Wild rice flour pasta dough is exactly what it sounds like: fresh pasta dough, made with wild rice flour. Not 100% wild rice flour, just 50%, since that’s about the most you can work into fresh pasta and still have it act like fresh pasta while you’re rolling it out, since wild rice flour lacks…
Nuts, Seeds and Starches
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…
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…
Acorn Grits
If you process acorns, acorn grits are another great, simple way to enjoy your harvest. There’s plenty of guide books and people in the foraging space that talk about making acorn grits, and most of them seem to like using 100% acorn meal. Personally I find it way too heavy of a food to eat…
Guide to Black Walnuts
Like a lot of other people, I have memories of tripping and stepping on ugly, gooey black walnuts in the yard when I was growing up. They were a serious pain when I had to mow the lawn, and I thought they were weird, not food–no way they could actually be related to regular nuts…
Black Walnut-Maple Honey
I love old cookbooks. Recently For research on lamb and goat recipes for the farm I work with, I’ve been collecting old Scottish and Irish books, most from around the 1900’s, since I know they historically work with lots of lamb and small ruminants. Aside from all of the great recipes like hotch potch I…
Nocino, The Black Walnut Liquor
Before I knew a mushroom to pick, before I had ever considered clipping a leafy green to cook from a field, I knew I could pick black walnuts and make nocino. I don’t remember at exactly what time I picked it up, but it was early in my career while I was working at the…
Turkey Wild Rice Soup with Black Trumpets
As far as food is concerned, the main course for holidays will change here and there. One year it’s a ham for Christmas, the next year we’ll smoke a prime rib. One thing that’s constant is somewhere along the line there’s probably turkey at one of the gatherings I’ll attend, either for my girlfriend’s family…
Wild Rice Polenta
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…
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,…