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Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Spruce tip recipes, etc

Spruce tipsSpruce tip panna cotta recipe with wild grape sauce and pistachios

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 Tips

Spruce Tips in Sugar

Of all the young growth of Spring, spruce tips occupy a space that’s really interesting. Literally the young growth on branches of spruce trees, they’re not quite a vegetable, not quite an herb. In a sense, they’re a little bit of both, and there’s a learning curve to working with them, but nothing you can’t…

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Caramelized Spruce Tip Syrup

Caramelized Spruce Tip Syrup

Spruce (and cedar) have tons of untapped possibilities. A green ice cream we make from young spruce tips never ceases to get oohs and ahs at the restaurant and I remember one guest I brought a scoop of it to ran back to the kitchen looking for me and asked my staff where “god” had…

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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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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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Spruce Poussin, With Apple Mustard Sauce

There’s nothing quite like a young spring spruce tip, but the mature needles still have a lot of flavor too. I knew that people make tea from older branches, so I thought it would be fun to make some sort of water based infusion as the base of a dish. A simple brine turned out…

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Spruce Tip Ice Cream

blue spruce ice cream

  Spruce tip ice cream is one of my stand-by’s, a cornerstone in a canon of wild food recipes I’ve developed over the years, and one of the most popular recipes on this site, ever. Spruce tips are a great introductory flavor for people getting into foraging, but also for others that may be knowledgeable…

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Crispy Pork Snout with Black Truffle

crispy pork snout with truffles and spruce tips

The last time I visited the Butcher Block restaurant in Minneapolis, Chef Fillipo Caffari gave us a tour of the kitchen. Fillipo moved here from Rome, where he used to be a butcher. I haven’t worked directly under him except for one or two special dinners, but I always admired the magic he works with…

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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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