Foraging
Fiddleheads are in season in the East and Pacific Northwest, and these crunchy, pretty looking shoots are one of the hallmarks of springtime. They're featured here in a simple Asian stir fry with wild boar backstrap.
Featured
A recipe for a juniper wild ale with pine needles that I call Junipine. It's a red ale fermented with the yeast on the juniper berries.
Pasta, Risotto, Gnocchi
It should be obvious by now how much I love spring onions in all their forms. This light, lovely Italian rice dish highlights whatever wild or store-bought green onion you have on hand, spiked with fresh spring green herbs.
Pasta, Risotto, Gnocchi
An Italian classic. Squash gnocchi tossed with butter and sage, and, in this case, with wild mushrooms.
Recipe
A recipe for persimmon bread gone wild: Hickory nuts, acorn flour, dried lingonberries. It's damn good for breakfast or as a snack.
Mushrooms
A recipe for mushroom bisque using wild mushrooms. This is basically real, homemade cream of mushroom soup. You can use any sort of mushroom you like.
Foraging
If you live where mesquite trees do -- and that's much of the Southwest from California to Texas -- you can make a fantastic mesquite bean syrup very easily with a slow cooker. Here's how to do it.
Berries and Fruits
I have been inordinately obsessed with red huckleberries ever since I ate a handful at a friend's house years ago. This year is epic for them, and I finally managed to pick several pounds. Here's how to find, harvest, prep and eat your red hucks.
Podcast
In this episode of Hunt Gather Talk, I team up with Minnesota's Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef, to talk about native American cooking and cuisine, and what everyone can learn by paying attention to how the various Indian groups worked the land for thousands of years.
Recipe
Beer with spruce or fir tips? Sounds crazy, but it isn't. Spruce tip beer was a thing in Colonial America, and many craft brewers are making modern versions. This is my recipe. It's an amber ale with enough Sierra Nevada fir tips to act like dank, Northwestern hops.
Foraging
Homemade root beer is easy to make when you use this syrup as a base. No fermentation needed, you just add it to sparkling water and you're done. And if you live east of the Great Plains, sassafras lives everywhere.
Essays and Stories
Tidepools capture me like nothing else, and I am certain I am not the only one who has carried this fascination well into middle age. Tidepools capture us because they are a microcosm of life: A world in a puddle. And, as it happens, an edible world.
As Seen In
