A Wild Solstice Feast
The sun’s arc is low to the south, the day is at it’s shortest and the night is the longest of the year. Happy Solstice! Many holidays fall during this time, and our lights push back the dark while food, friends and family buoy our spirits. We’re taking a break from our homeschool programs for the winter holidays, but last week we ended the fall session with a feast and celebration.
The youngest group, Nest to Fledge, cooked up a stone soup with different ingredients from each participant. The Teens crafted chocolate-like confections from our native Bay Laurel nut and cocoa. And the Kestrels had an all-wild feast cooked up over coals in Huddart Park. Later, the NEWTS joined us and added their playful energy to our celebration by leading a tour of the mushrooms of Huddart Park.
What follows is the Kestrel’s wild food feast menu. If you made food on Friday, please add your comment about what you made, what recipe you used, and how it turned out!
We had three drinks to choose from. Yerba Buena, our local wild mint, made a delicious hot tea. We also had pine needle tea, lemony and slightly bitter. Both were sweetened with honey. Our most surprising addition was Manzanita soda, made by adding bubbles to manzanita cider that had been sweetened slightly with maple syrup. So delicious!
Yerba Buena photo by Cactusbones
Monterey Pine photo by jkirkhart35
Manzanita photo by Randomtruth
And we had such a bounty of food. Our staple was acorn that we all pounded and set to leach in a creek for a week. We mixed the meal with water, salt and honey and poured it into a hot oiled skillet, and cooked up delicious acorn cakes. We also mixed in some wheat flour (about 1/4c wheat to 1c acorn) and made cakes that way, to compare. The acorn alone was the best mix, I thought. It cooked up into a deep brown, firm, slightly jellylike cake that was delicious with our jams.
Acorn photos by tallasiandude
Some other participants gathered rosehips and toyon berries and arrived that morning with two beautiful jams. The rosehip jam was a vibrant red and tasted fruity and sweet, somewhat like strawberries and apricots. The toyon was also fruity and very gelatinous, with a tannic pucker in the background of the flavor.
Rosehip photo by Iguanasan
Toyon photo by allisondan
Alongside the acorn and jam we had a ton of sauteed chanterelle mushrooms that had grown in one participant’s backyard. Yum! We had been tracking animals near our sit spots for weeks ahead of time, and we finally managed to trap some! We did not use real traps, but track plates that recorded the passage of the animal and did no harm. So as a stand-in for the wild squirrels that we trapped but did not catch, I brought some grass-fed beef to grill. Everyone got perhaps a quarter pound of meat.
Chanterelle photo by Colros
Squirrel track on a track plate baited with participants lunch.
Western Gray Squirrel photo by Just chaos
My contribution was a survival stew made of wild rabbit meat, dock greens, mallow greens, and wild onion greens. It turned out to taste strongly wild, but very nourishing. I quartered the rabbit carcass, browned the meat, added water, and simmered until I had a good stock. Then I added the young leaves of yellow dock (Rumex crispus), Mallow (Malva neglecta) and Wild Onion (Allium triquetrum) and simmered until the greens were cooked. I did not add any salt, nor did the soup need any.
Brush rabbit photo by terriem
Dock photo by The Weed One
Mallow photo by Matt Lavin
Wild Onion photo by Mat. Tauriello
Altogether we fed 13 people with almost all wild foods gathered by our own hands. The only non-wild ingredients were canola oil for the skillets, salt, honey, other sweeteners for the jams and teas, and some wheat flour. When we all had as much as we wanted, there was still a ton of food left! We invited the Teens and Nest to Fledge to share what we had made, and we got to taste their stone soup, and finish everything off with some bay nut candy.
I for one am especially excited to get the recipes for Manzanita Soda, Rosehip Jam, Toyon Berry Jam, and the Teens Bay Nut Candy. Please post in comments!
