Recipe

Elderflower Champagne

A perfect summer spritzer, elderflower champagne is fun to make and easy to drink. I walk you through how to make it, with lots of variations.

Foraging

How to Eat Cholla Buds

Cholla buds are edible, believe it or not. Here's how to harvest, prepare, store and eat the buds from the cholla cactus, which live in the American Southwest.

Featured

Hunt Gather Talk Podcast 4: Early Spring

Spring is here in NorCal. Normally I feel bad about it, almost ashamed. After all, so many of you are still locked in winter, and will be for months. But this is my reality. And I embrace it. In this episode I talk about early spring foraging, the end of hunting seasons and embracing transition in your life.

Berries and Fruits

How to Eat Manzanita Berries

Manzanita berries are ripening all over California right now, but few know that they are not only edible, but are well worth your time to collect. The secret? Grind the dry, apple-like berries to make a sort of manzanita sugar.

Featured

Wild Herbs: Monardella Villosa

Mountain pennyroyal is a widespread mountain herb in the American West. Think of it as a combination of mint and marjoram. It is one of our most spectacular native wild herbs.

Foraging

Gathering Curly Dock

One of the earliest greens to appear in spring, the various docks -- curly dock and Western dock chief among them -- are easy to identify and taste like a cross between spinach and rhubarb.

Recipe

Sorrel Sauce

Sorrel sauce. It's so basic, yet so profoundly useful... and awesome. Sorrel tastes like lemonade in a leaf, and both wild and cultivated varieties grow like weeds in any garden. This rich, tart sauce is perfect with pasta, poached fish or poultry, or any other lightly cooked meat.

Foraging

How to Harvest Wild Onions

There's a lot of talk out there about people overharvesting ramps, the most dominant wild onion in the East. Some of that talk is true. Here's how to responsibly harvest wild onions of any sort, as well as how to prepare, store and preserve them.

Foraging

Feeling the Burn

Morel hunting the way I do it is a lonely affair. Miles walked in a beaten, burned landscape. A morel here, a morel there. It's not the bonanza of a big burn, but I wouldn't give it up for anything.

Foraging

Contemplating Hopniss, the American Groundnut

Apios americana, the hopniss or potato bean or American groundnut. It's a plant that has fascinated me for some years, so much so that I began growing it in my garden in 2011. Since then I think I have a handle on growing, harvesting and eating these native American tubers.

Fish

Walleye Minot: Why Not?

I call this recipe Walleye Minot because it is an ode to North Dakota, and because I caught the walleye on Lake Sakakawea near Minot, ND. Pretty much everything in it speaks to that state, which was so good to me when I visited in October.