We went for wild plums in the cold, misty morning, gathering them with fingers freezing and lethargic, my feet squishing in icy, wet boots. It was worth enduring the thorny thicket, the musky scent of catnip tall around us, to come home with 20 lbs or so of plums, without making … [Read more...]
Low Cost Meal—Beans & Dried Dock
My fiance and I are seasonal workers. Most of our income comes from a winter job that lasts 6 months. It offers health insurance for that time period, so we jump on it each winter. In December I can finally get my cavities filled, and he can upgrade his glasses and contact … [Read more...]
Spruce tip yogurt sauce
Spruce tips—those soft, light-green new tips that grow on spruce (Picea spp.) in spring—have become wildly popular lately, and I’m still sleuthing about trying to find out where that idea on the culinary use of spruce tips came from. Maybe the cookbook Noma: Time and Place in … [Read more...]
More Whitetop Kitchen Experiments
The one nice thing about invasive, edible plant species is that there are more than enough specimens available for kitchen tests, and you don’t feel like you’re dishonoring nature’s gifts when something goes wrong. Like in my recent countertop honey infused with whitetop … [Read more...]
Rebecca Lerner’s ‘Dandelion Hunter’
There’s a young woman who hunts dandelions and sundry other edible and medicinal wild plants out of an apartment in Portland, Oregon, relishing reconnecting with nature after a several-years-long stint sequestered indoors, surrounded by a plantless outdoors, working for a New … [Read more...]
