South-East Alaska Wild Foods

This vicious, thorny, woody weed is Devil's Club.  It has a bad habit of growing right where people most need hand holds.  The bright red berries are only edible to bears and other animals but in the spring time the buds are edible and tasty.  The trick is picking them without loosing too much blood.     They are excellent fried in butter, battered and fried, steamed, in eggs, and in pasta.  They can be eaten raw but I think that they are a little bitter until cooked.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Club 

TasunkaWitko wrote: i've never seen or heard of those before.   how big do they get? i'm thinking in some parts of europe, the flowers of zucchini and other similar vine plants get stuffed and then fried of steamed, not sure if that would be the case here, but if they are big enough, it might be worth a try to stuff the buds with a meat or mushroom and rice mixture?

The Devil's Club buds do not have much room to stuff.  They are about as big as your thumb pad.  The flavor would go well with mushrooms and onions.  This is a recipe for Devil's Club gnocchi: http://medcookingalaska.blogspot.com/2008/05/recipe-for-devils-club-gnocchi-or.html  It is a surprisingly tasty weed and there is a certain gratifying sense of payback while eating it. 

Fern fiddle heads are another local spring dish but I just don't think that they taste like much no matter what I do to them.  They even sell fiddleheads in the local grocery stores for those so incredibly lazy they will not walk into their back yards and pick their own.  Ferns grow very large and everywhere here since we live in a rain forest. 




I had fried and stuffed squash blossoms in North Carolina.  Not overly flavorful but they are supposed to be good for you(?) before being deep fat fried....