I eat a lot of meat, but I’m not much of a hunter. I know plenty about butchery and processing animals though, so when I got my first charity deer year, one of the first cuts I knew I would take out was the breast, which I’ve never, if rarely seen people mention when processing…
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Candied Black Trumpets
Candied mushrooms? Like, with sugar?? Hard pass. Candied mushrooms are the sort of frou-frou B.S. I’d expect 15 year old me to try making, or a young cook still trying to figure out what a palette is. Honestly, I found the idea so annoying it was nearly offensive. These are mushrooms we’re talking about, I…
The Wild Harvest | Episode 5: Late Summer
Episode 5 of The Wild Harvest show is here, and, I think it’s arguably the best one yet, although I’m guilty of saying that about all of the ones we’ve shot so far. This episode is the longest we’ve done, as well as the most labor intensive. 3.5 days of Jesse and I shooting…
Wild Plum Leather (Tklapi)
Wild plums (Prunus americana) are in season, and they’re a puzzle. The flesh is rich and sweet, the perfume so deeply floral it will make your toes curl, but the skins, the skins are tough, and tannic enough to make you feel like you drank a few cups of chianti straight. The two aforementioned reasons are…
The Black Staining Polypore
A number of years ago I got an envelope in the mail, ground dried powder of Meripilus sumstinei, the black staining polypore or rooster of the woods. it the first time someone sent me mushrooms in the mail I’d never met, which, is now a pretty regular occurrence (currently I’m waiting on honey truffles to…
Simple Black Trumpet-Potato Gratin
Potatoes are a perfect partner for mushrooms since they won’t overpower them. They let the mushroom take center stage, which is exactly what I want after I spent half of the day on my hands and knees with a scissors cutting black trumpets off of the ground. One of the easiest, and tastiest things I…
Fried Milkweed Pods
Late summer is good for a lot of things. Mushrooms are here, parading around in all kinds of shapes and sizes, fruit harvests are well underway, and the getting is good. Greens plants are getting slim though. The watercress has started to come back, and is a few inches tall, but most others, unless they…
Woodchuck Stew with Garden Vegetables
The giant, beautiful gardens on the farm are home to all kinds of plants and vegetables, and they attract the attention of plenty of critters. If you have a garden that’s ever been visited by a woodchuck, you know they can be very disruptive. How I approach woodchucks is a good example of my approach…
The Wild Harvest | Episode 4: Mid Summer
Episode 4 of the Wild Harvest is here, and it’s a love letter to gardens and wild places filled with the edible treasures of summer. The beautiful landscapes and images go by nice and easy with Jesse behind the camera, but this episode was by far the most difficult we’ve done yet. The first three…
How to Taste a Landscape
The jack pine barrens are one of the most beautiful, unique landscapes I know. There’s gently rolling hills as far as you can see, with dips of kettles, those spots where glaciers paused, making depressions in the Earth. The green hills are dotted here and there with the scorched black skeletons of old jack pines–a…