It’s green black walnut season. I don’t know how people figured out you could use unripe walnuts in cooking, but I’m sure glad they did, and after you try making fermented green walnut honey, I think you will be too, even if you don’t like the taste of black walnuts cracked from the shell. Unripe…
Nuts, Seeds and Starches
Persimmon-Acorn Pudding with Dried wild Fruit
When you look up old recipes for persimmons (many fruit for that matter) one thing you’ll often see are puddings. If you’re from America and you’re looking at the images here and wondering why this doesn’t come served in a cup, don’t worry, it’s ok. What you can technically describe as a pudding can…
Hackberry Souffle / Spoonbread
Hackberry spoonbread, a sort of fallen souffle, is one of my favorite things to make with hackberries. The finished dish is a rich, custard-like brunch or dessert that tastes a bit like crust-less pumpkin pie. As I was working with the hackberries and trying to figure out what I could make with them, I ended…
Hackberries
A wild tree fruit that eats like a nut loaded with carbohydrates, protein and fat, and tastes a bit sweet like squash with hints of dates? Yes please. If you’re in the Midwest and looking for something interesting to forage in the winter, our common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) is a tree that you must meet….
Guide to Wild Rice (Purchasing and Cooking)
Wild rice is a source of cultural pride in Minnesota where I’m from. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation about it online and in print. It’s time I had a guide on here about one of the most important ingredient of my region, so, I’m going to try and answer all the questions I can…
Fennel-Celery Root Salad with Acorn Oil
This is such a good salad. Such. A. Good. Salad. Working in Italian kitchens most of my life, shaved fennel salad was basically an afterthought—I honestly didn’t know why we put it on the menu sometimes, since it just didn’t excite me. By the time service came around, it would often be a clumpy oily…
Acorn Oil
Acorn oil is a secret nearly lost to time, a piece of edible history a few thousand years in the making, and one of the most cutting edge products I know of being produced today. Just the fact that it exists makes me giddy, and once you hear it’s story, I think you’ll agree. It…
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…
Raw Turnips with Acorn Oil
Raw turnips with acorn oil might sound like something you’d be served during winter in a Polish Gulag, but I can assure you, it’s a far cry from a punishment. The idea for this came from a couple different places, but the most inspirational was a book many of you will know (and love): The…
Acorn Crusted Squirrel with Wild Mushroom-Giblet Gravy
Acorn crusted squirrel is one of the best things I’ve made with tree ninjas. Period. A few years ago, I had Daniel Vitalis of Wild Fed and his entourage out to film an episode for his show. We took a week to hunt things around Minnesota and Wisconsin, and put everything together for a nice…
Bison Stew with Timpsila, Ramps and Hominy
I started cooking with the Thíŋpsiŋla / Timpsila / Prairie Turnips, and they are so, so delicious. I was lucky enough to get invited out near the Standing Rock Reservation by my friend, Native American ethnobotanist Linda Black Elk this past summer, and for two days, I worked hard enjoying the timpsila harvest with them….
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…
Tinpsila Harvest (Thíŋpsiŋla)
I turned off the gravel onto the road–ghosts of tire tracks barely noticeable through summer’s tall yellow clover, it gave me the feeling the clearance of my city slicker “little Honda that could” might not be enough for what was to come, the caravan of trucks I was following having no problem. But, I’d…