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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Salad

Woodchuck Salad with Hickory Nut Oil and Squash

Confit woodchuck salad with hickory nut oil (2)

When I was in Costa Rica I ordered a tuna salad at a little restaurant and throwing the cautionary tales of eating only cooked food to the wind (which I later paid for after drinking a couple drinks with ice) in order to have as big a variety of local food as possible. The salad…

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A Raw Porcini Affetatti

raw porcini mushroom affetati

Years ago when I was working at Pazzaluna, I was on the garde manger station making hot and cold apps, salads, and desserts, as well as curating a daily changing selection of antipasti I came up with. One of my favorite snacks, and plates to make was the affetati, an Italian platter of cured meats….

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French Morel Mushroom Salad

French morel mushroom salad

The connection between memories and what we eat is a strong one. If I wanted I could recall my entire life as a timeline through what I ate, or just foods I remember, each particular thing imprinted for a reason only my esculent oriented brain could tell you. Wild mushrooms are no exception, and the…

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Aronia Berry Vinaigrette

Chokeberry or Aronia Berry Vinaigrette

I’ll be honest and tell you I’ve never picked Aronia berries (a.k.a chokeberries or Aronia melanocarpa) in the woods after a long hunt, or after walking around the edge of a clearing during berry season. They’re just not that common where I’ve hunted. But they’re often in urban areas, and I have no problem picking…

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Dotty’s Wild Green Salad

Dotty's Wild Green Salad

I never liked salads as a kid, they were always like watery, tasteless lettuce. If I ever did eat a salad it was assassinated with dressing, croutons and cheese, since it’s hard to make fat, salt and carbs taste bad. Even through my teenage years and into college, I still wondered why people ate salads….

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Watermelon Salad With Purslane and Anise Hyssop

Watermelon Salad With Purslane, Goat Cheese, Jalapeno, and Anise Hyssop

Watermelon salad is on plenty of menus in the summer for good reason, it’s cold, refreshing, and evocative of the season. At it’s best it can be paradigm shifting, at it’s worst, it’s nothing more than a glorified fruit salad. While I was in San Francisco this past month, I had one that was basically…

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Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato

Fiddlehead, Asparagus Salad with Spruce Tips, Lavender Radish and Fresh Herbs

Out of all the dishes I created for Slow Food MN’s “Where the Wild Things Are” farm dinner, this was probably the crowd favorite. The evolution of it was a little interesting. The hosts of the event looked at my original menu and suggested we add a vegetable side of some kind to appease vegetarians…

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Heirloom Tomato Salad with Pickled Chanterelles and Ramp Leaf Oil

Heirloom tomato salad with ramp oil and pickled chanterelles

I never thought something as simple as making a salad could remind me of why I cook in the first place. I cook for a living, but before I made money doing it, I just lived to cook. Making things in the kitchen was my creative outlet, and made people around me happy. Ever since…

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Fried Oyster Mushroom Croutons

Oyster mushroom croutons

If the restaurant were to fail, finding a way to mass produce these would make me rich I tell you. They’re not so much a crouton as they are crispy, deep fried mushrooms, but calling them deep fried mushrooms would insinuate that they’re served hot, which they aren’t. Personally, the word “deep fried mushroom” conjures…

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Fiddlehead Salad With Spruce Tips, Peppermint, And Pecorino

Fiddlehead-Fava Bean Salad With Pecorino, Peppermint and Spruce

Here’s what I made with the last of my fiddleheads this year, it’s a great little spring salad. The origins are Italian. In the Spring, it’s an Italian tradition to have fresh fava beans with hunks of pecorino cheese, a great example of less is more-just beans and cheese, that’s it. A colleague of mine,…

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Wild Greens That Survived Winter, With Celeriac And Cheese

celery root salad with chickweed and watercress

Like most people, I think of seasons as static: Winter turns to Spring, to Summer, to Fall, and then repeats. It really isn’t true though, the change of seasons is gradual, and the transition between them blurry. At the restaurant, the first day we saw snow melt a server pulled me aside and asked me:…

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Roasted Beet Salad With Fennel And Anise Hyssop

  People know I like to cook with foods that are off the beaten path. A couple weeks ago my coworker pulled a bunch of anise hyssop out of his garden and brought it into work. “Can you use this Al?”. I told him it depended on what it was. He came back with a…

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Purslane Panzanella Salad

recipe for purslane panzanella with golden cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes

  I don’t really go out of my way to eat tons of “salads”. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great and all, and I will make one from time to time. Its just that working in a restaurant 60+ hours a week can have a part to play in how quickly you can get to…

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Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemera Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemerals, and other tender young plants and herbs. 

The instinctual knowledge involved in choosing different plants at their peak to serve together raw, with thought put into how the textures and flavors will work on someone’s palette, to me, is one of the highest forms of culinary artistry. Something most people will never taste in their life. 

A little oil, salt, pepper, acid, a touch of sweetness from maple, maybe few fresh herbs are all you need. Bottled dressing of any kind would be like putting Axe Body spray on food. 

#spring #ephemerals #toothwort #troutlily #springbeauty #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Virginia Bluebells (Merten 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is another beautiful spring wildflower that loves to grow in the same habitat you’ll see ramps and spring beauty. 

Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
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