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 or brisket, which I’ve never, if rarely seen people mention…
Appetizers
Lobster Mushroom Rolls
Lobster mushroom rolls are a solid way to enjoy your harvest. Lobster rolls are usually a pretty simple thing: really fresh lobster, mayonnaise, and maybe some chives or celery, since it’s all about the lobster. But lobster mushroom rolls, if they’re going to taste like anything, need some extra attention, lobster mushrooms having a much…
Eggplant Baked with Tomato and Wild Herbs
Early last fall I was planning a menu to be executed in someones home. It was going to start with a few appetizers, and the client wanted a selection of gluten free, vegetarian, as well as meat centered apps for guests to graze on before I served dinner. It was the very tail end of…
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…
Sicilian Chicken of the Woods
Think eating chicken of the woods is strictly an American thing? The continents separated a long time ago, but we still share many of the same mushrooms, at least as far as culinary purposes are concerned (specific species are another story). Doing research with Jesse for The Wild Harvest show as we planned Episode 3…
Stuffed Grape Leaves with Wild Fruit and Nuts
There’s dolmas, dolmades, dolmasi dolmathakia, dolmathes, sarma, sarmasi, and probably a few other names I haven’t seen them travel under. Whatever you call them, if you put some in front me I’m going in for more than my share, because I love a good stuffed grape leaf. They may be small nibbles, but they’re rich…
Cattail and Milkweed Shoot Salad
Cattail and milkweed shoot salad has been on my list of things to make for a while. Both are two edible wild plants I like eating during the season, but neither of them is something I’m probably going to make a meal out of all by themselves. Milkweed is a great vegetable, but most of…
Burdock Yamagobo
Yamagobo is one of the tried and true recipes for cooking with burdock root that comes from Asian cuisine. It’s a simple recipe: burdock roots peeled and mixed with a pickle solution typically colored orange with..carrot powder, or more commonly orange food coloring–no thanks. After a reader tipped me off to the preparation, I had…
Angelica Blossoms (Zavirne)
“These angelicas grow wild near abandoned ruins and damp places. In February the Salentines go feverishly in search of them. This is the moment when the incipient flower-heads are still enclosed in their sheaths right up against the greenish-purple stem. You cut these sheaths with a knife”. –Patience Grey, Honey From a Weed. I love…
Hop Shoot Frittata
A good hop shoot frittata is one of the first things I’ll make in spring when the hop shoots start to come up outside the house–a good indicator that I need to go check my wild patch and take a look at their progress. Hop shoots are good for all kinds of things, but the…
Pork Salo, with Ramp Leaf Rub
Salo is a great piece of pork charcuterie that I found out about from one of the members of Hank Shaws great Facebook Group Hunt Gather Cook when I asked for some ideas for interesting pork cuts to take out of 2 pandemic pigs I butchered. I love cultural specialties and the rabbit holes that…
Baked Oyster Mushroom Croutons
At the tail end of morel season, we’ll start to see others coming up, especially if we get some rain in the Midwest like we did last week–it poured, and poured. My favorite are the first flushes of young chicken of the woods that come up, sometimes even while I’m out hunting morels, if I’m…
Braised Burdock and Wild Mushrooms
Ever since I figured out a reasonably efficient way to dig burdock roots, I’ve been eating it every which way. Kinpira was my real breakthrough. Sure, I opened up a restaurant featuring burdock as a local ingredient, but back then I cooked it like a European would, generally with dairy, which is fine, but the…