Sassafrass Wine

Sassafrass Wine? Whoever heard of such a thing! Sassafrass tea, yes. Sassafrass as a flavoring for root beers, sure. But sassafrass wine?

Well, yes, Matilda. And it is good stuff (or at least I like it :). Last spring I dug a lot of sassy roots. I love the tea, and found the recipe for the wine over at Jack Weller's amazing wine-making page. I won't bother to copy the recipe over here; just click on the link and you'll come to the recipe.

Wine-making isn't difficult to do, although getting a really fine wine takes time and some effort and good ingredients. I made about 10 gallons of different kinds of wine last spring/summer. Now that it is January, it was time to taste and enjoy at least some of them. When I first tasted my sassafrass wine (probably a month or two into the process) it didn't taste very good. With these 7 months later, though, it has mellowed into a really tasty wine (once you get over the surprise of a wine tasting like sassafrass). I've been enjoying a glass every once in a while. I also made wines from nettles, strawberries, blueberries, raisins, dandelion flowers, peaches, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. All of them using the recipes at Jack Keller's page. And some of them turned out better than others.

Jack Keller has some recipes for wines made out of the strangest things. He's also a forager and enjoys making wines from wild plants and herbs. Here's a few of those I thought rather odd, but definitely fun to make. Wines from turnips, ginger root, eggplant, jalapenos, corn, chicory, leeks, even garlic wine. It's a very interesting page overall. Check out his list of requested recipes. What a hoot! And yes, the sassafrass wine is very tasty. Wish I could share a glass with all of you!

Onwards,

HM

Busy Day!

Yesterday was busy. First off, got the chickpeas ready for thermal cooking. Two cups soaked chickpeas, half and onion, some tomatoes and chipotle peppers, other herbs and spices and enough water to cover. I boiled the chickpeas on the stove for 10 minutes or so. Then I transferred the pot with a cover to an insulated cooler that was lined with baby blankets. Once the pot was safely in the cooler, I wrapped the blankets around it, stuffed in some newspapers to insulate it even more, then closed the cooler. By end of day (about 5 hours later), I opened the cooler, unwrapped the pot and checked the chickpeas. They were still just a bit hard, so I removed the pot and simmered them for another hour or so on the stove. I could have heated them up again and put them back in the cooler for further cooking, but didn't. Chickpeas take a long time to cook. They are, however, delicious! And it is neat to have another cooking method if the power is out.

Our hunter neighbor was cleaning out his freezer a while ago so he could put in all the deer meat he had just processed from the deer he got hunting. We benefited with loads of venison, fish, and random game meat. Pheasant was one of the gifts, so yesterday we had roast pheasant. I used the crockpot for this: 2 pheasant breasts, rolled in flour and browned in the fry pan. Cut up an onion and put that in the crockpot, added the browned pheasant breasts, and 1 cup dry red wine and 2 cups chicken broth. Threw in some rosemary, thyme and bay leaves. Let it cook all day, and by dinner, the meat was falling off the bones! We had it with baked potatoes and sweet potatoes. A royal feast!

In the afternoon, I couldn't stay inside any longer, and the weather permitted so I went foraging. I've been really hungry for wild food, so I went looking for fresh greens although I knew there wouldn't be much or any yet. Our wild foods start coming up in March, which is still a tad early. I found no greens--even my favorite chickweed patch hadn't yet recovered from the snow and ice it had been buried under for nearly two weeks. Sigh. I did find some wild chives and harvested those. I'll use them with the chickpeas to make a salad.

So I dug roots instead. A friend has asked for some sassafrass roots. She grew up in Ohio and loved sassafrass tea, but hadn't had any in years since she nows lives out west. So, I dug sassafrass roots--well, wrassled them out of the mud is more like what happened. I went for the little saplings who had come up in the shade of a large pine and which were unlikely to grow up anyway. It was very messy, digging in the mud, but at least it was mud and not hard packed earth as it was last time I dug them. Got a goodly store of roots, enough for my friend and for us. The inner bark of the root is what you use to make the tea traditionally, but I just simmer the roots for 20 minutes or so. Makes a fine tasting, reddish-brown tea that is excellent. It's a good tonic and blood purifier.

I also found the old dead poke plants and managed to dig up bits of the roots. A poke plant simply will NOT give up its roots, you'd have to use elephants to drag them out of the ground. But I could chip off pieces of it and got enough for something or another. Poke root is quite poisonous so I'm not sure if I'll use them or not. I'll research this more before I do anything with them.

After digging the roots I went and visited Fred to see how he was doing. He's recovering nicely from his broken elbow, but his rheumatism is acting up. We had a glass of wine and commiserated.

All in all, a busy fulfilling day. I can't wait for those wild greens to come in though! I'm hungry for 'em!
HM

Diggin' Roots: Burdock, Yellow Dock, Dandelion, Sassafrass

I've been digging roots, as many as I can find. And here's a confession of a beginning forager: It simply didn't occur to me to mark plants whose roots I wanted to dig. See, you are supposed to dig the roots after the plants have died down; however, when the plants have died down, I can no longer find the plants! Isn't this the dumbest thing? Why didn't I think to mark exactly where those evening primroses were? Or the jerusalem artichokes? Jeez. Well, next year.

What you see top left is a first year burdock, the basal rosette. It is the first year roots you want. The plant is a biennial and will grow again next year, sending up a large flower stalk. These plants get HUGE. Here's a picture of a second year plant.

He's a big guy, ain't he? Anyway, I've been spending hours here and there digging roots. It is not like picking up a head of lettuce at the store. Foraging is work, good hard work, enough to lessen my guilt for not taking up Shy Wolf's exercise routine. :) And after you get your roots home, then it is another hours of time cleaning the roots and chopping them up. That, of course, is when my back spasms and goldenrod oil is called for.

I find the burdock all over the place. There's some in the garden, some at a neighbor's house when I went over to bring him some garlic syrup and elderberry extract (first cold/flu of the season), and some by a roadside. They are handsome, virile plants--I tend to think of them in masculine terms, apparently.

The first year roots are both edible and medicinal. Burdock is a capital blood-purifier, containing lots of minerals and trace minerals. It is a good and gentle detoxifier, and will strengthen the body. Check out its nutritional value here, and be sure and scroll down the page.

Prodigal Gardens has a nice section on burdock, complete with recipes. I want to eat some of what I gathered and save the rest for an extract. I've already eaten a couple of the root slices and found them tasty, if a bit woody.

I've already discussed yellow dock and dandelion, so I won't get into them here. Besides eating the greens, the dandelion roots can also be eaten (yellow dock roots are too bitter), but I think I'll be using these as teas and extracts. It is easy to tell the yellow dock root from the dandelion--the yellow dock roots are intensely yellow, and dandelion roots are whitish and sweeter. I picked them both at the same time, but had no trouble telling which roots were which.

There's a veritable host of little sassafrass saplings to the side of our garden, so I tried digging up a bunch of them. Digging tree roots is a lot harder than the other plants mentioned here. Yowsa. I guess I'd better start getting in better shape to dig these fellas. I did get three good size roots, though, and shaved off the bark to use for sassafrass tea. The shaved roots went into a pot with about a quart and a half of water, boiled for 10 minutes. The tea became a bright, handsome red and smelled terrific. I know that the FDA has banned safrole, the essential ingredient in sassafrass root and bark, reporting that it can cause liver damage and perhaps cause cancer. Well, maybe so, but a few cups of delicious sassafrass tea probably won't hurt.

Besides, I tend not to believe the FDA, since I don't think it is a good idea to trust an agency that has lied to me before on many things. The FDA likes pharmaceuticals (as in, they know where the money is), and I like plants and herbs. Both pharmaceuticals and plants can kill you and make you sick, but except for the rare poisonous plants, plants and herbs are far better for you than the chemical stews of Big Pharma. Just my 2 cents worth.

I also took the sassafrass leaves to dry. Dried and powered, they can be used to thicken stews and gumbos, and probably used for tea as well.

Onwards,

HM