Wild Foraged Salad from Your Own Backyard with Rosehip Infused Vinegar and Wild Plants

I'm Laura Gilmore and welcome to the Wild Muskoka Homestead. Today we're going to be making a wild salad with delicious greens from our garden, weeds that normally people pull out from their vegetable beds, some of our sumac-infused apple cider vinegar, and a delicious jelly from Forbes Wild Foods. If you'd like more wild foods recipes and foraging content, be sure to subscribe to this channel and visit our website wildmuskoka.com to purchase some of our awesome products. So now we're going to put together our wild salad. You can of course just use whatever salad you can get your hands on, whether it's from the grocery store or from your own garden, but as a start we've got a base of just our romaine lettuce that we grew here in our garden. And then now we're going to use a whole variety of weeds that we've picked from around the edge of our vegetable garden. These are normally plants that people just pull and discard compost, but there's delicious food in our in our local weeds, so weeds and herbs from our garden, and a little flower for some color. So some of the plants we're going to start with. So first we have daisies. So most people know daisies as just a wildflower, but they actually have a really delicious and nice flavored leaf. So we can use the leaves and the little unopened buds for a little crunch in our salad. Our next weed is wood sorrel. So wood sorrel looks very similar to clover, except the individual leaves of the wood sorrel are heart-shaped, and sorrel has this delicious lemony flavor. And we're going to use the leaves, sprinkling them through the salad. Our next green is the field peppercress. So this cress, which is part of the mustard family, has some of that spicy mustardy flavor. We're going to use the leaves, and we're also going to use the flower buds. The next green for our salad is a really, really common weed, and often is quite abundant in people's gardens. It's lamb's quarters. So these kind of diamond shaped leaves with a wavy edge, they're actually covered in a fine powder. I find these greens taste really similar to spinach, and we're just going to chop them up into our salad. The last wild green we're going to add to our salad is chickweed. This is often a very abundant green, particularly in moist, shadier gardens, or here we actually found it in the forest. And this little green we're just going to tear up through our salad. It has a nice, mild flavor. And to add some color to our salad, we're going to tear up some of these beautiful dandelion flowers for the bright lemony color. The dandelion greens at this point in the year are often a little bitter to eat raw, so we're going to use just the dandelion flowers for our salad. These little wild pansies are Johnny Jump Ups. They come in all different shades of purples and yellows, and they grow wild in our gardens. They're delightful, and they have a really nice vegetal flavor. And then just from one of our garden herbs, these are chive, chive blossoms. They have that delicious chive, onion flavor, and we're just going to tear these up and sprinkle them, and they're also going to add a lovely crunch to our salad. Now we're going to prepare our rosehip and chokecherry salad dressing. So this vinaigrette is going to be made with our rosehip-infused apple cider vinegar. So the base is a good, organic, raw apple cider vinegar made here in Ontario, and then we've done the flavor infusions with rosehips. So the rosehips give it this wonderful sweet and sour flavor, gives it this beautiful color, makes it really high in vitamin C, and so delicious. And to partner with this, we're going to use chokecherry jelly from Forbes Wild Foods. So this is like, again, to really play on the nice tart notes from the rosehip. Include those in with the chokecherry. They both have this gorgeous red color, so it's going to be a really beautiful burgundy-colored dressing. And what I also love is that the chokecherries and the rosehips are both kind of fall foods. The chokecherries come a little bit earlier, kind of just at the very end of the summer, and then the rosehips right on their tails. So these beautiful red fruits, both available in wild spaces and hedgerows across Ontario, and wonderful tart flavors to work with in our salad dressing. So we're going to take two tablespoons of our chokecherry jelly, two tablespoons of the rosehip-infused vinegar, and one tablespoon of olive oil. We'll give it a good whisk to integrate all those ingredients, and now we're ready to dress our salad. So our wild greens with our wild vinaigrette. For people interested in foraging, wild salads are such a wonderful place to start. There's so many edible weeds that are growing in our gardens, in our backyards, and wayside places that are non-native and super sustainable to harvest. They also provide such incredible flavor, diversity of textures, things that you just don't get in the cultivated lettuces that we grow in our gardens. And they're also a wonderful way to start because you can integrate them in small amounts with the lettuces that you buy from the store that you're already growing in your garden. So, because I'm always encouraging people when they're starting with new wild foods to just start with small amounts. So wild salads are where it's at. And play with your wild dressings. So we make, beyond the salad dressings that we've shown you today, we also make infused vinegars of a few other different flavors. And you can get, you know, wonderful jams and jellies from Forbes Wild Foods, as well as, you know, the great jams and jellies that, you know, friends and family make you or that you pick up on your travels or from local markets. And you can easily take the recipe that we did here today and you can just swap out different vinegars. You can try different jams or jellies and really get to try such an incredible array of wild flavors with the salads that you pick with your backyard weeds. So if you're interested in these products, make sure that you get them from us online at wildmascoca.com. You can get an array of wonderful wild jams and jellies from our friends at Forbes Wild Foods. And if you're interested in foraging content like this, make sure you subscribe to this channel and check out more stuff at our website. Time to try the wild salad. Get a mouthful that will actually fit in my mouth. So good.