4 cups berries
3 cups sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 package of pectin (whole for jam)
1/2 tsp butter
Mash the berries by the cupful into a sauce pan. Stir in lemon juice and pectin and bring to a boil. Stir in sugar and butter and bring to a boil once more, stirring constantly. Boil for a full minute, then ladle into sterilized jars. Place lidded jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Yields 5 half-pints of jelly.
While scouting mushrooms in the mountains yesterday, I was reminded of a comment from a professional forager I interviewed this spring. “I always pay for my gas,” he said, the point being that foraging is a multi-disciplinary avocation and a good forager is knowledgeable on a wide variety of wild edibles—or, to traffic in cliche, when the gods give you lemons, make lemonade.
The mushroom hunting was certainly a lemon yesterday. After such a good start with all that rain in August, September has been bone-dry. My chanterelle patch is a withered husk of its former self. We need rain badly. Yes, I’m sure there are mushroomers who are finding goodies in wetter micro-climates. That’s why I went for elevation yesterday—I figured there might be a little extra precip up there, at least some drip lines from early morning mist.
Not likely. The roads are dusty and the duff is crunchy. Here and there I found the desiccated remains of old fruiting bodies, but otherwise the ground was bare. This was terra incognita for me, mostly a scouting run. I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and saw a total of four other hikers. Crossed paths with two backpackers and asked them how many nights. They looked a little embarrassed. “Five months,” one of them finally answered. Right on! I plan to do the through-hike one of these years. Passed an elderly couple out for a stroll. We talked about the poor huckleberry crop this year. The man said it was 10 percent of normal. If that’s true, expect to see newspaper stories about bears coming into town and raiding garbage cans. All around us the berry bushes were bare. Then, about two miles into my walk I started seeing them, big beautiful huckleberries like those we found in Indian Heaven earlier this summer.
Forget mushrooms; I screwed on my huckleberry snout.
Poor crop or not, it’s prime time for mountain huckleberries in the Pacific Northwest. Get ’em while you can. I love how the sun-exposed bushes turn fire-engine red this time of year.
Tips for Huckleberrying
1. Scout first. Look for patches producing the biggest, sweetest fruit. This will make the picking faster and easier. During my hike I covered about 7 miles and noted all the good patches so I could hit them on my return, at which point I was able to concentrate on chest-high bushes with lots of fruit that didn’t require any bending over. I saved my back the trouble and picked faster to boot.
2. Look for open slopes where fire or logging has removed much of the canopy. There is much debate among huckleberry hounds about the conditions that promote the best fruitings. Some evangelize full sun, while others pronounce the filtered light of open old-growth forests to be best. My own findings suggest that it isn’t so much the amount of sun or shade but the make-up of the bush. Spindly bushes will often have huge, sweet berries, with all their energy put into the fruit rather than the growth of leaves and stems. Be your own judge.
3. Know your huckleberries. Two of the most common in my neck of the woods are the thin-leaf huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) and the oval-leaf huckleberry (Vaccinium ovalifolium), also known as the Alaskan blueberry. The former, with its large size and sweetness, is the most commonly harvested huckleberry in the PNW, while the latter is more sour and suitable for jams. Another less common species is the Cascade bilberry (Vaccinium deliciosum). There are more than a dozen species altogether in Washington and Oregon.
4. Two hands are better than one. Wear a jug around your neck. I didn’t have one on this trip, thinking I was mushrooming, but I improvised a plastic grocery bag that had contained my lunch, stretching one of the handles until I could fit it over my head and around my neck.
5. Pay attention. Mr. Bear has a stake in the berry brakes too!
Huckleberry Sauce
This sauce is so easy it’s criminal—and yet how nicely it tarts up (yeah, rockin’ the double-entendres) a grilled fillet of fish or a cut of meat. Really, you can make it however you like, but here’s what I did:
Simmered 4 cups of huckleberries with a cup of chicken stock, a cup of sugar, and 3 tablespoons of cider vinegar (several of the huckleberry sauces I checked online call for raspberry vinegar), then poured in a splash of tawny port a couple times, amounting in total to less than a half cup. I mashed half the berries and left the remainder whole. You might try crushed cloves, or white wine instead of port, or lemon zest, really whatever you want to jazz it up. A dab of butter to finish it gives the sauce a glisteny quality. I went for a fairly simple presentation and let the berries speak for themselves.
The sauce turned a fairly innocuous dish of grilled rockfish into something a little more special. The fish I rubbed with curry powder and a few other spices, then grilled. Topped with huckleberry sauce, the sparring between the curry and the berries made for, in Marty‘s words, an “awesome dinner!” Meanwhile, I’ve got a couple cups of sauce left in the freezer.
I love Canada. At my old bookstore job I used to work regularly with Canadian publishers, who came down to Seattle each season to present their latest frontlist books. We’d go out to some nice restaurants on the publisher’s dime, and I can say unequivocally that those Canadians put me under the table each time. The next day they’d be chipper as ever at the day-long meeting while I felt like slapping a cold t-bone across my face. My Canadian friends mountain bike over teeter-totter logs suspended a dozen feet above the ground, surf the icy waters of Vancouver Island’s west coast, and ski like bandits on a getaway run.
I just wish I could get up there more often, if only to let some of that Canadian gnarliness rub off on me and my kids. Happily, in recent years a tradition has sprung up among four Seattle families who share a waterside cabin for the better part of a week each summer in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia. There’s an outhouse and a well with a hand-pump. A variety of mismatched camp stoves function as the kitchen. Everyone agrees that to update a single feature would be sacrilege. In the U.S. it’s getting harder to find such rustic accommodations; not so in Canada.
The real magic of this setup is watching our nine American kids do without their accustomed gewgaws and explore the natural environment. Games of tag and sardines go on among the old-growth Douglas-firs. Hide-and-seek in head-high salal bushes is a real challenge. They build “fairy houses” on the property and keep eyes peeled for the legendary Island Trolls. But it’s the water that’s most tempting.
This year the older kids showed a surprising interest in catching their own food. They dug clams for hours, used a dropnet to gather bait, fished for bottomfish, and set a crab trap. They even ate oyster po’ boys. In a “Lord of the Flies” moment that might freak out some parents, one little girl—a few days shy of starting kindergarten—caught a kelp greenling from shore, using a clam she had dug up for bait. 
All the other kids clamored ’round, each one administering a blow to the head to do it in. We grilled the greenling that night and they all ate of it with gusto under the stars. Rockfish and flounder landed on the menu as well, as did three species of clam: mahogany, littleneck, and horse. The adults had to hide batches of steamed clams just to have a few to eat.
Bottoms Up!
I don’t own a boat and rarely have access to one, so one of the real treats is taking an ancient battle-scarred Whaler out to the bottomfish grounds, where it’s virtually impossible to get skunked. Every kid caught a fish, bouncing weights along the bottom and using clams for bait. Sometimes you get more than you bargain for; one of the flounders came up half-eaten and it’s not uncommon to haul in the occasional dogfish. Sadly, as in much of the Northwest, the salmon runs have been badly depleted and we don’t even make the effort of time and gas to look for the remaining few.
The Myth of the “R” Month
Spend any time harvesting oysters and you’re bound to hear the old saw about “R” months, that you should avoid oysters in any month without the letter “R”: May, June, July, August—the summer season, effectively.
Bah!
Now it may be true that in earlier days without reliable refrigeration and fast transportation, the warm months were the most likely to see fish spoilage. Similarly, the warm months are when we usually get the algae blooms that can cause red tides, which were less closely monitored in the past. Neither of these issues should obtain now.
The only other factor is the oyster spawn. When the water is warm enough, oysters undergo a physiological change in preparation for spawning, with their organs largely given over to the task of reproduction, resulting in a milky, somewhat mushy meat (see above). 
It is during this stage that many oyster lovers spurn their cherished bivalve. But wait. The milky substance is not the result of any sort of toxin or sickness. Most of it can be washed away simply enough by running the oyster under tap water. While I don’t slurp down oysters raw at this time, I can think of no reason to not batter them in egg, flour, and cornmeal and fry them up for po’ boys. The half-pints didn’t seem to mind either.
Go Make Your Clam Bed
Probably more time was spent digging clams than any other activity. We used big shovels and small shovels, spades and scratchers. The kids dug trenches deep enough to hide in. Native littlenecks lay just a few inches beneath the surface, but butter clams (which we only used for bait) secreted themselves well below the littlnecks—and horse clams, also known as gapers, were deeper yet. Higher up the beach the kids discovered mahogany clams, a silky smooth clam with a lustrous brown shell that is delicious steamed and dipped in butter. The gapers got cut up for chowder.
Bait
Collecting bait is often more fun for kids than the actual hooking and catching of fish. Heck, I feel pretty much the same way about it sometimes—which is why filming these two kids going at it with the dropnet was such pure pleasure. It hurt my knees just to watch them squat down on their haunches so effortlessly for minutes at a time. I was reminded of more innocent summers in the distant past, of catching frogs and building bike jumps with my neighbor Sarah Sulger, the complications of adolescence and adulthood still years away. Watching this scene unfold, only a short bit captured here, might have been the highlight of my trip.
And then it was time to go home, to get back to work and prepare for the school year. While waiting for the first of two ferries to shuttle us back to the mainland, we found a monstrous patch of Himalayan blackberries and picked until the last car had debarked before running back to our vehicles for loading. I’ll post the result of that quick pick in a future post: blackberry crisp.
I hope everyone had a tremendous Labor Day Weekend!
It’s Martha’s birthday today and I figure she’d like to see these shots of her boy catching yet another fibby, as his sister would say. The kid is automatic. Seven years of spending every available moment in the woods have taught him well.
I’ve already talked up the virtues of the brook trout. Next in line is the cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki), several sub-species of which are native to the western U.S. and taken together are known for their eagerness. Cutthroats, it sometimes seems, simply beg to be caught.
Which is why we give them the thumb’s-up for the family backpacking trip to a subalpine lake. The lake in question was more like a high country tarn, with a perimeter of dense undergrowth forming a protective barrier against the lesser angling lights. But faced with two seven-year-olds wielding Scooby Doo rods, the cutties didn’t stand a chance.
The berry bonanza continues unabated. The other day I happened upon what is perhaps my favorite of all the wild Rubus: the western raspberry, or blackcap (Rubus leucodermis).
Closely related to the eastern raspberry, it tastes a lot like a cultivated raspberry, with a nod to blackberries and other wilder instincts. In fact, a ripe blackcap could almost be confused for a kinder, gentler blackberry, were it not for its shape—it parts from the bush with the typical thimble-like shape of a raspberry, and like its cultivated kin, the texture is velvety soft.
I don’t see wild raspberries as often as other members of the Rubus genus. In the PNW, they seem to favor the sort of areas most hikers try to avoid: clearcuts, old burns, and other disturbed areas with full exposure. On this particular hillside I probably could have picked a coffee cup’s worth if I had wanted to trudge up and down among the burned stumps and kinnickkinnick. Rarely do I see them in shady oases. It might be time to learn more about these berries because they’re so tasty.
THIS IS A SIMPLE recipe for when you’ve been out all day foraging and get home late—but still want to enjoy your fresh bounty.
4 thin chicken cutlets
flour
butter
2 tbsp olive oil
1 shallot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1/2 pound chanterelles, sliced
2 tbsp tomato paste
madeira wine
8 oz shaped pasta like penne
parsley, chopped
1. Saute diced shallot and garlic in olive oil. Add chopped chanterelles and cook until mushrooms release their water. Season to taste. Meanwhile add penne pasta to salted boiling water.
2. Add 2 tablespoons of tomato paste to mushroom sauce and stir. In a separate pan, sauté thin, floured chicken cutlets in butter.
3. Finish tomato-chanterelle sauce with madeira wine and add water as necessary.
4. Serve chicken over pasta and ladle sauce on top. Garnish with chopped parsley.
MOUNTAIN THIMBLEBERRIES (Rubus parviflorus) don’t have much of a shelf life, usually falling apart in your hand, which is why you never see them for sale. They’re a wild treat, meant to be enjoyed in the wild.
Or you can make jam. They’re naturally high in pectin, so all you need is a 1:1 ratio of sugar to berries and a tablespoon or two of lemon juice, depending on the size of your batch.
First, boil the berries to desired viscosity, then add the sugar and lemon and bring to a boil for a minute. You might get some foam at the top; skim off if you wish. The jam is now ready to be ladled into sterilized jars for canning. Secure the lids and give the jars a 10-minute bath in boiling water.
Screw on your berry snout because the time is now to sniff out one of the great treats of late summer. By general consensus among the berry cognoscenti, the western huckleberry enjoys a position at the pinnacle of berry crops across the brakes of North America.
East Coast blueberries, long since domesticated and hybridized into amusement park proportions for lowest common denominator taste buds, may be the sweetest of the Vacciniums, but the wild huckleberry, with its complex sparring of sucrose and tang, is the berry of record for true aficionados. And while FOTL can’t consider himself an aficionado yet (he’s only been picking huckleberries off and on for a mere two decades), he knows ’em when he sees ’em.
Last weekend we captained the Loaf down to one of the most storied berry patches in the land, the Indian Heaven Wilderness in the center of the volcanic triangle of Hood, Adams, and St. Helens. Indian Heaven is a seismic plateau of lavaflows and ancient, long-foundering cinder cones, a snowtrap in winter and a meltwater sponge through the summer—conditions that make it a Mosquito Heaven for sure, and a Huckleberry Heaven of tall-tale grandeur as well. For hundreds, probably thousands of years the Yakama and Klickitat tribes gathered here in summer to hunt, fish, pick berries, play games, and race horses. The Indian Racecourse is still around, as are the great berry fields, an accident of fire ecology that was later accentuated by purposeful fires set by the Indians themselves to choke out competing groundcover and keep the canopy open.
Among famous berry-picking locales (a few that come to mind include Glacier NP in Montana and the Blue Mountains in northeast Oregon), Indian Heaven has to be the most prolific I’ve ever seen, with some of the biggest and tastiest berries to be found anywhere. This year the berries are 2-3 weeks late in much of the Northwest due to lingering snowpack and a hard spring, so the season was just getting going. 
We came from the north, a long slog on forest roads 25, 90, 30, and 24, arriving finally at Sawtooth Mountain flanking the northern end of Indian Heaven and the beginning of Huckleberry Nirvana. Indians picked along the roadside, using improvised milk jugs with lanyards to free up both hands. A sign on the east side of the road laid out the terms of engagement (see image above). Just past the PCT we came upon this view of Mt. Adams to the northeast.
Washington and Oregon host a dozen species of huckleberries. Two of the most prominent (and the two we’re pretty sure we picked) are the thin-leaved huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) and the oval-leaved huckleberry (Vaccinium ovalfolium). V. membranaceum has very large, sweet purple berries; these are the berries sought after by most pickers because of their size and taste. 
The other, V. ovalfolium, looks more like a small bleuberry with a slightly glaucous waxy sheen; they’re smaller in size, though a good bush can be covered with scores of them, and the flavor is tarter, making V. ovalfolium a preferred huckleberry for jams and jellies. You can see the differences in size and color between the two species in the video and image below.
If you go a-huckleberrying, do yourself a favor and fashion a proper bucket that can hang around your neck. A word of warning though: I know of a guy, an experienced ex-forest service employee, who was picking Oregon grape berries with a similar leashed bucket. He was picking so fast he inadvertently scooped an entire bees’ nest into the bucket. As the mad bees started swarming over the berries he saw his error and tried to run away but the bucket naturally followed him. Throwing it did no good. Lots of screaming and running in circles ensued. Finally he had to concede to the reality of the leash and lift the lanyard over his head, effectively putting his face right in the bucket. 
Good thing it was early morning and the bees still couldn’t fly; he escaped without a sting.
If you’re in my neck of the woods, the Gifford Pinchot NF puts out an excellent brochure on huckleberry picking that answers many general questions about regulations, biology, history, and also includes a map (!) to some of the better patches along forest service roads.
Since our return with a few gallons of huckleberries, we’ve vacuum-sealed and frozen most of our catch, and used the rest either to make cobblers and pancakes or to eat simply, unadorned. I’ll try to get a pie recipe posted soon, but first I’ve gotta get me some lard!
OVER THE YEARS we’ve tried any number of different cobbler recipes, and yet I always find myself returning to the sort you might find in a small-town diner.
4-5 cups blackberries
1 cup sugar
8 tbsp unsalted butter (1 stick), cold and cut into small pieces
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
Pinch of salt
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Toss berries with half the sugar and spread in greased 8-inch square or 9-inch round baking pan.
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining sugar in bowl. Mix in cold butter pieces with a pastry blender until well blended. By hand, beat in egg and vanilla.
3. Drop mixture on fruit by the spoonful; do not spread. Bake until topping is golden yellow, 35 to 45 minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream.
THE KEY TO A good crab cake is in the meat to filler ratio. Adjust however you like, but always remember: the crab is king.
2 Dungeness crabs, picked
1/2 large onion, chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
butter
2 tbsp parsely, chopped
1 egg
1-2 tbsp mayo
1-2 tsp Dijon mustard (optional)
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/2 lemon
1/2 cup crackermeal or breadcrumbs
Old Bay seasoning
1. Sauté onion and red bell pepper in butter. Season to taste.
2. Remove onion-pepper mixture to bowl. Add chopped parsley, one egg, mayo, a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce, a few shakes of Old Bay, and the juice from a half lemon. Stir together while adding crackermeal or breadcrumbs. Mix in crab last for chunky cakes. The cakes should be just wet enough to hold together. Adjust accordingly.
3. Form into patties and refrigerate on wax paper for 20 minutes or so for firmness.
4. Sauté crab cakes in butter in a large non-stick frying pan.