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…
Stalks and Shoots
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…
Burdock Flower Stalk and Mushroom Vegetable Soup
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,…
Burdock Stalks and Carrot Saute
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…
Hop Shoot Frittata
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…
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…
Wood Nettle Shoots
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…
Lacto Knotweed Pickles
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…
Smilax Shoots / Carrion Flower
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…
Bitter Celtuce
Celtuce. Kind of like if lettuce and a long root vegetable had a baby, with a beautiful, translucent, emerald color. I heard about it from a friend of mine one day when we had a snowday, he and I decided to meet up, geek out over some of his cook books, drink a couple beers…
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,…
Sochan
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…