Photography by Amy Meng
A class offered through Manhattan’s UFM Community Learning Center teaches students the basics of foraging for edible native plants
Sue Maes, Terry Olson and Kelly Yarbrough’s passion for edible native plants is unwavering. No stranger to foraging, this trio is well-versed in adding nutrition and variety to their diets with locally sourced fruits, nuts and plants. Each year, they offer the class Edible Native Plants through Manhattan’s UFM Community Learning Center, where they use their years of foraging experience to educate others about the benefits of nature’s bounty. For this article, they recreated a scaled-down version of that class experience just for me.
We started in Olson’s kitchen, where the smells and sounds of seared meat and bubbling gravy permeated the air. Prepared foods lined the counter, and I quickly surmised that the sampling they promised was a wild feast. At first, I was apprehensive to eat what my farmer father once referred to as “weeds” or consume anything with the word “stinging” in its name. But I soon discovered these women know how to make the most of prairie-food flavors and textures.
Let me begin with the stinging nettle quiche prepared by Maes, who has taught the Edible Native Plants class at UFM for four decades. She combines nettles with spinach to create a flavor combination that made me regret choosing a small portion. Nettles are at their peak in the spring. Maes picks the young, tender leaves off the top of plants, then blanches and freezes the excess in 1/2 cup portions to use throughout the year. She stresses the importance of wearing gloves when harvesting stinging nettles but assures me that cooking the leaves neutralizes the stingers.
A relative newcomer to the class, Yarbrough is a local artist who also organizes Manhattan’s annual “Seed Swap” event at the Discovery Center. In my personal class, she explained how juniper berries must be harvested in the fall when they are blue and soft. Drying and then pulverizing them releases their citrusy and rosemary-like overtones and adds a burst of flavor to her juniper berry gravy, which she served over seared lamb.
Yarbrough also enjoys cooking with hickory nuts, which have a starring role in her popular pumpkin hickory maple cornbread bars. “Not all hickory nuts are the same,” she warns. “Bitternut hickories are the most common, but they live up to their name.” She has recently found a palatable species near Blue Rapids that must be husked, shelled, repeatedly soaked and dried before being added to her moist and flavor-packed cornbread bars.
For her delicious bergamot and sumac tart, Yarbrough steeps fragrant red sumac berries to create an infusion that is the base of her tart’s custard filling. She also incorporates ground bergamot leaves into the melt-in-your-mouth shortbread crust.
Olson, who owned and operated the Eastside and Westside Markets for 43 years, is a pro at finding culinary uses for edible prairie plants. Her rule for cooking greens: “The more bitter the green, the more likely I am to use bacon grease as the added fat. Less bitter, I use butter.”
To prepare dock, a wild plant often found in open fields or along roadsides, chop its young, tender leaves, then steam and season them with salt and butter to create a simple dish that tastes like lemony spinach. Similar to spinach, dock cooks down to almost nothing, so always start with more. “It’s in every byway,” Olson says. “It can be found everywhere from spring to fall.”
Olson enjoys turning wild blackberries and plums into jellies, filling tea bags with dried leaves for easy-to-make teas, and freezing containers of pesto that she makes from garlic mustard. Another invasive plant, garlic mustard grows rampant in shady areas in the spring and early summer. For our sampling, Olson heats a portion of pesto and serves it over tortellini for a quick and tasty dish. “Because garlic mustard is considered an invasive plant, you’re doing the environment a favor by harvesting it,” Olson explains.
Although cooking with native plants is a great way to add delicious, healthful foods to your diet, harvesting them must be done responsibly. During a slideshow, Olson points out various look-alike plants that can be dangerous to mistake for one another, including poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), which is commonly mistaken for elderberry (Sambucus canadensis).
Common sense is key. Avoid harvesting plants from fields, yards or roadsides that may have been treated with herbicides or contaminated by vehicle emissions. Only forage in state, county or municipal parks where it is not prohibited, and on private property if the landowner grants permission. And—most importantly—don’t eat anything you can’t identify with absolute certainty. Would-be foragers are encouraged to read authoritative reference books and field guides. Plant photo apps can be a useful learning tool for confirming identification, but Yarbrough warns they are not 100 percent accurate. She suggests cross-referencing with reliable field guides.
“After several times in the field, you’ll become familiar with plants, and then it becomes easy to identify them,” Olson says, reminding class newcomers to relax and enjoy the fresh air and exercise.
Olson also reminds students to never take more than 10% to 20% of a given plant’s population so as to avoid overharvesting. Partial harvesting, as Olson points out, can actually encourage the growth of some crops such as nettles, lambsquarters, dock and dandelions. When it comes to morel mushrooms, however, people tend to pick everything in sight. That’s why morels should be collected in mesh bags so their spores can fall back to the ground.
Foraging provides a bounty of free foods that can be transformed into flavorful fare, but the process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. So why bother? “It’s a way to connect with nature,” Olson says.
For Yarbrough, former president of Friends of Konza Prairie, foraging expands the world by encouraging her to notice new plants. “I get excited taking people on the trails,” Yarbrough says. “They find things that they recognize and then discover they are edible. Suddenly, they see the world with a new eye and begin to understand there is abundance that can sustain life in so many ways.”
Following the advice of Olson, I plan to start with lambsquarters this spring. “It’s probably the easiest to find and a good one to start cooking with,” Olson says. “Look for a silvery plant with textured leaves that are kind of furry. To prepare, just boil or steam it and season with salt and butter.”
I’m also planning spring salads of watercress, chickweed, violets, henbit and young, tender dandelion leaves. Perhaps I’ll invite a few friends over for my own “wild” party, amid conversations about the edible gifts from our Kansas landscapes.
Edible Native Plants
This UFM Community Learning Center class on edible native plants will be offered June 24 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. at Prairiewood Retreat and Preserve. In addition to the slideshow and sampling, participants will be divided into small groups for a hike along the preserve’s reclaimed prairie trails. Guides will point out seasonal plants and provide tips on identification. Plants expected to be available in June include spider milkweed, plantain and garlic mustard. For more information, visit tryufm.org.
what else is on the menu?
Instructors Sue Maes (left), Kelly Yarbrough (center) and Terry Olson (right) share some of their favorite edible native plant creations.
- Common milkweed pods | Breaded and fried to serve like fried okra
- Daylilies (non-native, but naturalized orange “ditch lilies”) | Use in place of lettuce in salads
- Elderberry blossoms | Lightly battered and fried to make funnel cake-like fritters
- Dandelion Greens | Sautéed or stir-fried in bacon grease; blossoms battered and fried
- Grape leaves | Briefly fried in ¼-inch olive oil in a heavy skillet, drained and salted to make crispy chips
- Jerusalem artichoke roots | Eat raw or cook for a vegetable side dish
- Mulberries | Use to make jellies or pies
- Pawpaw fruit | Eat raw, add to smoothies or salads, or use in baked goods
- Spider milkweed pods | Steamed and served like edamame
- Sumac berries | Steeped overnight in cold water to make a refreshing cold tea
- Wild parsley | Use in dressings and dips
