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Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Spruce Tips and Conifers

Spruce tips
Spruce tips and conifers are some of the easiest wild edibles to gather, but they need to be used with care to taste great. If you're new to spruce tips, read through my basic guide to cooking with spruce tips first. If you have some you'd like to cook, don't miss Classic Spruce Tip Syrup, Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup, or Spruce Tip Ice Cream.

Pollen Bread

Pine pollen bread

My pollen bread is essentially pollen cornbread, with a few tweaks, and it’s a good introductory recipe to start out with if you have some pollen to use. Most of the time, when people talk about cooking with pollen, they might think of pollen pancakes, and they can be good, as well as your other…

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Pollen Pancakes with Pine Cone Syrup

Pine pollen pancakes with mugolio pine cone syrup and wild blueberries

I have a big stash of pine pollen I’ve been waiting to use the cold months and I finally got around to making some new things with it. If you’re not familiar, pine pollen is a thing, similar to cattail pollen, but much easier to harvest in my opinion, as the window for capturing it…

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Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup

Mugolio, a traditional pine cone syrup recipe

Mugolio, a dark, aromatic syrup imbued with the flavor of pine cones, is the poster child for the kind of crazy cool, Illuminati-esque foodstuff foragers have access to, all for the price of a hike, or even less, depending on how close you are to some pine trees. The syrup came on my radar when…

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Classic Spruce Tip Syrup

Traditional spruce tip syrup recipe

I have to preface this by apologizing. I’m sorry for not getting this up sooner. I’ve been writing this website for years, and although I have a spruce tip syrup that tastes like spruce, it’s not the most powerful one you can make–it’s a hybrid, a shortcut. That older recipe of mine was back from…

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Spruce Tip Panna Cotta

Spruce tip panna cotta recipe with wild grape sauce and pistachios

Spruce tip panna cotta is a great alternative to make if you don’t have an ice cream maker for my signature spruce tip ice cream recipe. Panna cotta is great for a lot of reasons: it’s relatively cheap, easy enough for a blind-folded child to make, and refreshing for those warm summer or late spring…

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Spruce Chocolate Mousse

Chocolate-Spruce Mousse

This is exactly what it sounds like: chocolate mousse flavored with spruce tip syrup. Just using spruce tips simmered a bit with water isn’t going to cut it though, for the flavor of spruce to overcome the chocolate you’ll either want to make a slow sun syrup using equal parts by volume of brown, natural…

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Spruce Tip Posset

Spruce tip posset recipe

Silky-rich and custardy, but without any egg, possets are one of the best desserts I’ve discovered (thanks to my old pastry chef) in recent years. They were totally new to me, but apparently they’re an old fashioned British dessert that used to be relatively common in America around the mid 20th century, but more so…

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Spruce Tips

Edible white spruce tips

  Of all the young growth of Spring, spruce tips occupy a space that’s really interesting and worth getting to know if you love wild food, like I do. Literally the young growth on branches of spruce trees, spruce tips not an herb in the typical sense, but, they are for all intents and purposes. …

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Caramelized Spruce Tip Syrup

Caramelized Spruce Tip Syrup

Update: this is a shortcut version of a more classic recipe for spruce tip syrup. If you want the real deal, which takes at least a month, see my post on classic spruce tip syrup.  Spruce (and cedar) have tons of untapped possibilities. A green ice cream we make from young spruce tips never ceases…

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Spring Vegetables With Spruce Tips and Lemon Agrumato

Fiddlehead, Asparagus Salad with Spruce Tips, Lavender Radish and Fresh Herbs

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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Spruce Ham

Ham cured with pine needles

A while ago I was having fun working with my old boss Andy, now executive chef of Oxcart Ale House in St. Paul while he did recipe development in my kitchen before opening the restaurant. He started out with the most difficult stuff: dialing in the from-scratch charcuterie program, which is similar to what I…

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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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Rhubarb-Hazelnut Cake, With Spruce Tip Ice Cream

Rhubarb-hazelnut cake with spruce tip ice cream

Cooking is more than a job to me, it’s a way of life. When I’m sad, I cook. When I’m bored, I cook. This little cake came from an evening where I cooked because I was really happy. I was cooking for a date, with the most talented and beautiful woman I’d ever met. I…

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Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemera Consider the salad, here, a little mix of ephemerals, and other tender young plants and herbs. 

The instinctual knowledge involved in choosing different plants at their peak to serve together raw, with thought put into how the textures and flavors will work on someone’s palette, to me, is one of the highest forms of culinary artistry. Something most people will never taste in their life. 

A little oil, salt, pepper, acid, a touch of sweetness from maple, maybe few fresh herbs are all you need. Bottled dressing of any kind would be like putting Axe Body spray on food. 

#spring #ephemerals #toothwort #troutlily #springbeauty #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Virginia Bluebells (Merten 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is another beautiful spring wildflower that loves to grow in the same habitat you’ll see ramps and spring beauty. 

Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
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