Have you ever had commercially pickled grape leaves? If you haven’t, don’t bother, I’m pretty sure they’re the reason some people claim not to like grape leaves, or things made with them like dolmades. Like plenty of commercial pickled things, I usually find grape leaves from a store shelf overly acidic, like the processor is…
Leafy Greens | Recipes
Stuffed Grape Leaves with Wild Fruit and Nuts
There’s dolmas, dolmades, dolmasi dolmathakia, dolmathes, sarma, sarmasi, and probably a few other names I haven’t seen them travel under. Whatever you call them, if you put some in front me I’m going in for more than my share, because I love a good stuffed grape leaf. They may be small nibbles, but they’re rich…
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…
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…
Minestrella: Italian Stew of Many Greens
She is the Tuscan queen of weeds. Over the past year I’ve stumbled on a few recipes using wild plants that really inspired me. At the top of the list is la Minestrella, a sort of ultimate foraged greens stew found in Garfagnana (Tuscany) I stumbled on while doing armchair research on the Italian names…
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…
Toasted Rice with Campion Greens
Rice with campion greens or arroz con collejas as it’s known, is my take one of the most traditional dishes using campion in the Spain. It’s one of those cultural specialties that can be hard to pin down tp origin. If you look online using terms like arroz con collejas (collejas being the Spanish term…
Meatball Stew with Pheasant Backs and Campion
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…
Ramp Leaf-Goat Cheese Dumplings
Where the hell did all this cream cheese come from?! Maybe someone forgot to check something off the list they ordered, maybe someone hit a wrong button, maybe the driver was new and he had no idea that the regular par was cut in half for the week–I’ve seen it all. After the person doing…
Wild Herb Gnudi Dumplings
A number of years ago I was contacted by a company in Australia to make a few recipes for an e-book on sustainable eating. The first thing I shared with them was this simple recipe for gnudi dumplings made from ramp leaves, which, as far as ethical eating goes, are basically the poster child for…
Garlic Mustard Ricotta
Garlic mustard ricotta is a piece of nostalgia for me. Saying I don’t love garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is an understatement—I eat the plant occasionally out of spite for its invasiveness. It’s that the recipe reminds me of when I was the chef of Lucias, and so ignorantly, naively hopeful for the future of me,…
Nettle Pancakes with Goat Cheese and Wild Mushrooms
Wait, nettle what? Yep, stinging nettle pancakes. Savory pancakes were a vegetarian standby at a couple different restaurants I worked at, and Chef Russell Klein of James Beard nominated Meritage in St. Paul ran a version of them on their menu that often stayed most of the year, changing up the flavors as the seasons…
Sochan with Venison Bacon, Ramps and Maple Vinegar
It’s Sochan season, and while I was reminded of it in a big way while hunting morels in a flood plain forest. There were lots of familiar plants (no morels), but most of all I was struck by the Rudbeckia laciniata / Sochan—it was everywhere I turned. The colonies seemed to go as far as…