Archive for 'recipes'

Black Greasewood with Tofu Cubes

Sunday, May 19th, 2013 at 12:18 pm  
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tofu black greasewood 350x262 Black Greasewood with Tofu Cubes

Pan-fried tofu cubes with black greasewood leaves.

Last night I all but destroyed the kitchen, scurrying about cooking up a wild feast like a person possessed. It felt good to be back home experimenting with wild ingredients again after our recent road trip to parts west, to channel all that inspiration from finding exciting new plants into food while my better half lounged on the couch. And, of course, it was snowing while I did so, here in the last stronghold against spring at 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies.

One of the dishes I made uses the leaves of black greasewood (Sarcobatus vermiculatus). The sprigs of the desert shrub had been sitting in the refrigerator for the last week and a half or so since we gathered them from a Nevada alkali flat. Not because I’d forgotten about them—rather because I was leery of the odd new plant, and awaiting responses to my recent query in the Edible Wild Plants group on Facebook as to whether anyone had eaten it before. Fortunately Brad VanDyke, based in Utah, responded: “I have eaten it, and like it. However, it does contain oxalates, so be careful,” he wrote. As certain commercial veggies we consume—like spinach—contain oxalates too, I took that to mean: Don’t overeat. As in an entire pound in a sitting. Read the rest of this entry

Ready-made Road Trip Salad

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at 8:16 am  
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road trip salad 350x258 Ready made Road Trip Salad

Ready-made road trip salad–my favorite of all the road meals on our inaugural trip with Myrtle the van.

We embarked on a road trip through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada to California’s Eastern Sierra last week. I had a lot of delicious wild greens on hand that I’d collected in Denver immediately prior, and I wanted to eat fresh salad for the duration of our journey through the deserts, so this is what I came up with.

The cabbage was a lazy last minute choice as a base to temper the bitter and pungent wild greens, as we had no store-bought lettuce in the house and I didn’t feel like going out to buy some. I packaged it all up in a big bag, and the dressing in a recycled salad dressing bottle, and served it nearly every day of the trip.

Surprisingly Gregg—who is not much of a salad eater—asked for it every time, and touted my culinary prowess. Score! Read the rest of this entry

Chicken and Nettle Gnocchi Soup—Reflection & Recipe

Saturday, April 20th, 2013 at 10:59 am  
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nettle gnocchi chicken soup 350x284 Chicken and Nettle Gnocchi Soup—Reflection & Recipe

Chicken soup flavored with stinging nettle spice and accented with stinging nettle gnocchi dumplings.

This always happens to me. I come into some wild food and then I get a wild hair to make something genius with it in the kitchen. So I dedicate myself with so much time and energy that I overextend myself, producing mediocre results. Then since I’ve committed so much heart to it, I can’t stand to let the meal go unhonored or the story untold, so I produce such entries as Suillus Sludge Soup, and Everything Gnocchi without Moderation. The latter, from two days ago, recounts my fit of inexperienced potato gnocchi-making with a $1 markdown bag of potatoes that I swore I’d find a use for. Clearly I was overstimulated, unreasonable. And then of course afterward I’m drained, and less than satisfied with the results—so much work for what seems like so little gained.

I always forget to realize that the true prize comes later. A moment of genius strikes, a reward after so much hard work. If you honor it, and go with it, often some minute genius will result—like this recipe for chicken and nettle gnocchi soup. It’s really just a dumb little soup I threw together haphazardly while doing laundry and dishes and cleaning the house. I was making a chicken-carcass-rescue soup, and decided to throw in some of those pretty, green, dried nettle flakes leftover from the other night, as well as the nettle gnocchis. Read the rest of this entry

My turn to do wild edible gnocchi

Friday, April 19th, 2013 at 7:31 am  
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stinging nettles in pot 350x233 My turn to do wild edible gnocchi

In Langdon Cook’s instructions, you boil the nettles briefly to remove the stingers. Photo by Gregg Davis.

It’s markdown season at the grocery store, now that the tourists are in absentia for a while, joined by the locals who migrate to parts warmer during mud season too. So it’s time for the good deals—such as the $1 bag of slightly soft “Red Skin Yellow Flesh Colorado Sunrise” potatoes that Gregg and I argued over in the grocery store last week.

“They’ll go bad,” he said.

“I’ll use them all once,” I countered, throwing them into the cart.

Everything gnocchi without moderation

A few days later, as the universe would have it, I came into a wealth of dried nettles and porcini. I won’t say how I came by them, but you can probably guess. So it was logical that I should decide to make nettle gnocchi. Read the rest of this entry

Wild Edible Notebook—April release!

Sunday, April 14th, 2013 at 7:53 am  
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WEN April 2013 640 226x350 Wild Edible Notebook—April release!Good news! After nearly a year on hiatus, the Wild Edible Notebook is back!

This first-time April edition centers on everybody’s favorite wild food—dandelions. Though snow still covers the ground here in the Colorado high country, the dandies have been up in Denver for a while now, and it seemed a safe bet for foragers in other locations too. I also included a piece I wrote on spring foraging in the Denver area last year. Although the season’s change is taking its time this spring (thank goodness), my hope is that this will at least get you thinking about all the delicious wild food that awaits. There’s a review of first-time author Rebecca Lerner’s recently released book, Dandelion Hunter, a wild edible poem from correspondent Brad Purcell, and a handful of recipes to boot.

I’m not going to lie to you—this issue contains recycled blog content, so if you’re an avid reader of this site, some of the text may strike you as familiar. Still, I included a bunch of as-yet-unseen photos to sweeten the deal while I wait for my own local wild food to sprout.

As with all other Wild Edible Notebooks, if you want to read it, you have to download it—and that means joining the list if you haven’t already.

How to Join the List

If you go through the process to join the list you will receive one (at most two) emails from me a month. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. To join, scroll to the bottom of this page and fill in your info. You’ll receive an email asking you to click on a confirmation link, and after doing that, you’ll get another email with the download link for the latest issue of the Wild Edible Notebook—in your choice of either a handy print-and-fold booklet or a file you can breeze through onscreen or print out one-sided. You’ll be able to access a few prior notebooks as well. Read the rest of this entry

Dried wild plants experiment

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013 at 10:42 am  
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mountain parsley Colorado 262x350 Dried wild plants experiment

Mountain parsley, or biscuitroot, gathered near 11,000 feet in Fairplay, Colorado last summer.

This summer, I’ll be drying more leaves.

Last season’s nettles were a no-brainer, and they disappeared from my pantry shelves fast—in the form of tea and a much-loved pumpkin nettle beer soup. But what of the other leafy greens I enjoy all summer long? Could they help to tide over a fanatical forager during the long winter months?

Inspired by Maria’s post on Lessons from the Pantry, I piled my few bottles of dried leaves on the counter last night and set to work experimenting in the hopes of determining which dried leaves merited the effort.

Here’s what I came up with:

Salted Bluebell Leaf Chips

A recent insinuation of cheesy kale chips into my life from multiple directions inspired this attempt to recreate leafy green veggie chips from a wild edible angle.

I painted the light-green, dried smooth bluebell leaves (Mertensia spp.) with a thin coat of olive oil—though a spritzer would have been ideal—then sprinkled black Hawaiian lava salt on top in the hopes of drawing out the leaves’ oceany flavor. Then I crisped them on low heat in the toaster oven—actually I crisped them at high heat and a few of them burned before I turned it down—and served to the curious fiancé. Read the rest of this entry

Tiny Mushroom Soup #1

Monday, April 1st, 2013 at 10:06 pm  
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dried Sarcodon 262x350 Tiny Mushroom Soup #1

Dried hawks wings (Sarcodon spp.) slices for the crumbling & reconstitution.

Don’t be deceived. I did not make this soup with tiny mushrooms. Rather, I made but a tiny amount of soup.

“Tiny Mushroom Soup” is my new strategy for making something worthwhile with what remains of my dried wild mushroom bounty from the last two summers. That way, if the soup comes out awful, I haven’t wasted a gallon of mushrooms in the process.

Truth be told, I don’t know much about mushroom cookery. It has taken some serious experimentation to get where I am now, which isn’t very far, and more often than not I find myself completely baffled by icky, gooey mushroom sauces and omelets that are so mushroomy weird that Gregg has to eat them because I’ll hurl if I attempt another bite.

Still, it appears luck was on my side tonight, because this soup came together naturally and turned out to be a hit in our house, the cause of repeated, emphatic utterances of “Mmm!” by the one-day hubbie. Read the rest of this entry

Pine nut shell vodka sauce with pasta

Saturday, March 9th, 2013 at 7:00 am  
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pine nut vodka sauce 350x344 Pine nut shell vodka sauce with pasta

Pine nut vodka sauce over pasta with side salad and small, breaded venison chop.

I wrote perhaps one of my most ridiculous, albeit in-depth, posts — on the subject of pine nuts —  while loopy with pain meds last year after I blew my knee. During that time I made the acquaintance of a colorful character, the purveyor of pine nuts and conservation activist Pinyon Penny, who told me about infusing vodka with pine nuts. Though I can only imagine how good pine nut infused vodka would taste had I left the nuts in there (but of course I had to eat them), the shells worked well for the purpose, resulting in a quite piney vodka a few months later. The pine nut shell vodka is the star ingredient in this vodka tomato sauce. It’s strong, flavorful, and forest-kissed.

Ingredients:

  • 4 cups crushed, roasted tomato
  • 1/2-1 cup pine nut shell vodka (or pine nut vodka) to taste
  • Wild oregano (Mondarda fistulosa) or regular oregano to taste
  • Wild garlic (Allium spp.) or regular garlic to taste
  • A splash of olive oil
  • A pinch of sugar
  • 3/4-1 cup Greek yoghurt

Instructions:

Mix everything together except the Greek yoghurt and simmer for a while so the flavors meld. Mix in yoghurt to desired color and taste. Serve over pasta.

Black birch experiment

Friday, March 8th, 2013 at 6:02 am  
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black birch twigs CT 350x262 Black birch experiment

Black birch twigs can be used for tea. Note the horizontal lenticels that look like dashes, as Steve Brill describes them.

It’s now a week into this month’s wild recipe challenge at Hunger & Thirst for Life, and can I just say, I’ve been out of it for eight months and all of a sudden, this game has gotten way harder.

This month, Wild Things is a “Tree Party,” which, despite the fact that it conjures up happy tree house imagery for me, is not as simple as it sounds, because the following tree parts are disqualified, reserved to grace a later contest on their own merits: leaves, needles, fruits, and nuts. So much for the pine nut vodka I was thinking I’d make into vodka sauce.

Instead we are left with “sap, bark (including cambium), pollen, catkins, and resin,” explains Butterpoweredbike, head cheese of the wild recipe share. She expects to receive monographs or recipes for herbal remedies that use tree bark, and syrup from folks who tap trees, in addition to her own culinary experiments with ponderosa pine bark. Read the rest of this entry

Bent on pulverizing Short-stemmed Slippery Jack’s bad rap

Thursday, March 7th, 2013 at 6:20 am  
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wild food 030 350x262 Bent on pulverizing Short stemmed Slippery Jack’s bad rap

Wild chicken stew with slippery jack powder.

Lately I’ve been powdering my dried wild mushrooms, batch after batch and species after species, then attempting to use the powders in various kitchen concoctions.

First were the porcini (Boletus edulis), from which I made a divine sauce, followed by not-so-bad hawks wings (Sarcodon imbricatus) venison marinade and cream sauce. Short-stemmed slippery jacks (Suillus brevipes) were a logical choice after that—in part because I have so many, and in part because I refuse to believe them inferior despite their reputation.

I went through a phase obsessing about Suillus brevipes this fall.

Said me on the Facebook: “Not to harp on the (short-stemmed) slippery jacks or anything, but I’m growing very fond of these guys. I’m tempted to say they rival Boletus edulis, but I think Butter at Hunger and Thirst might have my head for it.” (This because Butter is such a porcini fanatic as to pass up the short, slippery dudes.) Read the rest of this entry

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