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Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Fiddleheads

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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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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Midwestern Vignarola, 2017

Midwesetern Vignarola 2017

There’s usually a point in April where I just stop ordering root vegetables-a purgatory state of the local growing and selling where I can’t really get anything except the random squash, root or potato, maybe some greenhouse vegetables if I’m lucky. After I stop ordering roots for the year I look forward and dream of…

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Bread and Butter Fiddlehead Pickles

Bread and Butter Pickled Fiddleheads

A couple years ago I shared my basic method for pickled fiddleheads- a savory pickle using salt as opposed to sugar. I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t share some variations though, so here’s another favorite of mine: bread and butters. It’s pretty much as easy as it sounds. All I did was…

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Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato

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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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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Midwest Vignarola

midwest vignarola

After a long winter, the green explosion of spring is breathtaking. When you live in a place that’s frozen for plenty of the year like Minnesota, you learn to appreciate Spring that much more, and if you’re like me, you want to stuff your greedy face full of all of the treats you’ve been waiting…

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Black Grain Salad with Ramps And Fiddlehead Ferns

Black grain salad with ramps and fiddles._-8

While I was busy getting prepared for the Black Morel Hootenanny, I got a surprise email from my new friend Jason at InHarvest, a Minnesota supplier of artisan grains and legumes. He asked if I would like to incorporate some of their products into the post-foray dinner, I told him I’d love to. He sent…

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Crunchy Pickled Fiddlehead Ferns

Crunchy pickled ostrich fern fiddleheads recipe

As the fiddlehead ferns are starting to dwindle in our areas in Minnesota, facing a commercial fridge packed full of them means I need to work quickly to preserve some for the coming months. When I pick a large amount of something, I usually set aside a nice amount to preserve, whether it be by…

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Fiddlehead Ferns

Ostrich Fiddlehead Ferns

By now, most people casually interested in wild foods know fiddleheads. Fiddlehead ferns are a harbinger of Spring, along with ramps and morels they’re some of the most widely known and desired spring edibles, and I look forward to picking them every year. They’re also usually very expensive, since they have to be harvested wild….

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foragerchef

Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, the roadkill is t Let’s talk roadkill. Honestly, the 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
Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and c Hackberry milk spoonbread with black walnuts and chokecherry gastrique is one of the dishes @credononfiction and I filmed for @headspace. 

I cook hackberry milk with cornmeal and maple syrup, whip some egg whites and fold them in, then bake. Eats a bit like crust-less pumpkin pie, if pumpkin pie came from a tree. 

#hackberry #souffle #wildfoodlove #chokecherry #blackwalnuts #brunching
Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made f Hackberry milk is a sort of rustic nut milk made from ground hackberries and water. I grind the berries to a meal, then simmer with 3x their volume of water, strain through a chinois (without pressing) season with maple and a pinch of cinnamon. Tastes like pumpkin pie in a glass, also a decent cooking medium. 

#hackberries #nutmilk #foraging #wildfoodlove #celtisoccidentalis
Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of b Are hackberries a fruit? A nut? They're a bit of both. They also contain protein, fat, and carbs, and the oldest evidence of humans enjoying them goes back 500,000 years. Right now is the best time to harvest them in the Midwest as the leaves have fallen. The full break down and introduction to them is in my bio. 
#hackberry #celtisoccidentalis #winterforaging #wildfoodlove #traditionalfoods #manbird
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