Sky Full of Bacon's all-vegetarian forage-fest. Inspiring!



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After making a blackberry pie, I got to wondering what other kinds of pies I could make. Could I use native berries? Recently we spent a vacation in a National Forest Service fire lookout cabin. These are a sweet deal at around $50 a night, but you have to reserve them way in advance. Anyway, I brought along a pie crust. My son G and I gathered several cups of native salal berries while waiting for Emily to come out of the campground shower. For comparison's sake, we also gathered several cups of blueberries and raspberries from a local u-pick farm.

I carefully divided the pie into three sections, each with its own type of berry. The plan was to evaluate each berry on its own merits, without mixing flavors.

The blueberry pie turned out pale and bland. You know how cherries turn somewhat translucent when you cook them? The same happens with big blueberries. The beautiful dusty blue skins of the fresh fruit are simply overwhelmed by their bulging insides. The larger the fruit, the lower the ratio of skin to interior.

The raspberry pie tasted like jam. Rich, but very jammy storebought jam.

But the Salal berry pie: there's something magic going on in there. Perhaps because they've such a high skin to interior ratio, the color and flavor was a hundred times richer than the blueberry pie. In addition to being a smaller berry, the salal berry is actually a fleshy sepal enclosed over a ripened ovary. What that means to a cook is there are multiple layers of berry skin all folded up inside the berry. I often hear that most of a fruit's nutrition and flavor is contained in the skin, so it's no surprise to me that the very sweet salal berry pie was almost too rich to eat. But it wasn't just a more conventional berry flavor magnified. It was a new flavor, fully developed only in the cooked berries. The closest I can describe the taste is that it has something in common with cinnamon. But that's not quite it either.

It's best to soak salal berries first before cooking with them. There's a little worm that likes to hide in there, probably the larvae of some beautiful endangered forest butterfly. Still, I don't want to eat them. When the berries are placed in water, the little caterpillars climb up to the surface, looking for air.

Emily and I both agreed, blackberry pie is still the best, a little tart but wonderful with ice cream. Emily didn't care for the salal berry pie, but I feel drawn to it, challenged by its new flavor, encouraged to try other native berries. Next time, I think I'll try mixing salal berries it with blackberries. The salal will add an extra spiciness and sweetness to the otherwise uniformly tart but delicious blackberry pie.

Jennie Grant lives in urban Seattle. But her backyard is anything but downtown. Besides the small kitchen garden, she has several chickens, a pair of goats with kids, and a beehive. Just down the block is a park full of blackberries. She invited me over to make ice cream using only these backyard ingredients. I did a little radio documentary on the process for a radio show called "The Splendid Table" (search for the September 13 episode here, if you're curious).



Every step of the way we created waste products, and Jennie folded them right back into her little self-contained system. For example, when milking goats, you discard the first two squirts of goat milk, since bacteria linger in the teats. This gets fed to the chickens. When picking blackberries, you can bring home a few blackberry vines and feed them to the goats. We generated large amounts of skim milk in the process of making cream for the ice cream. What to do with that? Heat it up on the stove, add rennet (or vegetarian equivalent), drain in a cheesecloth, salt and voila, you've got skim chevre. I went home with a container-full. My family ate it on home made pizza. It melted up nicely.



Chickens in the city are fun, but goats are the next frontier. I'm hoping to set up a "goat co-op." The goats will live in someone else's yard, but several interested neighbors and I will "buy shares" of the goat pair. We neighbors will be in charge of milking the goat every weekend, so the landowner can sleep in.