Filled bread party is next week! What are you making? Savory buns like cinnamon rolls, but with mushrooms, thyme, and Gruyère? Cupcakes with a secret cookie inside? Kadoo bishak filled with pumpkin or butternut squash? Maybe you want to attempt mooncakes? Or are these just the contents of my brain when I go to bed, which make me so excited that I don’t want to go to sleep?
If you’re coming, please bring something you can share with a bunch (?? quantity) of people. I’ll have cutting boards, knives, gloves, napkins, stuff like that. If you have any questions or want to talk about your bake, just reply to me or drop a comment. If you’re not local to NYC, I am so sorry 😞, but you can throw your own filled bread party and send me pics and I‘ll FOMO and consider moving to your city.
McGolrick Park, Greenpoint
Sunday, October 2nd, 3-5pm
Driving through Staten Island is unpleasant. I plod along a crowded four-lane road full of oblivious drivers taking their sweet time or aggressive traffic weavers who make you want to tailgate to box them out. I roll down my window because it’s a perfect fall day, but then I’m only face-to-face with the horns and exhaust, so I roll it back up. The big box stores, drive-thru McDonalds, and gas stations march one after another for miles. There is nothing wild in sight.
When finally (I was in a rush — packing my stuff, baby who wouldn’t eat) I pull into the parking lot at the Mount Loretto Unique Area, there’s already a circle of people standing beneath a tree. They’re introducing themselves by way of the “last wild thing” they’ve eaten. Blueberries are the most recognizable food someone mentions; almost all the others are plants I’ve never heard of. I’ve been working on perfecting a chocolate buckwheat chaga cake, so I talk about that. Chaga is wild — it grows on birch trees — but it’s easy to get a packaged powdered version. Food doesn’t feel so wild when you don’t see where it comes from.
The group is led by Marie Viljoen, a tall redheaded woman with a lilting South African accent who feels like a cross between Amelie and Mary Poppins. In yellow pants, a floppy hat, and a basket slung over her arm, she seems to be perpetually strolling, no matter how rocky the terrain underfoot. She stops to point and sniff, pluck leaves and taste berries, all while the common and scientific names of plants, their season, identifying characteristics, and medicinal and culinary uses tumble from her mouth. When, occasionally, someone asks a question she doesn’t know the answer to, she seems just as delighted by that. “You’ll have to ask a molecular botanist!” she trills and spits out the seeds of the autumn olive she was showing us.
The autumn olives are tiny delightfully tart crimson berries speckled with silver dots that I would love to turn into a jam if I picked about a thousand of them. Some other plants I meet:
Mugwort, a tall plant growing everywhere in the field, with a woody stem and small flowers and leaves. We strip them off the way you would thyme, and crush the leaves and flowers together in our hands. They smell like sage, and that’s how Marie recommends we use it. Cook with potatoes, or in the trout handpies she serves us later. You can also use it to infuse a strong spirit like grappa for the Croatian liqueur Pelinkovac , which is traditionally made with wormwood, a close cousin.
Winged sumac, which shows up as clusters of small fuzzy berries with a sour-tannin aftertaste. Marie says she steeps the berries in water, adds some sugar, and then boils it down into something resembling pomegranate molasses.
Milkweed is good for monarch butterflies, and fine for humans if you cook it. You can eat the shoots in May, the flowers in June, and the pods in late July. It’s a native plant that was eaten here before European colonization. As if on cue, a butterfly lands on a flower nearby us.
Our walk takes us down to the southern shoreline of Staten Island, where I feel like I’m on the coast of Maine, even though I can just make out New Jersey in the distance. The beach is rocky and littered with mussel shells and alien-looking horseshoe crabs. Marie points out sea rocket, which has dense succulent leaves that taste briny and salty. She salt-ferments it and then pickles in a brine to make capers, which makes me realize suddenly that I have no idea what capers are when they’re not in a jar at the store.
On our way back, we stop to try sassafras, which tastes like root beer because they are the roots in question — you can steep the roots for tea or put the leaves in vermouth. The hill looks beautiful covered in goldenrod, whose leaves can be used like carrot tops for salad or pesto. Goldenrod is related to the sunflower, and native to this region. It’s funny to think about how relatively recent plant movement becomes inseparable from culture — that the yellow of Ukraine’s flag comes from right here.
From her small backpack, Marie produces an incredible picnic spread. I ask her how she fit it all in there; she winks and says, “Magic,” but like, actually though. On the tablecloth, nestled between flowers and rocks, we’ve got: smoked trout handpies with golden rod, sumac and sweet clover, served with some elderberry ketchup. Crispy seed crackers made with ragweed, lambsquarter and sunflower seeds, and a truly delicious carrot pâté with lilac honey, sumac and preserved lemon. For dessert, there are pickled cherries, candied crabapples, and a pawpaw spicecake. And my favorite, given my love of both mushrooms and filled bread: a soft brioche-like loaf stuffed with chicken of the woods. You see pretty spreads like this all the time on Instagram but you never know how it all tastes; you’ve got to trust me when I say that everything is perfect. The bread is rich and fluffy, the handpies crumble in your mouth, the crackers are super thin but strong enough to scoop up the hefty pâté. I am definitely buying her book. I linger next to the picnic spread to scoop up the last smears and crumbs so that nothing is thrown away. I drive back home full and satisfied, happy to have met another layer of my city.
I read an article about a neighborhood in Staten Island that, after Hurricane Sandy brought down most of the houses, is being transformed back into wetlands. It looks romantically dystopian, with wild turkeys pecking through backyards and cats lounging proudly in the middle of the street. It happened so fast; scratch the surface of civilization and the wilderness is not so far beneath.
What I’m Cooking
Mushroom, Olive, & Black-Eyed Pea Pastelitos (v)
These are perfectly savory little snacks, in a soft but crunchy dough. The olives provide a nice burst of salt, but the beans and mushrooms make them filling enough that you could eat a couple for dinner.
They were such a hit I make them again next week for filled bread party!
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