Karmic-Dragonfly

Got my first pawpaw of the year! This was lying on the ground, yellowing and fragrant. I kept in the kitchen a couple days and it started to darken at home.

I had seen a TikTok which suggested that where Mayapples are growing, then that is an indicator of where Morels might be found. And I actually happen to know of a large growth of Mayapples in Byrd Park! So I went looking. Sadly I did not find any Morels this morning.


Buzzards have chosen a tree near one of the paved paths as their roost — as I was standing there wondering if I really wanted to get that near a roost of buzzards (with images of buzzard poop forming in my mind), one of them landed on a dead limb directly overhead. I heard a ⚡️crack and I ran. Which turned out to be a good thing, because some fairly large chunks of dead wood slammed on the ground near where I had been standing!

A friend and I are scheduled for a class on mushroom scavenging. Looking forward to it -- I'd like to be comfortable harvesting simple ones -- like Morels and Chicken of the Woods.

I headed to the river today hunting pawpaws...and I came back with all that I would want for one sitting. Tbh, this is about all I can eat at once because the custard is just so gelatinous and sweet, with a bitter aftertaste, lol.

Three fruits that smelled ripe (fruity), felt ripe (soft), and had the right look (bruised and battered) --


Cut open & scoop out --


I think I mentioned this before, but when I first found out about pawpaws, I was surprised I didn't already know about them. They are native to this part of the US, and I grew up on a farm here. So I called my Dad and asked about them. After he had me describe the tree and fruit, his answer was 'I didn't like those.' Meaning, we didn't find out about them when we were little because he didn't like the taste, lol!



Ready to eat! People always ask what they taste like. It's hard to say. Here's the best I can do: "Custard. Sweet. Gelatinous. Melon-honey-mango-banana-overly sweet. There is a slight chorine smell when cutting the pawpaws…and there is a bitter aftertaste that lasts."

Some people don't like them, but I love me some urban foraging, lol

Self medication was necessary after the violence and fires here in town during the riots last night. Although my house is not near those locations, I still felt uneasy and didn't sleep well. So I was up around 2 and 3, watching reports on Twitter of the events.

The self medication I'm talking about is not wine (*although that will come later*), but going to the park and picking some mulberries. They were almost out of season, but some of the trees on the back side of the park were still pretty loaded.

This Black Swallowtail was on the Zinnias today -- presumably, this is the same butterfly that emerged yesterday!



i went back down to the river today to check on the pawpaws, and found several ripe -- or close enough that they should ripen in the next few days. The yellower ones pretty much have to be eaten quickly, while the greener ones will last a bit --


Of course you have to spit out the pits. This time, I tried squeezing some lime juice onto them, and that was pretty great! The tartness of the lime cuts the sweetness of the pawpaws!


Pawpaws are kind of an acquired taste -- very sweet, mushy texture, and they have an aftertaste! The lime helped with all that!

A friend and I went out this past weekend to walk around the river. It was fun hanging out with him, and as a bonus I asked if we could scout out some of the trails for pawpaws. Luckily, we found a couple of ripe ones (and a bit over-ripe) lying on the ground. He had never had one, so I gave him one to take home with the instruction to eat it that day because of how ripe it was. I kept the other one.

Ever since I first realized last year that pawpaws grow wild and that I could eat them, I have had an itch to eat them again when they come in season. Here is this year's crop!

Pawpaw Flavor Notes

The friend commented that he thought they tasted somewhat like banana. I also could taste the banana, but for me there was some other fruity taste as well -- again just like last year, I'll say 'papaya' for lack of a better word for the flavor that was underlying the 'banana'.

Later that day, another friend was over and when he tasted it, he commented that it left a bitter after-taste. Which is totally true! It is something I had not noticed before, but I definitely noticed the bitterness after he mentioned it.

My plan is to head back to the river this weekend if I get a chance and see if I can snag a few more.

Circle of Life

On the same trip, I found a LARGE spider. I think it was a Black and Yellow Garden Spider -- an Argiope aurantia -- feasting on a Snowberry Clearwing hummingbird moth (Hemaris diffinis). It was sort of sad to see the dead hummingbird moth!

Cloudless Sulphur

That same weekend, I found myself chasing a yellow butterfly around the yard because I could not ID it. It was very skittish. And very fast flying, fluttering around wildly. It did NOT like it when I got within, say, 10 feet of him! This made it hard to photograph! I believe it was a Cloudless Sulphur.

Here he is DEEP inside a morning glory out back in the alley:

Porcelain Vine & Neighbor Notes

Below is a photo of of a honey bee approaching a wasp from behind. The bees, wasps and some sort of fly were everywhere on the out-of-control porcelain vine back there, and I'm not sure why because there are no blooms from that plant now -- just the fruit.

The vine is quite the invasive, but this one is not on my property; instead it is growing on a neighbor's fence. Because it's not on my property, I can't just go out there and start whacking away at it.


Come to think of it, that neighbor has let his backyard go to weed the last couple years. Actually, I have a couple of neighbors doing that. Although I like the 'wild' look, the other neighbors have taken it to a new level, with thigh high grass for one of them, and this porcelain vine everywhere for the other.

The neighbor with the tall grass is older, so that doesn't surprise me. But the neighbor with the porcelain vine was someone that I used to see outside tending his garden all the time. But not lately. He's not old, so I'm not sure what has happened.

Continuing my quest to try the edible things in my yard and neighborhood, today I made some tea with dandelion flowers

First off, I had only mowed the yard just a few days ago, so I didn't have many flowers. I should have reduced the water in the pan -- the tea was not very strong.

First, I gathered the flowers that I could fine. I just put 2 fingers underneath each flower and tugged until the flower popped off into my hand.


Then, I put some water in the pan and put the flowers in. Remember -- there were too few flowers for this amount of water. I think the articles online showed a lot of flowers in the pan.


I brought them to a slow boil, then turned off the heat. Then I did some stuff around the house and came back -- probably about 20 minutes letting them steep.


The color of the tea looks like pee to me...but it tasted fine! I used honey to sweeten it. I would definitely make this again!



One side note -- if you take a medicine, make sure there will be no interactions.

Me? I take medicine that increases my blood potassium levels. And dandelion flower tea evidently is very high in potassium. So...this means I shouldn't drink this on a regular basis.

Headed down to Belle Isle today to look for Pawpaw fruits. Pawpaws are native trees that provide a 'tropical-like' fruit. I'm a little surprised I didn't know about these from growing up. I can't believe that my grandparents didn't know about them -- maybe we we got bougie, we stopped harvesting wild fruit? Or maybe some of the knowledge just didn't get passed down.

Fruit is very creamy, custard-like. I ate it with a spoon out of the pod --


Big mamajamma pits --


I gave the tree a good shake to get these to fall -


I can't quite describe the taste. I saw someone online describe it as a banana taste, but I tasted nothing banana-like. Maybe kinda like a papaya -- but very creamy. But there is something that I can't put my finger on....

Nutritionally, I'm seeing that they are high in protein, A and C, and possibly have anti-cancer benefits.

I believe that the Papaya is also called a Pawpaw, but it's a different species from this one. Although the fruit looks a bit a like.

http://www.pawpaw.kysu.edu/pawpaw/cooking.htm

I expanded my urban foraging to a nearby park. My biggest fear about going outside my own yard was that I wondered if the city might be spraying some sort of pesticide for mosquito control.

But as I thought about it:

1. I go to the park all the time, and I have never seen the city spraying anything.
   
2. If the park had been sprayed, unless the poison is systemic, I would expect it to wash off with the rain. And we had a lot of rain last night and earlier this week.
   
3. There's a large bird population at the park and lots of bugs, so I just don't think there has been any spraying.
   
4. I only foraged a small amount of food, so even if there were to be systemic pesticide, I'd only get a small dose.

So, I think I'm safe on that account.

So off to the park I went to pick some Mulberries since they are in season right now.

I actually have a Mulberry out back of my house (hence the sub-title of this journal), but it is very old and no longer seems to bear any fruit. It did bear some fruit when I first moved in, but I have not seen any any in recent years.

The ones I picked at the park were on the tree itself, so I suspect they are not completely ripe. And as you can see below, the stems came off with the berries -- another sign of incomplete ripeness. I think with a Mulberry on the property, you could spread a tarp on the ground and let the berries fall naturally off the tree.

In any event, I washed the berries and then used some scissors to trim off the stems. And I put a little sugar on them to eat.


There are several Mulberry trees at the park. They are pretty easy to identify -- of course, by the fruit, but also by the leaves and because their branches naturally sort of drape down towards the ground.


Picking Mulberries is a messy business -- your hands get stained purple. It reminded me of helping my grandmother pick blackberries when I was little. By the way, the park is full of blackberries as well.

Continuing along the lines of eating what's in my back yard, I found this recipe (actually recipes) for making Candied Violets -- http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Candied-Violets. I chose to use the dip in sugar water approach. Easy.

I have TONS of wild violets in the yard -- some consider them weeds, but I like the flowers! And the leaves are green, so what more would I ask? I don't use chemicals in the yard, so everything back there is up for consideration as food :)

(IMPORTANT NOTE -- these are wild violets, NOT the African violets that you buy at the florist. I believe African violets are poisonous. Here's a post here to help you identify. I think wild violets are pretty edible -- leaves, flowers, etc.)


Flowers collected, rinsed in a collander, and then drying on paper towels --







The recipe called for 'caster sugar,' which evidently is finer than granulated, but not so fine as powdered sugar. I hate to buy special ingredients, so I decided to grind granulated sugar up in my mortar and pestle.



Recipe called for almond extract which I had in the cabinet. It also suggested rosewater would work well, but I did not have that.



I like the licorice taste of anise, so I ground up a few seeds as well as an extra ingredient --



An essential element of any cooking adventure -- this is for the cook, not this recipe :)



Sugar, water, almond extract, and ground anise heating on low on the stove, until the sugar dissoves --



I did not have any tweezers (as the recipe called for) which I would have wanted to use in the kitchen, so I used kitchen tongs to dip the flowers into the sugar solution. Surprisingly, I did not have any wax paper in the cabinet, so I subbed parchment paper. Here are the flowers placed on parchment after being dipped and sprinkled with the 'caster' sugar --



I hate to waste food, so I decided to dump some pecans in the sugar solution. I put it in the fridge to eat later --

So...what did the violets taste like?

They were pretty good -- I mean, it's hard to go wrong with sugar, right? I guess they are sort of Victorian candy. They had a bit of a green taste since they were flowers straight from the yard. But good -- I'd do again if I needed flowers for decoration.

Fun little project, and I suspect that if you have young kids, they'd love to help with this!