Foraged Flavours of Early Summer: Nettle, Fizzy Botanical Soda and Wild Mushrooms

Summer Solstice - 10:52pm

Spring flew by with incredible speed, and we celebrated Summer Solstice camping with family and friends. The growing season gets pretty crazy for us, even if we didn’t have added commitments of outside work and events. 

Over the past month we have:

• Organized meals and cooked for a 4-day jr-high/high school camping trip in Kananaskis- for 60 people! Super fun and always a great challenge.
• Got the garden in (just 107 tomato plants this year), which completely froze, dead, on June 22 with a freak late frost. Ah, Canada.
• Celebrated our daughter’s high school graduation (I was MC, there were 9 grads and ~250 guests)
• Celebrated my brother’s wedding (loved being able to sing 4 sacred choral works with my siblings for this)
• Celebrated both of our birthdays and our 24th wedding anniversary (24?! I'm 24... right??)
• Helped host a family camp for 200+ homeschoolers to celebrate 30 years of WISDOM Home Schooling.

Plus the usual year-end work stuff when one works for a school authority, and trying to get outside and be in nature as much as possible. Now, we’ve got a stretch of time at home, and I’m grateful. It's raining today, the house is quiet, and before I tackle cleaning I want to write. So here I sit, fuzzy blanket and coffee and laptop. 

There’s something sacred about early summer at home at Wildhaven Hills. The sun stretches longer across the horizon, wild grasses ripple with purpose, and the land offers up her most vibrant flavours - raw, untamed, and brimming with life. In these fleeting weeks, we harvest nettle tops before they toughen, gather fragrant wild blossoms and delicate plants for refreshing sodas or to dry for later teas, and scour the shaded woods for the fleshy goldmine that is wild oyster mushrooms.

Wild oyster mushrooms, stinging nettle, alliums

Here are three ways we’ve recently embraced the plate, straight from forest, field, and farm.

Nettle & Feta Hand Pies 

These are a dream: flaky, savoury, and nourishing. Nettles are packed with iron, calcium, and flavour - a spring green with backbone! I love nettle, and am always thrilled to find a new way to enjoy it. Hand pies are portable and crowd-pleasing, perfect for picnics, foraging hikes, or garden snacks. I thought it would be an easy move from a typical spinach and feta to using nettle, and honestly I love this so much more! I made the pie dough with a freshly-ground whole wheat flour for extra tooth, but puff pastry or regular pie dough work well.

Ingredients:

• 6 cups young nettle tops
• 1 tbsp butter (ish)
• 1 medium onion, minced
• 3-4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup crumbled feta
• Zest of 1 lemon
• Pinch red pepper flakes
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg
• Wild mushroom powder to taste (optional)
• Salt + pepper to taste
• Puff pastry or pie dough (enough for 12 4" hand pies)
• 1 egg (for egg wash)

Directions:

1. Blanch nettle tops in boiling water for 1-2 minutes, then plunge into ice water. Squeeze dry and then chop.
2. Sauté onion, pepper flakes, and garlic in butter until soft. Stir in blanched nettles, cook 2 minutes. Cool slightly.
3. Stir in feta, lemon zest, nutmeg, salt + pepper, tasting for seasoning. This is where I add some mushroom powder for a bit of extra umami. 
4. Roll dough, cut into rounds. Place a scoop of filling in center, fold, seal with a fork, egg wash tops (egg whisked with a bit of cold water).
5. Bake at 375°F for 20–25 minutes, until golden brown.

They're good warm or cold, and freeze well. Enjoy!

Wildcrafted Botanical Soda 

This is summer in a bottle… good zing, your own blends of flavours, fizzy and alive. You can use whatever wild botanicals are flourishing, experimenting with flavour combinations. This is a naturally fermented soda, gently probiotic and refreshingly wild. 

Getting into making wild sodas offers endless creative options! We recommend Wildcrafted Fermentation by Paschal Baudar as a great resource with loads of comprehensive recipes and ideas for wild sodas and much more. For a perfect step by step to make your own wild soda starter and get going, our friend Mel over at The Honourable Harvest has that for you. 

Once you understand the basic concept, you can easily experiment with all kinds of flavour combinations, using whatever is in season all summer long. Adding more sugar and extending fermentation time will create alcohol, so you can see this soda and raise me a wild beer!

Ingredients:

• 4 cups water (avoid city water - use spring water, well water, etc if you can)
• ½ cup wild botanicals if dried, more if fresh (rose petals, spruce tips, clover blossoms, sarsaparilla root, dandelion petals, or a combination of your favourite wild flavours). For this tea, I used sarsaparilla root, fireweed leaves, and pineappleweed.
• ⅓ cup raw honey
• A pinch of sea salt
• 1/4-1/2 cup wild yeast starter (learn more on Mel’s blog), OR 1/4 cup whey, OR 2 T ginger bug OR 2 tbsp kombucha 

Directions:

1. Bring water to a boil and turn down. Gently simmer the tougher botanicals (anything root, bark or twig) for 20 minutes, then shut off the heat. Add your delicate botanicals (petals etc) and then let that steep (covered with a tea towel) for a minimum of 20 minutes, and up to 24 hours to gather more wild yeast from the environment. 
2. Strain out your botanicals, stir in honey and salt.
3. Once cool, stir in your fermentation starter.
4. Pour into flip-top bottles. Leave at room temp for about 4 days, "burping" bottles daily.
5. Once carbonated, label, refrigerate and enjoy, chilled!

Note: Use caution, as fermented drinks are alive and bottles will build pressure!

Creamy Wild Oyster Mushroom Tagliatelle

We pick a huge variety of wild mushrooms here from spring through fall, depending on what's

fruiting, and I’m like a kid in a candy store with each foraged treasure! 

Velvety, fresh wild oyster mushrooms (pleurotus populinus) have a sweet anise/fennel aroma, and we find then on dying and dead poplar trees - usually in mid-to-late June. 

This is an easy, fast, and satisfying meal that your whole family will love. Oyster mushrooms' umami-rich depth sings when paired with garlic, herbs, and cream. 

Ingredients:

• 
  2-4 cups wild oyster mushrooms, torn or sliced into strips (of course, you can use farmed oyster mushrooms if no wild ones are at hand, but nothing matches the flavour of wild)
  
• 2 tbsp butter
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• A handful of young wild allium, finely chopped (or chives if that’s what you have)
• Pinch of red pepper flakes
• ½ cup heavy cream
• 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• Fresh parsley, chopped
• Salt & pepper to taste
• Fresh tagliatelle (or your favorite pasta)
• 2 cups grated Parmesan or Grana Padano

Directions:

1. Cook pasta. 
2. Meanwhile, sauté garlic, pepper flakes and wild allium in butter - letting the allium get a bit of a char. (If you are using chives instead of wild allium, add them in the next step.)
3. Add mushrooms, cook until soft and golden. 
4. Stir in cream, thyme, and a ladle of pasta water. Simmer 2–3 min until saucy.
5. Toss with pasta, adding grated parmesan and stirring to get it well incorporated. Top with parsley and enjoy immediately.

Final Thoughts from the Hills

These recipes aren’t just meals; they’re a rhythm of life out here. Walking the trails with a forager’s eye, brushing past nettles reminding you you’re alive, finding wild mushrooms hugging a log, bottling blossoms into fizzing brews… it all connects us to the land, to our ancestors, to each other… to what’s real.

If you're called to wildcrafting, start small. A handful of leaves, a few blossoms, one new variety of mushroom. Learn the land and let it teach you. This is the good work.

Leave a comment below—what are you foraging this season? Or tag @wildhavenhills with your take on one of these dishes. I’d love to see what your early summer tastes like.

Wild strawberry. 💚