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Foraging and Cooking Mushrooms, Wild and Obscure Food

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Wild Blueberries

Wild Blueberry-Maple Leather

Wild Blueberry Maple Leather

Everyone should know how to make a good wild fruit leather, and wild blueberries make some of the best since they can be harvested in large quantity, and they don’t require any straining to remove seeds or skins.  The method is super easy if you aren’t familiar, and a recipe hardly seems necessary, but I’m…

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Persimmon-Acorn Pudding with Dried wild Fruit

Persimmon and wild fruit pudding with chokecherry sauce

  When you look up old recipes for persimmons (many fruit for that matter) one thing you’ll often see are puddings. If you’re from America and you’re looking at the images here and wondering why this doesn’t come served in a cup, don’t worry, it’s ok. What you can technically describe as a pudding can…

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Wild Blueberries with Crème Fraîche

Wild blueberries with creme fraiche

Wild Blueberries with Crème Fraîche is a love letter to one of the best summer desserts of all time: berries and cream.  One night during the winter, my girlfriend and I were sitting beside the fire. She was feeling snackish and asked if there was anything I could throw together quick. I went over to…

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Wild Blueberry Molasses / Reduction

Wild blueberry juice reduction or molassses recipe

Wild blueberry..juice? Yes. Reduction? Double yes.  Wild lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) are by far the most abundant wild fruit I harvest that needs really no processing at all. Wild plums I can gather in larger quantity, but they require much more effort to process and make them delicious than wild blueberries do.  When I was speaking…

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Wild Berry Cassis

Blackcap Raspberry Cassis Recipe

I have a tendency to miss some berries during foraging season. Black caps (Rubus occidentalis) especially I love, but never seem to take the time to pick enough. This year I found a great new patch though, so I made sure to try a few new things that weren’t jam or jelly. Wild berry cassis…

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How to Taste a Landscape

The jack pine barrens, image by Jesse Roesler.

The jack pine barrens are one of the most beautiful, unique landscapes I know. There’s gently rolling hills as far as you can see, with dips of kettles, those spots where glaciers paused, making depressions in the Earth. The green hills are dotted here and there with the scorched black skeletons of old jack pines–a…

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Stuffed Grape Leaves with Wild Fruit and Nuts

Foraged grape leaves stuffed with wild blueberries pine nuts and wild rice flour

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…

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Fruit Scrap Vinegar

Foraged vinegars: wild plum, berry, and maple sap vinegars

If you harvest your own fruit–any kind of fruit–you know how many leftover skins, seeds, pits, cooked stuff, raw stuff, and all kinds of other things are leftover from processing. So much scrap, from so much good fruit. If you’re anything like me, you may have wondered if there’s anything you can do with it….

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Winter Pavlova

Winter pavlova with meadowsweet ice cream, chokecherry sauce, wild blueberries, butternuts and angelica

Sunday, Wednesday, spring, summer or winter–anytime is a good time for pavlova. If you’ve ever had one, I’ll bet you’re agreeing with me, especially if you’ve eaten one gilded with fresh berries in the height of summer. If you’re not familiar, pavlovas are a desert made of a meringue nest, the top chiseled out or…

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Wild Blueberry Sauce with Sweetfern

Wild blueberry sauce with sweetfern nutlets recipe

Blueberries, as delicious as they are, always seem to disappoint me when I see them in sauce form. You know the sauce I’m talking about, the thick, gloppy, sauce so sweet it will make your teeth fall out of your head stuff that comes from a can. Sure, people like it, but they like the…

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Wild Blueberry-Maple Sugar Pie

Wild blueberry pie with maple sugar recipe

Wild blueberry pie. Is there any better example of the height of summer? Ok, maybe blackcap raspberries, gooseberries, aronia berries and wild cherries too where I live, but blueberry pie is, without a doubt, an American dessert, as they’re native to the New World, and as it’s the state dessert of Maine. The first time…

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Venison Breakfast Sausage with Wild Blueberries

Venison breakfast sausage with wild blueberries

Looking in the freezer I had sausage on my mind. Seeing a couple bags of wild blueberries I remembered a moment of fear I had one day picking berries in a remote spot, and seeing a picture one of my friends posted about bears being seen harvesting berries in the area I was in. I…

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Caramelized Pumpkin Bread with Wild Fruit, Maple Sugar and Black Walnuts

Caramelized pumpkin bread with wild plums, candied black walnuts, wild blueberries and heirloom popcorn

Recently I did a big tasting menu with a couple different desserts. The crowd favorite was this pumpkinbread, spread with butter, crusted with maple sugar, griddled and smothered with wild blueberries, candied plums, soft cheese and candied black walnuts. As pictured its a bit of a process, but doing a toned-down version would be a…

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🌱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
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #2 is Virginia water 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #2 is Virginia waterleaf, and, I’m cheating a bit as it’s semi-ephemeral. The plant comes up in spring and goes to flower, but gives a second harvest of fresh growth in the fall, where other ephemerals I know do not. 

This is a great starter wild green-easy to recognize with the splashes of white on the leaves that may or may not be present. After you learn it though, don’t be surprised if, like me, you eventually pass it up for more delicious greens nearby. 

The plant gets tough quick, and the flavor is..meh, so I usually have small amounts of very young greens in blends of blanched and sautéed mixes. 

My favorite part is the wee flower buds, that, if you get at the right time, can be harvested in decent quantity and are good steamed as they’ll soak up oil sautéed. 

#hydrophyllumvirginianum #waterleaf #foraging #fueledbynature #weedeater
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