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Right across from the bathhouse, for example, we'll find the leaves of sheep sorrel. Shaped like a sheep's face, these leaves have an intensely sour flavor, superb in salads and soups, and with bland ingredients, such as potatoes, pasta, or beans.
Just beyond the bathhouse, we'll find highly abundant, green, fragrant saplings of sassafras, which will guide us in locating the roots, which you can use to make a healthful, detoxifying tea, wild root beer, or to use as a sweet seasoning.
Starting along the boardwalk, we'll find wild Northern bayberry bushes, with leaves you can use like bay leaves, to flavor soups, stews and sauces. A tea is good for indigestion, or as a gargle for sore throat. The bush is semi-evergreen, meaning that many of the leaves don't fall off during the winter, so they're available even before new growth has occurred.
A detour to the Long Island Sound will give us the opportunity to find seaweeds. Depending on tides, currents, and luck, we could find rockweed, a great source of iodine and other minerals. Never sold commercially it's great for flavoring vegan fake seafood sauces and entrées, and it's just as good in soups, or parboiled, seasoned, and roasted like kale chips.
Sea lettuce is another seaweed that could be up in abundance. Very easy to recognize, it looks like translucent green plastic wrap. It's great sautéed in olive oil with garlic, or added to soups.
Irish moss, yet another common seaweed, is a superb thickener for sauces and puddings, as well as a home remedy for indigestion. It contains carrageenan, a natural thickener used in dozens of commercial food and cosmetic products.
In the sand on the way back to the boardwalk, we'll look for the young leaves of common evening primrose, indicating the location of the long, white, pink-tipped taproots. With a complex, sweet, peppery flavor, they're excellent in grain and bean dishes, as well as in soups, stews, and sauces.
We'll also find chickweed, which tastes like corn-on-the-cob and is loaded with vitamins and minerals, growing in sunny spots. Both sweet-sharp daylily shoots and chive-like field garlic, will be producing bumper crops in partially shaded areas throughout the edges of the paths.
Field garlic leaves are best from September through April, before they get tough and coarse. The bulbs are mild in the winter and early spring, and especially most spicy from mid-spring through summer.
We'll also be finding garlic mustard galore in the woods. This foreign invasive species produces garlic-flavored leaves and horseradish-flavored taproots. You can season the leaves and roast them like kale chips or use them to make pesto, or chop the roots and add them to bean dips and sauces. In addition, they also contain nutrients that reduce the risk of both heart disease and cancer.
There's also lots of black birch in the woods. You can make a delicious, wintergreen-flavored tea with the twigs, which contain the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory methyl salicylate, a natural forerunner of aspirin that also the reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer. Chewing on the twigs even relieves the pain of teething, and adding the twigs to puddings creates an excellent flavoring.
All these plants are common, renewable resources, which "Wildman," along with his 10-year-old foraging expert, daughter, and assistant, Violet Brill, will teach you how to recognize, harvest ecologically, and use, with no environmental impact whatsoever.
