I have for you today what I think is one of the most fascinating sweets I’ve ever tasted: what I’ve been calling Pine Pollen Fudge. I started working on the recipe last year, but had a couple accidents with my pollen (D’oh!) and, if you’ve ever gathered the stuff, you know that it’s extremely labor…
Spruce Tips and Conifers
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.
Pine Cone-Cider Jam / Varenye
“Ever eat a pine tree?”. That infamous quote from Euell Gibbons during a Grape Nuts commercial (there’s a lot of them on You Tube now and some are hilarious) has some truth to it. Sure, you can make tea (mostly I see it done with the soft needles of Easter White Pine) from needles, bark bread…
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…
Pollen Pancakes with Pine Cone Syrup
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…
Mugolio: Pine Cone Syrup
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…
Classic Spruce Tip Syrup
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…
Spruce Tip Panna Cotta
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…
Spruce Chocolate 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…
Spruce Tip Posset
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…
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. …
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…
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…
Spruce Ham
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…