Yesterday I ate a poisonous plant. And I’m still here! (DISCLAIMER! I don't pretend to know all the safety guidelines for eating this plant! Do your own research if you plan to pick and eat this plant; don't go by what I say here.)
To be clear, the part I consumed wasn't poisonous. And the plant is not necessarily poisonous in a lethal sense. Many Alaska natives have used it for medicinal purposes for a long time. I ate devil’s club buds, which are edible for an extremely short timeframe in the spring. I read what I could in preparation, though it seems not many people have been brave enough to eat a plant whose spines give a nasty rash, or worse. (My main inspiration and guidance was this blog post by a well-known local cook.) My husband wasn’t too excited about eating this unfamiliar and unproven wild food, but I was determined to expand my skills of foraging for and eating Alaska’s bounty.
We had been out of town for a week, so we almost missed our opportunity since we hadn’t been able to check the progress of the buds around our house. We checked the other night and decided we couldn't wait another day; if we did the buds might start unfurling (quickly becoming the HUGE leaves they are in summer) and the spines would harden. So we donned gloves and carefully tromped through the woods.
To be clear, the part I consumed wasn't poisonous. And the plant is not necessarily poisonous in a lethal sense. Many Alaska natives have used it for medicinal purposes for a long time. I ate devil’s club buds, which are edible for an extremely short timeframe in the spring. I read what I could in preparation, though it seems not many people have been brave enough to eat a plant whose spines give a nasty rash, or worse. (My main inspiration and guidance was this blog post by a well-known local cook.) My husband wasn’t too excited about eating this unfamiliar and unproven wild food, but I was determined to expand my skills of foraging for and eating Alaska’s bounty.
We had been out of town for a week, so we almost missed our opportunity since we hadn’t been able to check the progress of the buds around our house. We checked the other night and decided we couldn't wait another day; if we did the buds might start unfurling (quickly becoming the HUGE leaves they are in summer) and the spines would harden. So we donned gloves and carefully tromped through the woods.
We just had normal clothes on, and because we didn't want to be poked with the painful spines that cover the stems or have to pick them out of our clothes later, we only chose buds from plants around the edges of the devil's club clusters. During the winter, each plant consists of mainly just a brown, spiny stick (as seen above).
We found a few pretty fiddlehead ferns (below) along the way! These are another Alaskan delicacy that are edible for a short timeframe.
The spring evening was just beautiful, with golden light coating all the vegetation around us. The sun isn't setting this time of year until after 10 PM, and the birds are awake and happy late into the evening. Buds and baby leaves are out on all the plants, and the rhubarb plants in the garden already have huge leaves!
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Then came the kitchen work. I didn't want to stay up late, so I put the buds in a bowl, sealed them up, and then stuck them in the fridge overnight. The next day, I carefully went through and weeded out ANY buds I was unsure of. I wanted only the greenest, most spineless buds possible for this experiment! I didn't quite know what I was doing.
I rinsed my careful selection well and then blanched them for a couple minutes, followed by an ice bath to stop the cooking, as Laurie instructs in the blog post I mentioned in my second paragraph. The juice from the buds stained my fingers and knife. Fortunately it came off with a little scrubbing. I didn't expect that brown color to come from these pretty green buds!
I finally had a whole bunch of buds ready to cook with or eat. I froze a few bagfuls and kept a little bit out to cook up (plus a few fiddlehead ferns we picked to eat).
I cooked them in some butter and garlic, with fresh-ground lemon pepper on top. The taste is hard to describe, but it's woodsy and almost spicy. The texture is soft, and they are definitely a unique Alaskan treat!
If you want to see what devil's club looks like in its summer form, visit this page and look at the picture across the top of the page! You can also scroll down to read about the plant.
Have you foraged for any wild, edible plants in your area?
Have you foraged for any wild, edible plants in your area?
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