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Forager Chef

Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Stalks and Shoots

Cattail and Milkweed Shoot Salad

Cattail and milkweed shoot salad recipe

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…

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Lacto Fiddlehead Pickles

lactofermented pickled fiddlehead fern recipe

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…

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Burdock Flower Stalk and Mushroom Vegetable Soup

Burdock flower stalk vegetable soup with chicken of the woods mushrooms recipe

Burdock flower stalks have an interesting, grassy flavor that has a tendency to meld into the background–it’s just not as flavor-forward as the roots. For me, the texture is really where this easily harvested part of the vegetable shines, as it’s tender and takes only a few minutes to cook, where burdock roots take digging,…

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Burdock Stalks and Carrot Saute

Sauteed burdock flower stalks and carrots with herbs recipe

Burdock flower stalks are in season right now, and they’re a great, widely available foraged vegetable I look forward to harvesting en-masse every year. At the abandoned farm where I do most of my harvesting, the soil is rich and black, and that means big burdocks, with big flower stalks. In a sitting, last year…

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Hop Shoot Frittata

Hop shoot frittata recipe

A good hop shoot frittata is one of the first things I’ll make in spring when the hop shoots start to come up outside the house–a good indicator that I need to go check my wild patch and take a look at their progress. Hop shoots are good for all kinds of things, but the…

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Wild Shoot Salad with Dryad Saddle and Wild Mint

Fiddlehead, asparagus, smilax and hop shoots with dryad saddle or pheasant back mushrooms 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…

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Fiddlehead Salad

Fiddlehead salad recipe with olive oil lemon and herbs

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…

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Wood Nettle Shoots

Steamed wood nettle shoots with acorn oil recipe

Wood nettle shoots are a great example of the different gifts wild plants give us at different stages of their yearly growth. Even more so to me, they represent my narrow sight, and how you can read about something, know it exists, and is there for the taking, but not truly “see it” until you…

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Lacto Knotweed Pickles

Brine fermented japanese knotweed recipe

One of the best parts about this site I never would’ve imagined as it was hatched when I lived in my friends basement years ago was that I’d be able to talk to people outside of the Midwest. In hindsight, the Internet being, well, the Internet, I should’ve known, but it came as a real…

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Smilax Shoots / Carrion Flower

Foraging for edible carrion flower shoots, or smilax / greenbriar

A few years ago I was in Northern Florida on a T.V. pilot shoot called Forage to Table that was supposed to focus on squirrel hunting, foraging plants, myself, and Madison Parker: a Vietnam Vet who trains Seal Team 6 in pre-black powder survival techniques. Madison was supposed to get the meat and I was…

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Duck Egg Spaghetti with Cattail Pollen, Shoot Relish and Marigolds

If you can collect enough flower dust to bake with you’re a foraging savant, and a better hunter than me. A quick google of “cattail pollen recipes” will show you different ways of using pollen, mostly for pancakes and baked goods. Honestly the baking looks interesting, and I love the color the pollen adds. But,…

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Sochan

Sochan, or Rudbeckia laciniata, cut leaf coneflower

Sochan, pound for pound, is one of the best greens I’ve eaten and to sweeten the deal, is one of the cornerstones of traditional, and severely under-documented Cherokee cuisine. You might be thinking, Alan, I’m a forager, and if it’s as great as you say, what is sochan and why haven’t I heard of it…

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Asparagus and Fiddleheads with Shaved Dryad Saddle

Asparagus and fiddleheads with shaved dryad saddle mushrooms recipe

This week I’ve been working on a side that evokes spring and also happens to be a great way to use those dryad saddles/pheasant back mushrooms that come up with abandon in the Spring. I was in the kitchen wondering what to do with some fiddleheads Hidden Stream Farm brought me, and I wound up…

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Tres Leches soaked in candy cap milk was a fun var Tres Leches soaked in candy cap milk was a fun variation I did on the house dessert of a little restaurant I was at for a time. 

Don’t be surprised if you smell like maple syrup a few hours after eating it. Using ground dried golden chanterelles is another variation that’s on my list to try. 

Link in bio to see how to make your own. 

#candycaps #treslechescake #myteethfellout #wildmushrooms #wildfoodlove
ARISE #fungimancer #frostbite #morels #tisthes ARISE 

 #fungimancer 
#frostbite #morels #tistheseason #mushroomhunting #winter #offseasontraining
Big thanks🙏 to all of you who showed your suppo Big thanks🙏 to all of you who showed your support with the first line of spirits @ida_graves_distillery and I collaborated on. 

Brock did a great job wrangling the wild things, and we have plenty of fun ideas in store (think aging nocino in barrels, new flavor combos, etc). If you’re in the Twin Cities and still need some, the amaro is #soldout but @ombibulousmn has nocino, and should have the spruce  liquor (goes down like pine gin) soon. Thank you!

#distillery #foragedcocktails #nocino #craftspirits #drinkatree #mnspirits #smallbatch #godscountry
Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, roadkill is too s Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, roadkill is too specific a term for me—I don’t limit myself to vehicular-harvested meat. 

However you feel about the topic, grab some popcorn and head over to the comment section on my blog (link in bio) for the 🔥personal stories from readers have shared from around the world. 

There’s the kid who brought home a nutria after school, a wife getting 4 deer with the same car, a train hitting a herd of elk, a bear named squish, living in a house with weasels, and more. 

#budgetgourmet #gleaning #scavenging #meatismeat #roadkill #freefoods #finderskeepers #wastenotwantnot
Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberr Sam Thayer dropped 25 lbs of his highbush cranberry cultivars (3 types!) on me before the last snowfall and I honestly don’t even know where to start after processing them. I’d already made jams and hot sauce already and I have enough for a year. 😅

Great time to practice the cold-juice which ensures the juice isn’t bitter. 

Anyone else have any ideas? 

You can still find some on the shrubs if the birds didn’t get them up by the north shore. 

#highbushcranberry #winterforaging #birdberries #sweetnectar #foragerproblems #juiceme #embarassmentofriches #wildfoodlove
100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw v 100% wild candy bars. I don’t usually make raw vegan snacks, but when I read about Euell Gibbon’s wild hackberry candy bars I had to try them. The  originals were just crushed hackberries and hickory nuts, but, I’ve read that Euell grew to dislike the crunch of hackberry seeds later in life. 

Here’s the thing though, if you sift the hackberry flour, you get a fun texture, with no worries about cracking a tooth. 

These are equal parts ground hackberries, dried wild blueberries, and hickory nuts, with a splash of maple syrup to bind.

The end product is a shelf stable, nutrient-packed bite filled with protein, carbohydrates, fats and natural sugars infinitely adaptable to your local landscape.

The texture is chewy and nougat-like, and now I’m curious to see how they’d perform baked in recipes that use frangipane or almond paste. 

#euellgibbons #energybars #hackberry #crushin #paleobreakfast #tradionalfood #wildfoodlove #rawfoods
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