It’s summer: high purslane season here, and that means I’m eating it every day, sometimes for two meals a day, mostly in cold salads like this one. I like purslane cooked, but most of the time in the summer when I eat it, I just want to wash it, chop it, and call it a…
Salad
Purslane and Sweet Corn Salad
Purslane and sweetcorn salad isn’t a traditional Mexican salad, but it might as well be. An homage to Mexico, and it’s love of quelites, a sort of catch-all term for edible wild plants, it’s a generous dose of the famous edible garden weed mixed with roasted sweet corn, charred tomatoes, and simple Mexican seasonings and…
Cattail and Milkweed Shoot Salad
Cattail and milkweed shoot salad has been on my list of things to make for a while. Both are two edible wild plants I like eating during the season, but neither of them is something I’m probably going to make a meal out of all by themselves. Milkweed is a great vegetable, but most of…
Lamb’s Quarters Salad
I’ve written about making salads from foraged greens before, but, more often than not, in the height of summer salad green season, I’m not making salads out of 15 different plants–it’s probably more like 3 or 4. Some of the plants will change here and there as the summer goes on, but one thing stays…
Kernza Salad with Butternuts and Mushrooms
Kernza, a crop being researched by the land institute in the University of Minnesota is a potentially groundbreaking game changing grain. Most grains, like wheat, corn and soy beans, need to be planted as an annual. Kernza is the opposite, a perennial grain that needs no planting, no tilling, and, because of that, actually replenishes…
Wild Shoot Salad with Dryad Saddle and Wild Mint
Here’s a great, off-the-beaten path salad I did for episode 2 of The Wild Harvest, my online series with James Beard Award winning filmmaker Jesse Roesler. The salad itself is great, but moreso to me it’s a statement about how we perceive vegetables in general, specifically shoot vegetables. When you think of a shoot, what…
Fiddlehead Salad
This simple salad is my go-to recipe for eating ostrich fiddleheads. There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to cook them: blanch five minutes, blanch ten minutes, saute afterwords and cook them to death in oil, put them in lasagna and bake them to oblivion, then pull out long, soft and stringy noodles…
Spring Ephemeral Salad
Spring is one of the most exciting times of year, and the regrowth of fresh greens always makes me crave them. Spring ephemerals, or plants that have short life spring lifecycles, are fascinating in how they operate. Plants like ramps, toothwort, spring beauty, trout lily, and Floerkia sprouts all live and get their energy in…
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…
Szechuan Parsnip Leaf Salad
Parsnips and their relatives like carrots are loved and cherished food plants around the world for good reason: they’re relatively easy to take care of, they can be stored for long periods of time—even over winter, and most importantly, they’re delicious. One thing no one talks about about though is that the leaves are also…
Anchovy Vinaigrette
This basic anchovy vinaigrette recipe is one of the cornerstones of fine home cooking for me–think of it like Ceasar salads lighter, more delicate cousin. I keep a number of simple vinaigrettes in jars around so I can make salads and have them on the table in seconds. Anchovy vinaigrette, along with a basic white…
Sunflower Artichokes, with Galinsoga and Smude’s Sunflower Oil
This is a simple recipe using a bunch of plants that taste like sunflowers, using my sunflower artichokes I mentioned in this post. Immature sunflowers can be cooked similarly to artichokes. Sunflowers cooked like artichokes, with related plants and virgin sunflower oil
Nasturtium, Arugula, and Purslane Salad with Milkcaps and Shrimp
The marinated milkcap mushroom preserves I talked about in this post are fine out of the jar, but even better warmed up and put on a plate with something. I love a good salad, and my nasturtiums have been in full swing, so whatever I made, I knew they’d be going in there. A great…