Fresh horseradish. Just the thought of it makes my eyes water with glee. Horseradish is an ancient condiment, and It’s kept a good popularity compared to other root crops like skirret and parsley root, the former of which I’m still dying to grow. It’s popularity has to be due at least partly to the fact…
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Dry-Aging Meat and Game at Home
Got a special occasion coming up, or a holiday celebration? Hunter in your family shoot too many deer and you’re running out of space? If you like meat projects, dry-aging them is a good one to add to your repertoire. By now, most people have heard of dry-aged meat, and, if they haven’t tasted some…
Butternuts / White Walnuts
When I saw my first butternut I had the same thought plenty of people have probably had: “that’s a weird looking black walnut”. They’re not black walnuts though. They’re butternuts, and in Minnesota, it’s illegal to harvest them, or even possess them—more on that later. Butternuts vs black walnuts Butternuts, also known as white walnuts…
Smoked Rams Head Posole
Some people might say an image of an animal head is unappealing, down right spooky. What I think is unnerving is the fact that we’re disconnected from where our meat comes from. More and more, and I feel like most Americans just can’t deal with the fact that the meat they eat had a life,…
Fermented Highbush Cranberry Hot Sauce
Highbush cranberries are a great fruit: they’re easy to harvest, bountiful when you find a good patch, and reliable, as birds seem to leave them on the tree longer than others, at least from my experience. The fruit makes a great jelly, pates de fruits, traditional cranberry sauce, colored apple sauce–they’re a great addition…
Shaggy Mane Ink
“Leave mushrooms on the counter until they turn into a black, inky mess, then puree this goop and eat it” sounds like instructions in a recipe for someone on a quest to make themselves sick. For the unfamiliar, Shaggies are part of a group of mushrooms called inky caps because the mushrooms quickly turn to…
Honey Truffles
I love working with truffles, so when a truffle hunter from Hungary and his friend asked me if I’d contribute to a new book on truffles they were writing by sampling Honey truffles (Mattirolomyces terfezioides) fresh from the earth, shipped direct from Hungary, I agreed (and squealed with joy). Shipping mushrooms across the pond is…
The Wild Harvest | Episode 6: Autumn
Episode six is the last entry in The Wild Harvest for 2020. From the start, back in April, Jesse and I had planned on featuring hen of the woods for this episode, along with whatever else I could come up with. Eventually hens turned into maitake when we got closer to the shoot date and…
Oven Fried Shrimp of the Woods
Fall is here, and one thing I know I can always count on are aborted entoloma / Entoloma abortivum / shrimp of the woods, no matter how bad the maitake are teasing me. If you have some, oven frying the arboreal crustaceans is a recipe you’re going to want to bookmark. As long as you…
Amanita amerirubescens
I ate my first mushroom from the Amanita amerirubescens group this year, but it wasn’t the first time I’d met them, or collected them. As many of you know, the often-avoided genus has a number of lethally poisonous mushrooms, as well as some very well known edibles in it. I first found them first 3…