Pollen is so much more than a “medicinal ingredient”. Pollen and honey cookies are a love letter to the life of bees, and a little study in complimentary flavors you can use when cooking with pollen. Although bees (at least to my knowledge) don’t harvest pollen from pine trees or cattails, the flavors of pollen,…
Baking
Pollen Bread
My pollen bread is essentially pollen cornbread, with a few tweaks, and it’s a good introductory pollen recipe to start out with if you have some pollen to use. Most of the time, when people talk about cooking with pollen, they might think of pollen pancakes, and they can be good, as well as your…
Candy Cap Tres-Leches Cake
After Lucia’s closed, I didn’t feel like running another restaurant quite yet, so I negotiated a part time job consulting on the menu of a little French restaurant near Edina. I was slumming, but I just couldn’t bear tackling another large operation just yet. It wasn’t a good fit. I ended up turning what was…
Candy Cap Mushroom Marshmallows
Candy cap marshmallows are exactly what they sound like, and they’re one of the most creative candy cap recipes I’ve ever worked with. Credit goes to my favorite pastry chef. I’m not a pastry chef, but I always loved collaborating with them, since they were the conduit that allowed me to speak to guests through…
Almond Candy Cap Mushroom Cookies (Amaretti)
Simple butter cookies are a tried and true candy cap recipe, and David Arora even shares a recipe for them in his excellent book All That the Rain Promises and More (get yourself a copy if you don’t have one, it’s a good, portable reference for when you can’t bring the larger book along). These…
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…
Candy Cap Bread Pudding
Back when I was running the Salt Cellar, I was dead-set on getting some kind of candy cap dessert on the menu. First I had ice cream, but that wasn’t really interesting enough, and, since I was running a steakhouse concept, I wanted something with a good dose of Americana in it. I thought a…
Blood Bread
Blood bread. This is a great example of historical harvest preserving, and something my Scandinavian ancestors might have made. It’s also spooky sounding and perfect for Halloween. It’s all about being resourceful. When an animal is harvested, the very first things you can collect are blood, and offal, in that literal, visceral, order. These things…
