It’s nettle season here in Northern California, and as I am on a pasta jag lately, I thought I would make pasta dough with stinging nettles. Seemed like the right thing to do.

When a passerby asked recently if I’d found any chanterelles, I casually told him no, even though my pack was full of them. Hiding your secret spots is all part of living off the wild.

Wapato, arrowhead, katniss, duck potato: Sagittaria is an aquatic tuber of American marshes said to be the equal of a potato. I have never found it. But a friend sent me some, so I got my first tantalizing taste.

The winter mushrooms of California’s North Coast are popping in earnest: Hedgehogs, black trumpets, yellowfoot chanterelles and candy caps!

Pine nuts from America’s Great Basin are among the best in the world. Combine them with some desert wildflower honey I bought in Arizona and you have one spectacular ice cream.

Amanita muscaria can be a hallucinatory mushroom, a possible symbol of Santa and his flying reindeer. But it also can be eaten safely, if you do it right. So I decided to take a Christmas trip down the rabbit hole…

There’s nothing quite like a porcini hunt. The mushrooms are huge, meaty and can go for $30 a pound or more, so finding them is like striking gold. And boy did we find them last weekend!

Puffballs are basically the tofu of the mushroom world, so I normally avoid them. But when I found lots of little puffballs recently, I decided to make Sichuan ma po tofu, only with puffballs instead of tofu!

Black walnut season has started, and my favorite thing to do with these hard-to-crack nuts is make ice cream. My version gives you a double-dip of black walnut flavor.