Hobo Burgers with Wild Greens!

My husband calls these, "Amazing!"

These burgers, while not pretty, have a fantastic flavor!  They are great for camping and cooking over a fire or on a grill.  The instructions are for the oven so they can be made anytime.  It's a versatile recipe because you can alter the ingredients to what you have on hand.  You can make your hamburgers home made or use a frozen patty which is what I did.  Any type of patty meat works.  Other wild greens can be substituted.  While dock is tart when fresh, after cooking you can not detect any tartness. The greens contribute the least flavor part of this recipe and are primarily used to add nutrition!

Hobo Burgers with Wild Greens

Ingredients:

8 hamburgers, frozen or fresh
2 potatoes, peeled and sliced thin
1 8 oz carton of sliced fresh mushrooms
24 baby carrots sliced lengthwise into fourths (like matchsticks)
1 large onion sliced thin
1 large handful of dock, center stem removed and chopped
1 handful of wood sorrel, chopped
1 handful of wild garlic/onion chives, chopped
8 tablespoons butter
garlic salt
spray non-stick oil
aluminum foil

Directions:

Make 8 large sheets of aluminum foil doubled over.  Spray with non-stick spray.  Place 3-4 potato slices, 12 carrot sticks and some sliced onion. Sprinkle with garlic salt.

Place burger on top of vegetables.  Sprinkle with some dock, sorrel and chives.  Top with some mushrooms.  Add a tablespoon of butter to top.  Sprinkle again with garlic salt.

Seal the aluminum foil at the top.  Repeat until all eight are finished.
Bake at 375 for 1 hour.

Serve with ketchup!

Optional:  You can use a tablespoon of cream of something soup in each one for a creamier effect.  You can also use frozen mixed vegetables as an alternative.  For a different flavor, add Worcestershire sauce.

Wild Garlic and Ground Ivy Tourtière (Holiday Pork Pie)

Wild Garlic and Ground Ivy Tourtière (Holiday Pork Pie)

Ground Ivy, Glechoma hederacea, also known as Creeping Charlie or Gill Over the Ground, is one of the first edible weeds of the season, first showing up in Middle Tennessee in February.  It is pervasive and the bane of many a lawn care company.  It is a member of the mint family (Lamiaceae), though it does not have a mint flavor.  The flavor is a mild cross between sage and rosemary.  My husband, not a fan of sage or rosemary, says it is far superior to those familiar herbs.  To get the full flavor, gather a handful and dice up and take a whiff. It is certainly a complimentary flavor in this dish.

Ground Ivy found at the woods at our local Franklin, Tennessee Recreation Center

Ground Ivy has a kidney shaped leaf with scalloped edges and a square stem (like all mints).  It has a purplish to blue flower that arrives in March.  It creeps along the ground as it grows and plants roots along the way which makes it difficult to eradicate. It thrives in shady and moist areas.  If you have it in your garden, it repels cabbage worms, cucumber beetles, and tomato hornworms.

Here’s fine rosemary, sage and thyme.  

Come, buy my Ground Ivy.

Here’s featherfew, gilly flowers and rue.

Come buy my knotted marjoram, too!

Roxburghe Ballads (1740-1804)

It has historically been used as a tea, as cooking greens and in place of hops for beer making prior to the 16th century.  Additionally it has a long herbal remedy history treating a variety of ailments including ringing in the ears, sinusitis, kidney disorders, indigestion, constipation, sciatica, tuberculosis and coughs. In large quantities it has been noted to be toxic to horses but no such reaction has been recorded in humans. Alternatively, it has also been recorded as being used as an addition to feed for livestock supposedly for good health and for increasing milk production.  Common sense requires anything remotely approaching excessive use is unwise.

Ground Ivy contains iron, potassium and vitamin C.  It also has tannins which give it a slight bitterness.  Laboratory and animal studies indicate that ground ivy may be useful for anti-inflammatory and antibiotic qualities.

This recipe also uses another early edible weed, wild garlic.  I discuss wild garlic and wild onion here.  Wild garlic is often confused with wild onion.  Actually it is more prevalent than wild onion and many who believe they are using wild onion are actually using wild garlic.  The way to tell the difference is wild garlic's stem is round and hollow, while wild onion is flat and solid.  Both are edible.  The main rule is that if it looks like and smells like wild onion/garlic, it is.  If it does not have a telling scent than do not eat it. It has been my experience that wild garlic shows up earlier in the spring than wild onion.

Wild Garlic at the Rec Center

Tourtière has traditionally been a French Canadian holiday pork pie. It is a comfort food with a unique blend of spices.  If you feel intimidated by the use of cloves and cinnamon in a pork pie, do not.  It produces a wonderful result. While I am not French nor Canadian, I love this dish!

Wild Garlic and Ground Ivy Tourtière (Holiday Pork Pie)

Ingredients:

2 lbs. ground pork
1 med. onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon ground ivy, minced
1 teaspoon wild garlic bulbs, finely minced (about one large handful when picked)
3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into six pieces each
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups chicken or turkey stock

Pastry for a double crust pie
1 egg white for glaze

Directions:

Wash and cut vegetables.

Wild Garlic

Wild Garlic Bulbs From Above Garlic

Chopped Ground Ivy

Combine all ingredients except pastry and egg white. Blend thoroughly. Bring to a boil and reduce to simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes, stirring frequently. Cook until mixture is tender and moist, but not wet. Remove potato and mash with a fork. Return to meat mixture and mix well. Check seasoning.

Mixture Simmering for 30 Minutes

Remove Potatoes, Mash and Return to Mixture

Roll dough and line a deep 9 inch pie pan or cast iron frying pan with 1/2 of the pastry. Add the filling. Brush edges of crust with egg glaze. Roll out top crust and arrange on top. Seal, make vent holes to allow steam to escape and brush with egg glaze. Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven for 30-40 minutes or until crust is browned.

Filling in the Pastry

Pie Before Cooking

Hot Out of the Oven!

Stolen by my son before I could eat it!

Recipe all together:

Wild Garlic and Ground Ivy Tourtière (Holiday Pork Pie)

Ingredients:

2 lbs. ground pork
1 med. onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon ground ivy, minced
1 teaspoon wild garlic bulbs, finely minced (about one large handful when picked)
3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into six pieces each
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste
1 1/2 cups chicken or turkey stock

Pastry for a double crust pie
1 egg white for glaze

Directions:

Wash and cut vegetables.

Combine all ingredients except pastry and egg white. Blend thoroughly. Bring to a boil and reduce to simmer, uncovered, for 30 minutes, stirring frequently. Cook until mixture is tender and moist, but not wet. Remove potato and mash with a fork. Return to meat mixture and mix well. Check seasoning.

Roll dough and line a deep 9 inch pie pan or cast iron frying pan with 1/2 of the pastry. Add the filling. Brush edges of crust with egg glaze. Roll out top crust and arrange on top. Seal, make vent holes to allow steam to escape and brush with egg glaze. Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven for 30-40 minutes or until crust is browned.

Canning Turkey Broth Using Holiday Leftovers

Ham and Potato Soup and Turkey Broth

Several years ago I would have tossed the leftover holiday turkey bones without a second thought. That was before I realized their true value! Making and canning broth not only saves you money but you get to control the flavor and nutrition.  I have discovered that it far surpasses the bland and weak store bought varieties.

Throughout November and December there are numerous opportunities to purchase cheap turkeys. So by the time Christmas is over, I have accumulated four carcasses in my freezer (sounds a little scary put like that).  I have also been saving end cuts of onions, leeks, garlic, peppers, etc. in a little freezer bag just for broth making purposes. Oh, and you remember all those great Halloween pumpkins?  After the holiday, I diced and canned most of them and chopped a few up to freeze. These make great additions.  I also recently picked some wild mustard which I included. Additionally, I added some dehydrated chives and Kudzu leaves.

Frozen turkey bones and added vegetables before water added.

It is a very simple process. Place the bones in your pot.  Add vegetables on hand (like carrots, onions, garlic, celery, etc). Add several tablespoons of vinegar to help release the calcium from the bones. I prefer balsamic vinegar for the flavor. Cover with water.  Bring to a boil and then reduce to simmer. Cook for at least four hours.  Stir occasionally.  Add salt to taste.

Simmering with added pumpkin, carrots, and greens.

Prepare your pressure canner and ready your jars and lids.  When ready to can, drain to remove solids. Some people prefer to refrigerate their broth over night so that they can skim any extra fat which gels on top and then reheat to can. I will skim whatever fat I see after cooking, but I do not worry so much about removing all fat.  Pour into your jars and wipe rim of jar with paper towel which you wet with water and vinegar to help remove oils. Place lids on finger tight.

Fill your pressure canner with your jars.  For pints, pc 20 minutes at 10 lbs, and for quarts pc 25 minutes at 10 lbs.

If you are making a large amount of broth at once like what I am doing, you may want to use some of it to make some soup with your holiday leftovers.  I recently purchased 20 lbs of potatoes for $4 which I used to make ham and potato soup with my leftover holiday smoked ham.  Here's a little secret about canning potatoes.  You do not need to precook them to can.  When you peel and dice them, drop them into a bowl of water with lemon juice and salt.  Soak.  Drain and refill at least two times.  This helps remove the starch so you do not end up with cloudy potatoes.  It is also something to do while making the broth.  I prefer this method because precooking and then pressure cooking make them too mushy in my opinion.

Holiday Ham and Potato Soup

Potatoes, pealed and diced
Ham, cubed
Carrots, skinned and cut
Butternut squash, peeled and diced
Broth

In a quart jar, layer potatoes until half full.  Add several tablespoons of diced ham. Fill remainder of jar with carrots and squash.  Pour in hot broth and wipe rim of jar with paper towel which you wet with water and vinegar to help remove oils. Place lids on finger tight.

Soup before pressure canning.

Fill your pressure canner with your jars.  For pints, pc 75 minutes at 10 lbs and for quarts, pc 90 minutes at 10 lbs.

To prepare, you can eat as is or add cream or cream of whatever soup to give it a creamier texture.

Enjoy!

The Lowly Wild Onion

Wild onions (Allium species) are some of the first plants to pop up in middle Tennessee.  This year their bright green tufts began poking their heads up at the end of January.  Tennessee has wildly fluctuating weather.  One winter day can be near 70 degrees while the next day is 30 degrees with an ice storm.  Some years you have more near 70 degree weather than others and the poor confused plants start blooming early.  I actually used this to my advantage when I brought my soon to be husband home to visit my family at Christmas one year and it was barely sweater weather.  It convinced him to move here from Florida! 

Family in the 1960's

One of the few wild plants with which my family has a history is the wild onion.  My grandparents were from Denmark arriving in the United States in the 1950's with their growing family.  My grandfather was an engineer working for the government and my grandmother had worked as a midwife and nursing assistant before leaving Denmark.  By the 1960's they had four children and they divorced.  My grandfather traveled to foreign countries on long assignments for his job so he was not around.  My grandmother, who probably did not have the right credentials to continue her career in the United States nor a strong enough grasp of English, was only able to work low paying jobs. So here she was in the United States with no family support system, four children to raise and limited financial resources.  To put it bluntly, they were poor and struggling.  So poor that my mother would tell me stories about drinking Pepsi and picking and eating the wild onions on crackers for food. Not exactly complete nutrition but if you are starving, you take what you can get.  So the wild onion is a personal favorite of mine.

The main rules for onion hunting are if it smells and looks like an onion, it is an onion, and do not harvest along a roadside, industrial area, or yards that have been sprayed with pesticides.  There is a resemblance to a mildly toxic plant called Crow's Poison (Northoscordum bivalve) but it does not have an onion smell when crushed.  You would have to eat a pound of Crow's Poison to get a stomach ache.  Another look-alike is Death Camas (Toxicoscordion venenosum) and is poisonous but does not smell like onion.  It is usually found out West not in the South. Also, all onions are toxic to dogs and cats so do not feed it to them.  Onion hunters tend to find a favorite patch, often not revealing the location, and return to it to gather their onions year after year.

There are two common types of onions that you will most likely find, wild garlic (Allium vineale) and wild onion (Allium canadense).  Often you will not be able to tell them apart.  They both have long narrow leaves arising from basal bulbs. However, wild garlic has hollow and round leaves while wild onion's leaves are flat and solid.  The more common of the two is wild garlic.  All wild onions and wild garlic are edible.  They will never grow bulbs the size of store-bought onions as it is not in their genetics.  Their bulbs will be more like pearl onions.  The leaves are skinnier than the green onions that are sold in the store, and have a stronger oniony taste. They actually look more like chives. Cooking the onions mellows the flavor out.  You can replace wild onions in any recipes that call for green onions or chives.

It is common in some parts of the south and west for churches to have wild onion lunches for fund raising in the springtime.  They are typically served sauteed with scrambled eggs.  As far as nutrition goes, wild garlic and onions contain vitamin C, A and potassium.  Native Americans ate wild onions as a cure for colds.  They also rubbed the plant on their bodies to protect them from insects.  In modern times, onions have been reported to lower blood pressure, help to facilitate detoxification, act as powerful antioxidants, stimulate immune responses and reduce inflammation.

Wild onions/garlic can also be dehydrated and used for later purposes.  However, if doing it indoors, it will make your house smell like onions for days.

Here are some recipes to try:

Eggs and Bacon with Wild Onion

Ingredients:

6 slices of bacon, diced
1 cup wild onion, chopped
10 large eggs
1/4 cup milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Directions:

In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk and season with salt and pepper.  Set aside.

In a hot pan, fry the bacon until nearly crisp.  Add onions and fry until bacon is crisp.  Add the egg mixture and cook, stirring until set, about 4 minutes.  Cook until desired egg texture is achieved. Sprinkle with cheddar cheese before serving.

Serve with hot sauce.


Wild Onion and Oyster Chowder

Ingredients:

4 cups cubed frozen hashbrowns or 4 cups cubed potatoes
2 ribs celery, diced fine
1/2 cup wild onions, chopped
1 garlic clove finely minced or pressed
1 tablespoon butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
2 cups half and half
1 teaspoon chicken bouillon granule
fresh coarse ground black pepper, to taste
2 (3 3/4 ounce) cans petite smoked oysters, drained
6 slices of bacon cooked crisp and crumbled
oyster crackers 

Directions:

Microwave or boil potatoes until tender. Drain.

In a large pot, saute wild onions, celery and garlic with butter. Add potatoes and flour, blend well.

Add half and half, milk, bouillon, pepper, and oysters.  Cook until heated through, gently stirring occasionally.

Serve topped with bacon and oyster crackers.

Variation option:  Add 1 can drained corn


Notes: While the content of this blog has been tried/tested and the research diligently presented, I am not responsible for your use of it. Always try a little of the food first to test for allergies. Please do your own research. Discuss with your doctor before you use any herbal medications.