Can’t Get to the Market? Try the Backyard

An ace forager, chef Mike Ryan of Elements in Princeton says tasty greens are close at hand.

Magnolias, left, and garlic mustard. Photos by Eric Levin and Mike Ryan

Chef Mike Ryan. Photo courtesy of Elements

Mike Ryan’s son, Colden, is not quite four, but his father, chef de cuisine of the adventurous Elements restaurant in Princeton (closed during the pandemic), is already showing the boy where to look for the makings of a salad—in the family’s extended backyard in Belle Meade.

“Yesterday I was showing him how to pick garlic mustard and dandelions,” Ryan said Tuesday. “The green leaves of dandelions are good to eat, and the dandelion flowers themselves are quite tasty if they haven’t opened yet. Garlic mustard kind of looks like broccoli rabe, and gets little florets like broccoli rabe but the leaves aren’t as firm.”

The apartment the Ryan family rents stands on 3.5 acres of open land, “so there’s a good amount of property to pick stuff on.”

Two days ago the bundle of garlic mustard and dandelion leaves went into a salad. Yesterday, Ryan says, “we braised them in a sauce for pasta with chicken stock, butter and Pecorino cheese. We had a bunch of other wild greens in there as well—stinging nettles, trout lily, day lily. There’s also a plant called Claytonia virginica we forage near our home.”

Virginica is commonly called spring beauty. It produces a pretty five-petal flower with fuzzy yellow center. “I use them in salads, mainly the stems and leaves.”

Reader, if there’s a magnolia tree on your property or nearby, you might want to pay it a visit before the velvety leaves fall off. The upturning, candle-like clusters, now rampant, are to be prized for salads.

“They have an almost ginger flavor,” Ryan says. The smaller petals are sweeter, the larger ones have a crunchier texture and can be a little strong. At the restaurant we used to roll them up with tuna tartare inside. They make a great vessel, like a lettuce roll-up.”

Magnolias, left, and garlic mustard. Photos by Eric Levin and Mike Ryan

After our phone call, I walked down the block to the nearest magnolia tree I know, on the lawn of the local synagogue. I stood there, plucked a leaf, munched, thought, not bad, then plucked a couple more before I began to feel guilty. This isn’t my tree. I’m trespassing. Will anyone else want these leaves? Does the tree mind? Oh, get back to work.

During our phone call, Ryan said that the pandemic has changed his family’s routine as it has so many others. “Usually I cook for the family on my days off and my wife cooks for herself and our son during the day,” he said. “Now I’m doing more of the cooking at home, and trying to use up what’s in the pantry so we don’t have to go out shopping that often.”

Normally, Ryan and Scott Anderson, the executive chef and co-owner of Elements, forage each day for the restaurant. Now Ryan is foraging for his family.

“Each day there’s something different popping up,” he said. “In two to three days we’ll start seeing what’s called mugwort. It’s a green you can blanch and make soup with it. It’s got a great deep flavor. You can also blanch it, chop it and use it to fill stuffed pastas.

“In a couple days, if you have spruce trees, the new growth will appear, that becomes the new needles. It’s quite tasty. It has a real citrusy flavor. One can taste like a grapefruit, another like a lemon. Each tree is different, even though it’s one species.”

Ryan posts many of his finds on his Instagram. One of his passions is Asian food culture. “Japan, China and Korea have this huge culture of loving wild plants. They have a season in Japan—called sansai—where they go up and forage mountain vegetables, and seeing what they do with them is fascinating. There’s a lot of similar plants growing in New Jersey as in Japan, the same families, almost identical. It’s really great trying to figure out how these plants grow and seeing how Japanese and Korean culture use them. We do a dinner every spring with local greens to celebrate sansai. We’ve done it four years in a row, always with a guest chef, but not this year.”

While Ryan is picking in Belle Meade, Anderson is doing the same near his home in Ewing.

“It’s only about 15 miles away, but it has different things,” Ryan said. “He’s right by the old D&R Canal, a different landscape. He’s picking watercress on the tributaries around there right now. He’s got some things he can get that I can’t, certain lilies, hostas and wild greens. It’s exciting that areas so close can have such different things.”

“In two weeks, Scott will be able to pick bamboo. He has them right by his house. Bamboo is not native. Somebody put them there, but if you stumble across them, you can start collecting the shoots pretty soon. Those shoots are among the tastiest of all things in spring. They’re great, especially if you grill them.

“There’s definitely something edible in almost everybody’s backyard,” Ryan concludes. “There’s plenty of bittercress, chickweed, knotweed and ground ivy, which looks exactly like a basil flower and has a fun, floral note. It’s good to throw in salads. I can name a dozen things that are common, especially if people don’t take care of their lawn that well.”

So, dear reader, maybe before you mow, forage. Forget farm to table. Think yard to table.

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