Foraging
No matter where I went, from here in Sacramento all the way to South Florida, yucca plants are in bloom. There are lots of different species, but the flowers are all edible - they taste like a cross between a green bean and an artichoke leaf.
Sweet Things
Buttermilk huckleberry cake. Even with frozen huckleberries, it's as good as it looks. And I owe it all to Heidi Swanson, whose new vegetarian cookbook made even me take notice.
Foraging
It is finally morel season here in California, and cooking my first morels of the year reminded me of how much I love this odd-looking mushroom.
Recipe
I absolutely love my spaetzle maker, and have been working on flavored spaetzle all winter. This one, a stinging nettle spaetzle, I made to celebrate the coming of spring.
French
This is my favorite way to eat duck or goose gizzards. Sliced thin and tossed with a simple saute of wild mushrooms -- I mostly use chanterelles or hedgehogs -- it's a killer dish.
Foraging
For Westerners, miner's lettuce is a commonplace, an afterthought. But this pleasant salad green has a distinction very few other American plants share.
Foraging
The more I work with wild nuts, the more I appreciate the ones you buy in the store. Shelling wild pine nuts is not the most exciting thing I've ever done, but I'm glad I did it.
Mushrooms
Another foraging trip and another edible mushroom under my belt! Two good stashes of blewits last week gave me a great introduction to this mushroom.
Mushrooms
I don't eat unknown mushrooms lightly. But when I spotted these honey mushrooms, I knew, somehow, they were edible. Turns out they're a prime pierogi ingredient, too.
Foraging
Of all the things I hunt, fish or forage for, nothing requires as much effort as shelling black walnuts. But it's worth it. Black walnuts are to regular walnuts as a diamond is to cubic zirconium.
Foraging
Think you can imagine the thrill of unearthing a truffle? Sorry, but you can't. Not unless you've panned for gold. Or dug diamonds. It's the same feeling, complete with the whiff of rapacious greed...
How-To (DIY stuff)
It's been another year of learning and experimenting on the acorn front, and the more I learn, the more I love working with "oak nuts."
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