This simple salad is my go-to recipe for eating ostrich fiddleheads. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to cook them: blanch five minutes, blanch ten minutes, saute afterwords and cook them to death in oil, put them in lasagna and bake them to oblivion, then pull out long, soft and stringy noodles…
Appetizers
Nettle Bread
A deep green nettle bread studded with nuts, along with the more crumbly, shortbread-style lembas bread are traditional travel foods wood elves have been making for a very long time. Both are useful, portable foods you can pack in a bag and take with you on a journey, or in my case, a fitting seasonal…
Artichokes with Ramp Leaf Butter
Artichokes with melted ramp butter? No, no that won’t suck at all. I’ve been getting a good amount of questions about how to use ramp leaf butter after it’s made. To me, there’s so many options that the possibilities seem endless, but I get that it can help to have some very specific examples. One…
Gyromitra Gratinée
I’ve been eating Gyromitra korfii occasionally for a few years now, but haven’t shared too much about them, well, because they’re Gyromitra. Like certain plants containing problem compounds that are also staple foods (chokecherries and cyanogenic glycosides like amygdalin, for example) I had an inkling that the thousands of years of ethnobotanical evidence of consumption…
Garlic Mustard Shoots with Ramp Butter
Oh garlic mustard. Let me count the ways I hate thee. Seriously, I hate this plant, it’s nothing less than a scourge on the woodlands and sugarbushes in my area, so when I eat it, it’s usually seasoned with plenty of spite. Sure, I know plenty of people that like to eat it, “eat the…
Spring Venison Terrine with Ramp Leaves
When things are starting to pop up in the spring, my first instinct is to go out and start putting things up and preserving. If you’re like me, you probably have some other things that need to get cleaned out of the freezer too, first. Enter pates, terrines, and all the glorious charcuterie that you…
Burdock Kinpira
Got a burdock root? Meet your new favorite recipe. Kinpira, or kinpira gobo as you’ll see it listed on menus at various sushi and similar restaurants, is a tried and true preparation for burdock root (it’s usually called gobo) and if you’ve never had it before, you need to drop what you’re doing and make…
Roman Nettle Patina (Frittata)
People have been eating nettles for a very long time. Thousands of years, and, in all reality, likely longer than that. Nettle patina is the oldest recipe for nettles that I know of, and it comes directly from one of the oldest surviving culinary texts we humans have, the one and only De Re Coquinaria…
Szechuan Parsnip Leaf Salad
Parsnips and their relatives like carrots are loved and cherished food plants around the world for good reason: they’re relatively easy to take care of, they can be stored for long periods of time—even over winter, and most importantly, they’re delicious. One thing no one talks about about though is that the leaves are also…
Maple Sap Soda
Ever wondered “can I make something from maple sap?”. I have. There’s just something about sap that’s fun, it’s like tree water, and, its bountiful. There has to be some great use for it, right? You bet, maple sap can be used to make maple syrup. Sarcasm aside, if you haven’t had it, maple sap…
Double Mushroom Ravioli
A few years ago I got a request from a reader to make “double mushroom ravioli” or ravioli with dried mushrooms in the dough and filling. I spent a few days tweaking a couple batches, but, as luck will have it, I accidentally selected something wrong and named the images incorrectly, which meant they ended…
Meatballs with Ischnoderma Gravy
Everyone likes meatballs in gravy, and there’s nothing crazy or out of the ordinary here, except that I’m using Ischnoderma resinosum (resinous polypore) instead of more commonly used mushrooms, and some nice ground whitetail that I helped my friend butcher. The Ischnoderma is really the focal point here-the meatballs could be whatever you want. I…
Beef Neck Terrine
I’ve created more versions of pates and terrines than I can count, and some of them blur together, but one sticks out above the rest: the beef neck terrine. It was a crowd favorite, but also burned in my mind as one server repeatedly asked me to show her where the fruit was. She was…