Central Park provides a great window into the world of wild foods of mid-spring. Making a meal with these plants is simple at this time of the year.

For an appetizer, try simmering field garlic bulbs in diluted vinegar with Italian seasonings to make an outstanding pickle.

It's the peak of the season for wild salad greens, and we'll be finding great quantities of ingredients. Spicy mustard greens, such as garlicky garlic mustard, hot hedge mustard, and even hotter poor man's pepper, may abound on lawns anywhere. And lemony sheep sorrel grows in sunny places. Offset their flavors with milder-tasting greens such as violet leaves, lamb's-quarters, Asiatic dayflower, and chickweed, also quite abundant. With the inclusion of tender, cucumber-flavored cattail shoots, you'll have the best salad you've ever eaten.

And wild mushrooms, if present, will provide a gourmet side dish. We could find dryad's saddle, wine-cap stropharia, or chicken mushrooms on this tour.

Burdock root is one of the few wild root vegetables that remains in season throughout the warm weather. Add razor-thin slices to soups or rice. And at this time of the year only, you can also cook the immature flower stalks, which taste like artichoke hearts. Try using them to make Cardunes in Wine, an Italian delicacy.

Pokeweed, another seasonal potherb, is superb boiled in 2 changes of water (it's poisonous raw!). Flavor it with tamari soy sauce and garlic lightly browned in olive oil, as in Basic Pokeweed.

And for an exotic dessert, why not stew apples or pears with cinnamon (or wild sassafras), ginger (commercial or wild), and nuts, then add the sweet, perfumed blossoms of the wisteria vine?