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…
Wild Blueberries
Persimmon-Acorn Pudding with Dried wild Fruit
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…
Wild Blueberries with Crème Fraîche
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…
Wild Blueberry Molasses / Reduction
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…
Wild Berry Cassis
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…
How to Taste a Landscape
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…
Stuffed Grape Leaves with Wild Fruit and Nuts
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…
Fruit Scrap Vinegar
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….
