Wild Harvest Life - Winter Family in PNW

Wild bracken fern harvested in Washington became gosari namul and a comforting bowl of Korean bibimbap. I have loved gosari for as long as I can remember—probably since I was old enough to chew it. Gosari is the Korean name commonly used for prepared young bracken fern. Its flavor is mild, but its pleasantly firm and chewy texture is unlike most other vegetables. Sometimes it almost feels as if I am chewing a very tender piece of meat. That texture is exactly why I have always loved it. In Korea, gosari appears in many familiar dishes. It is one of the classic vegetables used in bibimbap, and it is an essential ingredient in yukgaejang, a spicy Korean beef soup. A similar soup made with chicken is called dakgaejang. I also enjoy adding gosari to japchae and other dishes at home, even when it is not part of the most standard recipe. If I have prepared gosari available, I can usually find a place for it. Today, I am sharing how I turn the wild bracken fern I harvested in Washington into ...

I Did Not Even Know Fireweed Existed Until recently, I did not even know that fireweed existed. I first heard the name while watching one of my favorite foraging YouTubers. In the video, several foragers were walking through the forest together looking for mushrooms. Along the way, someone stopped to harvest a tall plant with narrow leaves and pink flowers. “Fireweed,” they called it. They also mentioned that fireweed could be sold alongside wild mushrooms. That detail caught my attention, so I visited the forager’s online shop. Sure enough, fireweed was really listed there. From that moment, I became curious. What was this plant? Why were people harvesting it? How could it be used? And most importantly, could it possibly grow here in the Pacific Northwest near my own home? I began reading and watching everything I could find. The more photographs I saw, the more familiar the plant looked. Then one thought stopped me: Wait a minute. Don’t I see this along our mountain road? The plant I...

A cold, tangy bowl of miyeok oi naengguk made from wild seaweed I harvested in Washington State. Some foods stay in our memory for decades. They do not have to be expensive or complicated. Sometimes they are simply the foods our mothers made when we were children—the dishes that appeared every summer, every winter, or every special season until their flavor became part of our memories. For me, one of those foods is Korean seaweed and cucumber cold soup. My mother once told me that when she was pregnant with me, she constantly craved sour foods. She wanted foods made with vinegar, sour fruit, and even well-fermented sour kimchi. Apparently, that taste never left me. Even now, as I am getting close to fifty, I still absolutely love sour food. Give me something cold, tangy, vinegary, and refreshing on a hot summer day, and I am happy. That may be why I have never forgotten the bowls of cold seaweed and cucumber soup my mother made for us every summer when I was young. Cool. Tangy. Crunchy...

For several years, I did not really maintain my vegetable garden. I still grew a few familiar Korean vegetables and herbs in containers on the porch—perilla, lettuce, minari, dolnamul, and tomatoes—but I mostly left the garden itself alone. Before long, volunteer plants began filling the open ground. Some people might look at them and see only weeds. I do not really think of them that way. Curly dock and broadleaf dock appeared, along with oxeye daisy, plantain, two kinds of thistle, common vetch, bird’s-foot trefoil, self-heal, and many other plants that had found their own places in my forgotten garden. Then one especially large plant caught my attention. A Common Mullein plant in my Washington garden as its central flower stalk begins to develop. Its broad gray-green leaves were covered in such dense, soft hairs that they looked almost like velvet. The leaves spread outward around the base, but the center of the plant was beginning to change. A tightly folded structure was ri...

A Flower That Brought Back a Childhood Song “무궁화 무궁화 우리나라 꽃, 삼천리 강산에 우리나라 꽃.” When I was in elementary school in Korea, I learned a children’s song about Mugunghwa. At the time, I sang it without fully understanding the meaning of the words. I simply remember practicing the song with my classmates, trying our best to sing it well together. The song called Mugunghwa “the flower of our country” because it is the national flower of South Korea. But I am not writing about this flower today simply because I am Korean or because it is Korea’s national flower. I wanted to write about it because finding this familiar flower growing as an ornamental garden shrub here in America unexpectedly brought back that childhood memory. For a moment, I remembered the classroom, my friends, and the days when we practiced that song together without really thinking about what its words meant. The flower I knew as Mugunghwa in Korea was growing here in an American garden under another familiar name...