Meatball stew with pheasant back mushrooms and campion is a dish I came up with after I’d been reading about campion, and how it, and it’s relatives (mostly Silene vulgaris and Silene inflata) are used widely in Mediterranean cooking. The recipe itself is a sort of hodge-podge of different ingredients you might see in European…
Soup
Basic Dryad Saddle / Pheasant Back Broth
After morel season as we get into summer, the pheasant back / dryad saddle / Cerioporus squamosus will still be out, not in the staggering numbers we see during the height of the late spring season, but still out and plentiful. They’re not spring mushrooms though, and finding tender, succulent ones is far more difficult…
Mediterranean Dock Soup with Rice and Lemon
Do you like Greek dishes like avgolemono? Then you’ll like this recipe for dock soup with rice and lemon–they’re basically cousins. Dock, or Rumex species are legion across the United States, and, as much as I would like to tell you that I cooked with curly dock for this recipe, I can’t be exactly certain….
Watercress Soup With Carrots and Ramp Leaves
If you know watercress, you probably know watercress soup. While I enjoy the versions with cream, sometimes I might not have any around, or, I might want a lighter soup, people might be lactose-intolerant, or I might just want a change of pace. My new favorite watercress soup recipe is this simple, rustic one, scented…
Artichoke, Rice, and Mallow Soup
Along with nettles, mallow (numerous varieties) is one of the most widely used foraged greens in the Mediterranean and surrounding areas, and a Google search using words like “Malva soup” will show you what I mean. It’s a very traditional green. Most of the time when you see a recipe for mallow or malva soup,…
Smoked Venison Shank Ramen
A smoked venison shank is an investment that pays dividends in your future. Delicious dividends. During butchery season, sometimes it can get tricky to figure out what to do with bones and oddparts (note that I don’t save venison spines for stock, but I do from lambs I butcher). One trick I’ve kept with…
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…
Coral Mushrooms in Broth with Hominy and Mitsuba
Crown coral mushrooms (Artomyces pyxidatus) are, ok. People might pick them and be unimpressed when the mushrooms hit a pan, deflate, and cook down to an off-grey nothing. Crown corals will always lose a lot of volume sauteed or browned up like most people are used to cooking mushrooms, it’s just what they do. I…
Dried Lactarius Broth
Snow is on the ground, and that means it’s time to start working through the mushroom stash. The first thing in my queue was a simple broth with shrimp dumplings based on an old recipe I used to run as a deep fried fish cake appetizer. The dumplings were just for fun since I was…
Matsutake Miso Soup
I can still taste the first bowl of miso soup I ever had. It was at a higher-ish end Tepanyaki restaurant chain called Benihana, one of those places where they have a cook make the food in front of you on a grill set in the table-it’s a great place to bring dates. Before all…
Morel Broth with Wild Caraway Leaves
In Sam Thayer’s book Incredible Wild Edibles, he discusses wild caraway in depth, and, in passing, mentions a sort of Scandinavian soup made with beef stock and wild caraway leaves. I wanted to find the soup, and, even moreso, I wanted to study the history and any variations I could find. Well, it took me…
Vietnamese Coral Mushroom-Chicken Noodle Soup
I’ve been working on recipes with Rau-Ram, or Vietnamese coriander, as it’s basically my new favorite herb. If you don’t like cilantro, you should probably close your browser immediately, and walk away slowly from the computer, using your fingers to form a crucifix. Trust me, it may not be in the cilantro family, but the…
Yellowfoot Chanterelle Broth with Tiny Pasta
Midwestern yellowfoot chanterelles are small–no doubt about it. As such, their the sort of ingredient that is so difficult to source in volume as to make them near impossible to find on a restaurant menu, no matter the cost. They’re literally a chef’s dream, and I made one of the best wild mushroom soups I’ve…