Dining and Opining

After reading the urban foraging article I wrote about yesterday , I was thinking a lot about the joys of collecting fruit. And then, as is often the case, I discovered that one of my favorite bloggers, Sharon Astyk, had captured these joys as exuberantly and descriptively as I could ever hope to. Read her account here: The Fruit Olympiad I love how Sharon describes each type of fruit-picking as having its own challenges, and a seasonal variation that ranges from simple (strawberry) to more challenging (cherries) to requiring endurance (blueberries) to being a true battle (fruit with thorns!) to the relatively easy late summer/fall fruits (peaches, apples, pears). My dad is already finding wild pears and grapes in Atlanta, but we here in Madison have had a relatively fruit-less summer (at least in the literal sense). While last summer we were collecting strawberries and blueberries and raspberries (all cultivated) and foraged apples... ...this summer, all we've managed is s...

Because my family lives in Atlanta, I often think about what it would be like to live there or in the vicinity. And although my vision of it is usually peopled by corporate, SUV-driving types who spend hours in traffic and on their bluetooth devices, I like seeking out more positive representations of that city and its people. So I was especially excited to see this NYT piece about urban foraging in Atlanta , and about how some folks are making use of the produce growing in the yards of abandoned, foreclosed homes. Gardens no longer tended, fruit trees left unpicked--all are left hanging with fruit and vegetables, wasted if not for folks who seek to salvage this free and local bounty. Image from http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/08/11/us/FORAGE-5.html I also liked the portrayal of the city itself, as one that has organizations like Concrete Jungle , which forages fruit that gets donated to food pantries, and which has built a database of untended fruit and nut trees on comm...

In Madison, one of the things that spells summer most centrally (in addition to the lakes and bikes and farmers' markets and frisbee) is the mulberries ! (you can't spell "mulberries" without s-u-m-e-r). I first discovered these sweet finger-staining berries just outside our own home, growing on a couple of trees within a hundred feet of our place, and immediately called my dad to ask if they were edible. I described the trees they grew on and the way they detached with the soft green stems still intact, and he said these were indeed the edible mulberries (or shelkovitsa in Russian). So, I filled my mouth with them, and took some home to make a mulberry crisp out of. Over the next couple of summers, Justin and I stopped by these trees every time we biked home, always staining our fingers purple in the process. But alas, all good things must come to an end, and so our beloved mulberry trees were chopped down last summer. We speculated that the city had ordered ...