Wild rice polenta. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, you name it. This stuff is great, and it cooks in a fraction of the time typical wild rice does. It started with a farmer that ran a CSA that would bring me goodies once and a while when dropping off his boxes of veggies: a couple sunchokes…
Nuts, Seeds and Starches
Wild Mushroom Conserve with Walnut Oil
I have a lot of different ways I like to preserve mushrooms I’ve learned or come up with myself over the years. This method is one of the more interesting ones, and, I can’t take credit for it. When I started working at Heartland, with it’s daily changing menu that the staff collaboratively designed, one…
Barrel Cactus Fruit
Barrel cactus fruit, also known as muppets you can eat, or the Bert and Ernie of desert edibles. I’ve traveled to Arizona to see my grandparents just about every other year since I was a child. I always thought the concrete jungle of towns in the desert, and the different terrain was interesting-much different from…
Acorn Flour Crepes
If you process acorns, you have to try acorn flour crepes. I love the taste of acorns, but I don’t use much of it at one time, since acorn flour is heavy, dense stuff, almost like nut meal, but more starchy and dense. I typically use it in a blend for most recipes. Crepes are…
Cactus Seed Flatbread
Here’s a simple recipe for a flatbread made to compliment my desert stew that’s based around using barrel cactus fruit. Cactus seeds of a number of different cactus are edible, although, I can only speak to eating the seeds of saguaro and barrel cactus, so for this recipe, I’m specifically referring to barrel cactus,…
Acorn Flour Spaetzle
Here’s a quick recipe for making spaetzle out of acorn flour. While developing the recipe, first I wanted to see if I could make them out of 100% acorn flour, and you likely could by increasing the amount of egg and yolk, and decreasing the water, but, since the flour is so precious, I wanted…
How to Make Acorn Flour
There is a lot of info out there on how to process acorns, some better than others. I’m defintely not the first, or last to write about this process, but hopefully I can share some of what I’ve learned personally over the last few years. I’m not going to go crazy in depth on different…
Lotus Root Confit Stuffed with Sausage
Funky water tubers with their air-channels stuffed with sausage is my favorite go-to recipe with lotus root confit. The air channels are basically begging to be stuffed, and although you’ll need commercial, and not wild lotus root, unless you got some huge pond monster. It’s a great way to use these funky things, especially if…
Lotus Root Confit
From what I can tell, Americans don’t think of lotus root as something that grows in the U.S., or even as something to eat, but the lotus has always been here. They’re a little tricky to cook, but what I’ve learned is that they kind of like to be done either hot and fast (deep…
Glazed Sunchokes
Jerusalem artichokes, fartichokes, sunroots, earth apples, or whatever you call them, people either seem to love them or hate them. I’m in the love camp, but I’ve also been cooking them for a long time, and they can be tricky, especially if they’re knobby and full of dirt. This recipe though, this is a conversion-quality…
Pork Short Rib and Burdock Stew
I’m constantly blown away by the connections I get to make, in the Midwest, and the United States, but especially from other countries around the world. A few years ago, I was talking about using burdock root to make a relish I had been serving with fish, and I got an interesting conversation going with…
Parched Wild Rice-Mushroom Bisque
If you’re a mushroom hunter who likes to pick different types of boletes this mushroom bisque is for you. 2018 was a great year for boletes with our steady, late summer rain, and I got a lot more variety than what I’d say a typical year brings. The great part about boletes is that with…
Buttercup Squash Ravioli with Hickory Nuts and Birch Syrup
One of the things I wanted to show off on a menu for a recent event was hickory nut oil. The dish changed a bit as I developed the flavors in the rest of the courses, but it seemed like the only place I could sneak the oil in, so I was resolved not to…