Anasazi Stir Fry: An All-American One-Dish Dinner
By Larry Larason
Humans are natural foragers. In early times we might have gone exploring in the woods and returned home with a basketful of berries and a pretty rock. Today we explore at Wal-Mart or Family Dollar and return home with bags of stuff we don’t always need. A book published in 1962, Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons, promoted foraging for wild food. This book, and others by the same author, proved very popular and are still in print. Although he grew up in Texas and New Mexico, the wild foods he wrote about were mostly found in the eastern parts of the country. And Gibbons’s list of plants included some that were not native to North America. For example, he recommended day lilies, which in some climates may escape cultivation and go wild. I did learn some things from Gibbons. I tried putting cattail buds in pancakes. Once was enough! But I found that cattail shoots could fit right in many of the dishes on the menu of a Chinese restaurant. And he introduced me to Jerusalem artichokes, a native sunflower relative that makes edible tubers, which can be peeled and sliced to add some crunch to a salad. If you find them in a grocery they will likely be labeled “sunchokes.”
In the early 1960s, when his books came out, I lived in Phoenix, so I didn’t have much luck finding anything that Gibbons wrote about. But I had foraged for wild foods before. When I was growing up in northwestern Oklahoma, almost every year in early July my mother would take me and my sisters to gather sand hill plums, which grew in thickets hither and yon in that part of the world. We almost always had a supply of wild plum jelly at our house. I wish they grew around here, because that jelly is the best I ever tasted. One time we found fox grapes growing along a creek and made jelly from those, as well. While living in the Southwest my wife and I have tried two or three times to make prickly pear jelly; we never got it to jell, but the result made beautifully colored pancake syrup.
I’ve gathered other wild foods including persimmons and walnuts. One fall, while in college with a tight budget, we found a stand of hickory trees in a state park in Oklahoma and collected a bag of nuts. They were the most difficult nuts I’ve ever tried to get out of the shell, but they produced the best chocolate chip cookies ever. A cost-benefit analysis might show that hickory nuts are almost worth the trouble of harvesting for their superb flavor.
Want to eat something like the Ancient Puebloans might have eaten? I don’t mean forage for your dinner. Not now, in December. Nowadays, I do my foraging at Safeway or Albertsons. But the Ancients ate many of the same foods we eat today. The three staples of the agricultural tribes were corn, beans, and squash. This trio is sometimes called “the three sisters.” I’ve always been a fan of one-skillet meals. We can add some meat and onion to the three sisters to make a good one-dish dinner.
I apologize for the title of this piece. Of course the Anasazi didn’t do stir fry. But that got your attention, didn’t it? And if a time traveler had gone back to their time and presented them with skillets or woks, I’m sure they would have learned how to stir fry in no time. Here’s my take on this.
Meats: The Ancients had a choice of venison and elk. If their rock art is any indication, they also were fond of mountain sheep. They also ate rabbit, quail, and other small game. To be moderately authentic you should look for ground buffalo at the grocery. If you find it, fine; otherwise, substitute hamburger. I can’t tell much difference between red meats of whatever source.
Squash: We’ll use summer squash for this dish. I prefer the yellow, crookneck. When I was a kid I remember that these had a very mild, gourd-like under flavor. I think it has been bred out of modern cultivars, but I miss it. The Anasazi may not have grown this particular squash, but it was certainly grown by other agricultural tribes in what is now the U.S. They may have dried and stored it for future use. Don’t slice it too thin.
Tomatoes: I’m not sure if tomatoes had spread to the Southwest in pre-Columbian times, but they are definitely American in origin. Lacking tomatoes the local Ancients might have used tomatillos. The ones picked off wolfberry bushes might substitute for tomatoes. Seeds of these fruits have been found in archaeological sites all across the Four Corners, and today the plants grow around so many of the ruins and sites that archaeologists believe they were popular with the ancient inhabitants. Interestingly, these fruits are closely related to the goji berries that are currently a focus of interest for herbal medicine fans. Cost-benefit analysis says go buy a tomato at the grocery store and slice it into wedges.
Onion, chopped: Seasonality is the problem for all hunter-gatherer people. North America has many species of wild onions, but they come up in the spring, bloom, and then the leaves and stalks dry up and blow away. After that there is no indication of where the bulb lies in the soil. Did the ancients harvest and store onions for later use? Maybe. In any case, wild onions are quite small. Go buy a baseball sized one at the grocery.
Corn: This time of year you will have to buy canned corn, or maybe frozen. Or you could use hominy. Actually, I consider corn and beans to be optional in this recipe.
Beans: Obviously, you want precooked beans for this recipe. I suggest pintos, or, if you are cooking them yourself, try Anasazi beans, which cook faster than others, although they are more expensive.
Brown the hamburger and onions till the onions are translucent. If the meat was fatty, you may want to drain it before you toss in the other ingredients. Now I have a confession: cooking red meat without garlic is a sin in my opinion, so I would shake some garlic salt over this dish while it cooks. Gibbons indicates that some wild onions taste like garlic, so adding it is not a major violation of the idea of a Pueblo-type dish. Stir and fry until the tomatoes have gone runny and the squash is limp. You could cheat by sprinkling some grated cheese on each serving. Or you could throw in some authentic food stuffs like juniper berries or sunflower seeds. In the spring add dock leaves for something green.
You may have noticed that I didn’t specify quantities. The proportion of ingredients is not crucial. Use your own judgment of how much you want to prepare and how much of each ingredient you want.
The Ancients could only procure plant foods when they were in season. Our modern food network is a wonderment, supplying fresh produce year round. Appreciate our bounty, and enjoy a Merry Christmas.
