled eggs.
My parents won't even try foraging beyond picking blackberries. My mother actually tried to dispose of a bunch of greens I had collected for my lunch recently, insisting I was going to poison myself. I live in western Washington, and foraging for food is only difficult when things are frozen hard. But a lot of people act like things are poisonous if they weren't planted or bought from the store. They will sadly learn the hard way if things go fully sideways.
If you don't have the proper knowledge then you shouldn't be foraging. Nothing wrong with your parents not wanting to forage. They don't have to forage just because you want to.
@@johncollins211 I never expected them to. They don't want ME foraging for my own food. I spent a year in an apothecary course focused on the plants native to my area. I don't bother trying to forage for them anymore because they just throw it away. I just wish they wouldn't get almost offended acting when I choose to eat the wild food around here.
@@froginprogress8510Its social conditioning sadly - enough fear mongering and reinforcement that only food from the supermarket is safe, you have a customer for life.
Its hard to break these learned patterns of behavior and understand the wild plants arent all out to get you
I fondly remember my mother teaching me how to identify edible native plants, Sheep Shower being my favorite for it's slightly lemony flavor when eaten fresh.
@@kmoecub Sheep Sorrel? I have a bunch of that growing in my food herb garden. That flash of sour does so nicely compliment whatever it gets added to, doesn't it?
Foraging is my hobby, and stinging nettle was one of the first plants I learned to identify, so it has a special place in my heart. Loved the video!
I learned to identify them as a kid but in order to avoid getting stung 😂
I love picking stinging nettle with my bare hands!! I have rheumatoid arthritis, and the "stings" are equivalent to putting capsaicin cream on my hands
@silvek99 When I was a kid, I thought thistles were stinging nettles. I lived in kind of a desert area, so you wouldn't run into nettles much unless you go up into the mountains. When I found some, I actually thought it was mint at first, and was like, "Why is this mint stinging my hands when I touch it??"
@JenniferPeterson-oc2nj That's cool! It's fun to learn about natural remedies some of these plants can provide. I forage mostly for fun or to try new things I haven't before, but having knowledge of some of the health benefits is useful too for sure!
After you boiled and prepared them nettles tastes like butter.
Early spring was frequently called "the starving time."
Nettle tea is pretty good, I've had that.
Foraging is still completely normal in european countrys today (i love wild garlic soup) but 50+ years ago you done it to survive. you coudnt just go buy exotic fruits in markets people dependet on preserved fruits and foraging.
Here in germany my grandmother collected sorrel, nettle, goutweed, dandelion, woodruff. wild garlic, various leaves and berries for tea like blackberry-leaves and rose hip some as medicine (+a garden full of veggies appletrees 2 sows rabbits and chicken)
After work, it was work again at home they even had a field for wheat that they brought to the bakery for bread coupons
Foraging is part of the culinary tradition in Crete and was the inspiration for the Mediterranean Diet.
I only ate wild garlic raw or in scrambled eggs, I will look up the soup! I had a walk yesterday, I saw huge garlic fields with lots of people collecting the leaves (I am looking forward to see them flower, they are pretty). I live in Hungary and indeed, it's very normal to collect wild garlic, mushrooms, wild berries... I used to eat rosehip on my winter walks... Isn't it normal everywhere where there are many easy to identify things to collect? (Mushrooms can be tricky but many of them are still easy. Maybe not for people who are careless. I put very much effort into identifying them especially if they are even remotely similar to one of the deadly ones and I ate quite many wild mushroom species this far. It's fun. I don't always know the species that I eat - champignons are confusing like that - but I always can be quite sure I won't die of it. And I love to find new species even if they aren't edible.)
I have sorrel in my own garden, such a lovely plant, I only had to sow it once and it doesn't take space in my tiny veggie patch, it's fine just somewhere among the grass and it even multiplies and travel further every year.
Wild garlic, called "Bärlauch" in German is very good. Nice way to spice up scambled eggs, make a spring soup together with nettles. If you put it in a neutral tasting oil, you can make your own oil for salad vinaigrette. Or greek yogurth, some salt and pepper on a potatoe.
Several years ago, I used to give a talk at some of the campgrounds on "wild foods." That is, plants in the local area that were edible, some needing cooking, but others that you could eat raw. As I told the people there, "this is not so you can go out in the woods and live off the land, but so that if you get lost, you can survive long enough to be found." Thankfully, these days it isn't absolutely necessary for survival, but I still enjoy doing foraging to add variety to the dinner table.
Every year during this time I think of foraging at granny's home place. In the spring we'd gather nettles, fiddle heads, dandy lion leaves and early mushrooms. At the same time lettuce, beets and radishes would be planted. Before long the asparagus shoots would come up as well as the rhubarb. Peas would be planted. And so on. Easter was always a celebration using the last ham, the last of the root vegetables and lots of foraged veggies always cooked with ham hocks.
I love fiddleheads so much! I found some at the back of my property, and I was so excited ❤
When spending summers at my grandmas farm in my youth she always made nettle pancakes. Just absolutely delicious. She also made nettle soup. In fact, I think most things had nettles in it as long as they were somewhat in season. Even in the middle of summer you could still find good nettles to eat in shaded places.
I would give a lot to eat another morel mushroom. When I was a child in the late 60s/early 70s, my father had a coworker who provided morels. What a heavenly flavor
Morels feed on dead or dying trees, of fairly specific species. Might I humbly suggest looking into what trees morels associate with? You'll need to look at what grows in your area, but apple, cottonwood, cherry and black walnut are a few examples. The trees are a lot easier to find than mushrooms among the leaf-litter, and now's (roughly) the time of year to be looking. Besides, those trees often provide food in their own right, later in the year.
One thing that has changed in my lifetime is the dramatic increase in Autumn Olive trees in Kentucky. They aren't native, but they're suddenly everywhere in the past decade or so. They have berries that make a decent jam, but there's still way too many of the trees.
Another modern development is it's much harder to find ginseng now because people in the last several decades overharvested all they could find to sell, which sucks because it's a great little plant.
Foraging in the early spring is so much easier now than in those olden days. Today, so many of the plants we can harvest in the late winter and early spring are not native (like the dandelion and wild field garlic you showed). Instead, they were brought over as garden plants and have escaped cultivation, and have even become weeds that dominate native plants and places. Those European plants have such an earlier season because they are from farther northern latitudes, so our late winter daylength seems like springtime to them. And with warmer temperatures now, compared to the older days, even the native stinging nettles have an earlier season now. So it's hard to appreciate how tough those folks really had it, without the specialized knowledge and access to productive places. Stinging nettles were so important to people -- and are still one of the most delicious and nutritious wild greens out there. Happy foraging!
Americans severely underestimate how much of the plant life was cultivated by the native peoples. There are SO MANY forageable foods growing wild that we never bothered to learn.
It is still too cold here in Canada for things to be growing - we still have snow on the ground. But in a month or two we will be able to go foraging.
We'll need to forage at this rate
We need a Canada version of Townsends. I bet he could do it, too, but a lot of extra work for him. Canada would be a fresh pallet, from early east coast provinces and the along the St Lawrence river provinces. (QC, ON). We had longer growing seasons south of you, and that was difficult enough.
I would love to hear about the early settlers of your gargantuan western provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta. How did they survive? Were there edible wild greens, mushrooms? That might be more 19th century than 18th.
Proud to be your neighbor. I hope we can hear more about you in future episodes. After all, we were both British North America at one time, and cousins.
@@josephmclaughlin9865 There are a good many Canadian channels offering insight on foraging, growing and homesteading. Admittedly, a good many of them (the Wooded Beardsman, Fowler's Makery & Mishief and others) take a modern perspective, while others are the doom & gloom flavour of prepper. Nevertheless, many are good, practical sources of data.
I imagine searching RUclips with words like "foraging, settling, farming, growing" and the province name would yield good results. I recommend searching by province rather than the nation as a whole, since things were traditionally done differently in the mountains, prairies, Maritimes and so on - much as they were in New England, the Dakotas or Appalachia in the US.
Good luck!
Stinging Nettles are delicious. They should be added to your kitchen, even for weekly fare.
As Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman famously said, “ Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
My grandma's family had forage during winter when they had to escape to the mountains when ustaše came to her village during ww2, they had to forage tree bark, plants and struck gold when they found a goat(used it for milk). When she went to the doctor two or three years ago, he asked her if she was a refugee because she was soo malnutritioned when she was 5 she developed osteroporosis at 80.
Any time my kids tell me about what they would refuse to eat I tell them, "That's because you've never really been hungry."
The closest I've ever come to being hungry was when I was in the Army and we ran out of MREs and didn't get a meal for a couple of days. They brought us powdered eggs. I asked for seconds.
One of my favorite spring traditions is making a dandelion green curry or stew. Ideally accompanied by a saison (farmhouse ale) flavoured with dandelions (Fantome Pissenlit). Nettle stew is good too, and I've had some great nettle-flavoured beers. When I was a child, the house we lived in backed onto an overgrown valley filled with nettles, but we never ate them.
Many wild greens are special ingredients for traditional spring dishes
My great-grandmother was an excellent forager and she passed her skills onto her children. My grandfather, also an excellent forager, passed his skills to my mother, who passed the knowledge on to me. We have all gone beyond foraging for wild greens with berry collecting, nut gathering, trapping the occasional snapper turtle, crayfish, crabs, fishing, or even hunting for small or large game.
As was explained, early Spring was the most critical time for needing food supplies and nutrients for a rural-dweller. In our generational family of foragers, Spring greens were the focal point. Cress, both water and land cress, is one of our favorite greens. Dandelions, too -- with all of the various species. Foraging for wild Asparagus is very rewarding, although quite a bit of caution is needed since a great deal of them are found near roadways where chemicals are sometimes sprayed. My favorite foraged 'weed' is Purslane which is found in Summer.
Typically cooked in liquid for a soup or 'tonic', many of my foraged greens are made into sumptuous dishes like quiches or creamy-cheese skillet meals.
Even with my foraging abilities, and as delicious as foraged foods are, I seriously doubt that I could survive off of foraged foods long-term.
In the future foraging will be essential. Again.
Can't say it enough..this man is a national treasure.
Kinda lucky nowadays we have grocery stores to forage in. Although you have to forage some cash first.
I'd really like to see a video on the Sierra Nevada mountain range during the gold rush, so much wild cabbage you wouldn't believe, wild carrots fallowing the streams, rabbits and deer . But also bears,wolves, coyotes and lions in those forests.
With nothing but a metal detector and a pick we found 1800s square nails that were definitely made by a blacksmith ruffly around the area around black springs. I've seen the tracks of a mountain lion that had to be very large that walked right by our camp perfectly displayed in the fine dust of those old logging roads. The Forest is very quiet save for the birds and chipmunks. I love being far into the red woods and sequoias in the spring time when the flowers are blooming. All white and yellow flowers and new grass covering the forest floors and the meadows
I buy bulk bags of nettle for making tea. It is excellent for people that suffer from respiratory issues. Dandelion greens make a great tonic for spring detox from those winter blahs. After eating dried or salted foods all winter I'm sure fresh greens would have been heavenly.
The concept you talk about ~2:00 minutes in is called the hungry gap by farmers
Thank you Townsends for another great slice of history!
Nettle soup/tea is pretty tasty (though a literal pain to harvest!) and dandelion greens make a pretty good pesto if you don't have basil. Thanks for this video, Jon.
This is the one I've been hoping for. Foraging is one of my favorite things. Wild garlic, nettles, dandelion, plantain, and pokeweed are my most common finds here in Eastern Kentucky. Usually, the pokeweed is found around old homesteads, so it may have been planted by human hands.
How do you make your pokeweed? Some popped up in our yard and I would like to use it somehow.
@@sdw6846 Cook like greens, but boil it twice first because it is quite toxic!
@@sdw6846also as a general rule if you haven’t had it before only take the young shoots that haven’t yet turned purple and don’t touch the berries. There’s a fair few yt videos showing the process it’s definitely a plant you wanna be careful with though
@joybreegaming8781 Excellent advice. To be honest, I don't think poke is even worth the work as far as being an enjoyable food, but around here, it's kind of a cultural thing. It's considered a delicacy in Appalachia because it truly has saved a lot of lives here in past generations. People eat it kind of as a remembrance of that past.
@@dannzalbjorklund Thanks for this technique! I'll try it this year.
Nettles is an interesting plant, the soft fresh tops are good for eating, the stem has some decent fibers.
I grow nettles in my backyard in a city. Usually I dry them for tea. Now I want to try some oatmeal soup with nettles and other greens. Thanks for a great experiment idea!
Here in Finland, nettle pancakes are a fairly common food. Similar to spinach pancakes you eat them with lingonberries. Delicious and nutricious :)
I found nettles in my backyard but decided to go with better greens from the grocer. The family that built my house in the 1930s planted a lovely garden that birds and bees love.
Up here in Newfoundland many of us still pick dandelion leaves in the spring and boil them up with potato and salt pork and sometimes other veggies. They are very delicious but can get bitter as they start to flower.
Thank you, Jon, and Happy Easter, all! Imagine this lemon is an Easter Egg.
This early spring where things are just starting to sprout were called by the early settlers 'The 6 weeks of want' as all their stored food had virtually come to an end and it would be 6 weeks until things really started to grow and furnish proper sustinance. Now they had to forage and hunt hard to have food to eat.
But that is when the hens all start laying again. An abundance! Which is why Easter was celebrated by giving children boiled eggs, painted brightly and hidden here and there in the new green grass. Children foraging . . .
I used to forage back in 2014 but stopped for a time; recently picked it back up, enjoying the abundance of london rocket growing in the yard.
Basic foraging is something we should all learn tbh
My wife are an expert on what to eat in the forest.
She is chinese and when she found a certain kind of celery that are very expensive in china growing in the wild here in Scandinavia she was very pleased.
I love nettles! They can make a great spinach substitute, and people even replace basil with them and make pesto. I still haven't tried that yet.
To be honest, Watching these videos kinda gives me comfort and peace.
Thank you for making these kinds of videos.
I absolutely love nettle. You can make soup, you can mash it, and you can fry it. It's delicious and it's good for you.
My mother grew up during the depression. She gathered “weeds” her whole life. I always celebrate Spring with some nettles. They make delicious greens. 👍👍
Here in Czechia I've had fish soup with nettles (delicious) so the mention of the fish and nettles together was quite amusing. 😅
Uwielbiam tego typu materiały, w szczególności w waszym wykonaniu. Chętnie zobaczę więcej
Love the content. This is comfort food for the brain for me. Warm. It also helps his voice reminds so much of Metal Gear Solid's Otacon.
Good morning from Syracuse NY brother and everyone else thank you for sharing this video and Happy Easter/Resurrection day everyone
Whenever I go into natural environments in Australia, it becomes obvious why the pre-contact Indigenous Australian population for the whole continent was around 300,000. It is because while there are plenty of edible species in Australia, if not for fishing and hunting, you'll need to forage a lot to fill your belly. Also, a lot of people nowadays consider Australian native edible species to be an acquired taste.
If you have beef and oatmeal youre not in starvation mode
These skills are good to know with everything going on now
Those days were the real test of survival. Thank you.
Thrilled by this gem of a video, thank you kindly for featuring spring foraging-especially stinging nettle and dandelion greens. Those morel mushroom shots were truly marvelous too! What a gift it must have been to find hidden groves of forage-ables in the frontier when supplies were scarce and larders lean. Also, the stinging nettle porridge at the end reminded me a bit of the traditional Japanese New Year dish Nanakusa-gayu, or "Seven Wild (Spring) Herb Porridge." In all corners of the world after a long winter, cheers to the arrival of spring greens!
I haven't eaten them, but I've made nettle tea and it really isn't bad. Not necessarily a go-to for flavor being kind of "grassy" like many greens, but certainly not a hardship to drink and it's incredibly nutritious. I usually combined it with ironwort, which is also nutritious, but is a milder taste something more along the lines of chamomile, though I wouldn't say they taste the same at all.
Nice video townsends, absolutely adore the amount of historical accuracy and work that you put into your content on an otherwise unforgiving video platform.
The notion of foraging being a matter of extremity is always something that makes me chuckle. As I pulled this video up, I was eating a sandwich made with foraged mulberry jam (though, admittedly, the sugar came from the store). Last night, I had noodles with garlic mustard and nettles collected from my local park, and I'm planning on heading out mushroom hunting this weekend. I live downtown in the city, and would be eating even more from the land, if I had any wilderness near at hand.
I rather think that a lot of these people were similarly gleaning their food from outside their garden as much as growing within it; it's simply that, when the domestic foodstuffs ran out, the foraged goods bore more mentioning.
By the way, a note on nettles: I think these greens are absolutely delicious - but be warned: they do contain high levels of oxalic acid. They're immensely nutritious, and I have no doubt that one could get through a hard time by eating tons of the stuff (along with an occasional source of fat and protein). That said, they should be eaten in moderation (especially later in the season) if one has the option. They can cause calcium oxalate kidney stones in the long term, and put a strain on the kidneys in general. Have them once a week and you should be fine - especially if you stay well-hydrated.
As I write this already-wordy comment, one final thing occurs to me: as the kidneys become taxed, it does often lead to a loss of appetite (the body trying to avoid taking in any more toxins until the current load is eliminated). I've experienced this myself, the first year I started harvesting nettles, and went a bit overboard. One feels a bit bloated, but by no means ill, and I imagine the feeling of satiety might be another reason why nettles were enjoyed in the difficult time you referenced.
Nettles stewed in bone broth, with wild onions, salt, and pepper are absolutely delicious!
The closest I've come to foraging is selecting a nice bunch of collards from the produce section
The other day my husband foraged some mustard greens. I cooked them right up to accompany my otherwise colorless meat and potatoes, and they added a very nice touch! One of these days I'd like to take a local foraging class so I can identify more edibles.
Your channel is a balm! I'm grateful to be living in a time of advanced medicine and with so much free access to information, but I love the little break I can get from other modern pressures by watching your content.
My Russian grandma sometimes still cooks nettle soup and sorrel soup. Just because it's part of the countryside culinary tradition. For her, because it's a good thing to eat, but 100+ years ago, it was a way to survive for thousands of people in these areas
Knowledge is power. Knowing what grows around you that is edible, the nutritional values, and how to prepare, is worth much more than gold.
Happy Easter, Townsends!
Jon T. is the history professor that we never had in college, but, whom we wish we did have. Abundant passion, energy and deep knowledge from the teacher keep us students riveted.
I’m impressed how you handled those nettles with no gloves. I forage nettles a lot and the stings destroy my hands unless I wear gloves
7:27 Townsend - "..And so, he has to survive on..."
**immediately cuts to a ManScaped Ad**
😂😂
I'd love more of these! I'm Gen X and it's fun to see my parents, peers, kids, and grandkids stuff being highlighted next to one another.
Thank you for this excellent video! I heard mention of stinging nettles being edible. But nobody showed how to cook them like you did. Once again, thanks!
We live in a high fire area of CA, so we are legally required to keep all plant life down to 4 inches. We have been hacking down the wild plants, and my son said, "It smells like a salad!" I laughed and said, "Cuz it can be!" He didn't make the connection that the leaves of the little clustered yellow flowers I picked and ate were mustard greens! I just wish the cheese weed (mallow) would grow on my side of the fence!
We have a ton of hackberry trees here in Texas. They're sticky and messy, but actually are quite tasty and calorie-rich.
Fascinating! Really cool piece, Townsends Team! 😃👍
This is so interesting. I just watched an interview earlier today by a North Korean who made it down to South Korea and she basically talked about how in the north, Spring is the season of death for most people for this exact same reason.
Here in so. VT, our family forages a lot. Stinging nettles, plantain, dock, ramps (wild leeks), dandelion greens, morels, garlic mustard, wild lettuce, winter cress, burdock root, wild ginger, watercress, day lily and trout lily tubers, dentaria, spring beauty, violet leaves, cattail shoots and roots - you can eat well and have medicine at hand if have the knowledge.
I haven't planted my garden yet, but the deer and rabbit are coming into the yard, all the time to eat my fresh, spring, weeds! So....
My absolute favorite is wild garlic, usually called wild onions in my part of the world. Every time I mow my lawn, I come back with garlic breath. 😂
Your consistency is astounding. I could watch an episode from 8 days ago or 8 years ago and still be entertained and educated. Great stuff always
Ah, this reminds me of foraging for bamboo shoots with my father in law in China. The best ones grow in spring right after the first rain of the year. If you slow cook them with pork bellies they taste like heaven, and they taste great on their own when pickled in vinegar and brine. The Chinese have been eating those for thousands of years, for good reason.
The best meals I have ever eaten were foraged. If you learn your land and the enormous variety of plants that live there, you can eat well all year ‘round.
We usually use nettles here as the key ingredient in various dumplings, and spring stuffing (like for a goose during Easter)
May I ask where "here" is?
@@beth12svist Czechia. But truth be told, people who live in the city substitue it w spinach or something
@@dominatorandwhocaresanyway9617 Heh, that's funny, I'm Czech myself, and I _thought_ it sounded Central European. 😅 (Personally I'm not used to goose at Easter, though, so I did not place it.)
Happy Easter Townsends!! Love you guys!!
Transplant some nettles to your yard, put them in a bit of partial shade, similar to where you found them. They don't sting when they first sprout, that happens later. Mine come up year after year as long as I leave a few alone in the clumps or don't pull up the roots, just cut the tops. I boil, steam, or sear mine, keep the broth and dried leaves for a great iced or hot tea tea.
Foraged food often is more nutritious than store bought foods. I remember reading of a woman who kept her children fed during a summer during the depression by foraging lamb’s quarters in an empty lot in the neighborhood. There’s a lot of delicious stuff out there.
Goodnight, Em
In Lithuania, we still eat nettle soup in the spring. I always thought the nettles were there just for flavouring, never suspected they were actually nutritious.
10:05 I tasted a dish of stinging nettles in Delphi, Greece. It was the cheapest thing on the menu, but it tasted OK.
I loved this part in my high school Natural Resources class. Going out and trying white pine needles and eating red clover. Thanks for reminding me of this often unlooked skill for today.
pine needles!
Thats what the Moomins eat before they hibernate!
I’ve always wanted to try preparing nettles for food. Maybe this spring I give it a go
Love your channel. Few places you can find nostalgia, history and cooking and food together. What a magnificent mix.
love stinging nettles tea. so refreshing
Nettles are great, especially the fresh ones in spring. When they mature they have much more of the "dont-eat-me" molecules like fomic and oxalic acid. I find it best to not take the stems and cook them much like (we europeans) cook spinach. But one needs really much of them, so don't take too little. They can take it.
if u have a nettle patch in ur garden always make sure to add some to ur compost heap before they run to seed they add a lot of nutrients
Boiled stinging nettles with lemon and olive oil garnish are a popular Greek side dish known as ""Horta"