Highbush cranberries are a great fruit: they’re easy to harvest, bountiful when you find a good patch, and reliable, as birds seem to leave them on the tree longer than others, at least from my experience. The fruit makes a great jelly, pates de fruits, traditional cranberry sauce, colored apple sauce–they’re a great addition…
Pickles, Preserves, Etc
Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup
Mugolio, a dark, aromatic syrup imbued with the flavor of pine cones, is the poster child for the kind of crazy cool, Illuminati-esque foodstuff foragers have access to, all for the price of a hike, or even less, depending on how close you are to some pine trees. The syrup came on my radar when…
Classic Rowanberry Jelly
Rowanberries / mountain ash berries (Sorbus americana) are one of the more difficult fruits to work with I know of. At first I really, really wanted to find ways to use the fruits that made use of the entire fruit, and, yeah, it’s difficult. But, traditional rowan jelly is supposedly a good condiment for game,…
Highbush Cranberry-Ginger Jelly
The more I cook with Highbush cranberries The more I enjoy them, and one of the best things they can become is a brilliant red jelly. Highbush cranberries are not the easiest thing to make into jelly, and I should know, I’ve been testing this recipe for a couple years now, and am only sharing…
Wild Plum Leather (Tklapi)
Wild plums (Prunus americana) are in season, and they’re a puzzle. The flesh is rich and sweet, the perfume so deeply floral it will make your toes curl, but the skins, the skins are tough, and tannic enough to make you feel like you drank a few cups of chianti straight. The two aforementioned reasons are…
Dried Black Trumpet-Ramp Butter
I’ve never met a wild mushroom butter I didn’t like, and the few variations on the simple theme (especially the fresh porcini butter) are some of the most trusty and popular recipes on this website. For the most part, you can substitute different mushrooms in the basic recipe, but this one I developed especially to…
Salted Wild Mushrooms in Brine
Once I started reading about traditional ways to preserve mushrooms around the world, one of the first ones I came across was salted wild mushrooms, an old stand-by used in plenty of places, but most notably Eastern Europe. It’s not that popular in America, but one trip to a market with an Eastern European ownership…
Fermented Grape Leaves
Have you ever had commercially pickled grape leaves? If you haven’t, don’t bother, I’m pretty sure they’re the reason some people claim not to like grape leaves, or things made with them like dolmades. Like plenty of commercial pickled things, I usually find grape leaves from a store shelf overly acidic, like the processor is…
Serviceberry-Maple Leather
It took me years to really get a handle on harvesting serviceberries. First I had to find places I could go around the Twin Cities to harvest them, get permission from the land owners, and show up at the right time. Then, even when I did show up when the berries were ripe, bucket in…
Pheasant Back Fermented Soy Sauce
Prime pheasant back season is usually about over after the spring chicken of the woods pop, but just because they’re big and tough as nails doesn’t mean you can’t do anything with them, and pheasant back shoyu is a great example, especially if you like edible science projects. Shoyu and it’s cousin tamari (soy sauces…
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…
Lacto Fiddlehead Pickles
I love pickled ostrich fern fiddleheads, and my recipe for crisp vinegar fiddlehead pickles is one of the most popular recipes on this site (if you’re not a fermenter, try those first). I love the old pickles too, and by old I mean naturally fermented pickles–kosher dills, if you will. I’d tried fermenting ostrich fiddleheads…
Pickled Angelica
Pickled, tender Angelica stems are a good introduction to working with the plant, and I’m surprised I didn’t try it sooner after all the years I’ve worked with it. Angelica (my local species should be A. atropurpurea) is fascinating, and delicious in the right place, but was frustrating as it doesn’t obey some of the…