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I’ve been reading a lot of wild edible foraging and recipe books lately, and I figured I’d share them with you.

Most recently I have been reading The Wild Table: Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes by Connie Green and Sarah Scott. Although some of the recipes in this book aren’t a gluten-free vegan’s cup of tea (Stir fried dandelion greens with duck fat and garlic), the descriptions of the wild edibles and the stories she tells about them are fabulous.

In fact, just her introduction alone is worth the read: how Ms. Green got into foraging foods for restaurants. Ms. Green explains that in the 1980s it was hard to sell anything foraged to any restaurants: the only two chefs who acknowledged her chanterelles were French - one denied they could even be chanterelles because he felt they didn’t grow in this country, the other preferred his tinned chanterelles from France, feeling they were superior to fresh American chanterelles.

I love Ms. Green’s and Ms. Scott’s out of the box thinking when it comes to using the wild edibles such infusing vodka with evergreen needles and the incredible sounding: “Connie’s Favorite Persimmon Pudding with Brandy Hard Sauce.”

Many of the recipes are certainly from and for gourmet kitchens…and I have a few friends who I know would love to get their hands on these recipes and work their culinary magic!

For me - who loves simple plant-based cooking and wild edibles foraging - there is plenty for me in this book. I can’t wait to try the basket-grilled morels over a fire this spring - a simple recipe of butter, garlic, salt and pepper which Ms. Green describes as “simply the best way to cook morels” and the Fresh Mulberry Ice Cream, though I will adapt the recipe replacing the sugar with a natural sweetener like agave or maple syrup, and the half and half with home-made cashew milk, though I have no doubt her original recipe is divine.

The pictures in the book, both of the wild edibles and the recipes, are gorgeous. Full page spreads of morels roasting over a fire, freshly picked lobster mushrooms, huckleberries flowing out of the bag and onto a plate.

I can’t get enough of this book: reading about her experiences and what she has to say about the plants, drinking in the color pictures, ruminating over the recipes.

This is definitely a great one to have on the bookshelf!

Happy Foraging!

~ Melissa

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There’s still lots of wild food out there (well, depending on where you live)…here are some ideas on how to incorporate it into your holiday meals.

In Western Pennsylvania, you can still find oyster mushrooms, perhaps hen of the woods (though it’s a bit late…but maybe you still have some around you recently harvested), nettles, dandelion greens, burdock root, chickweed, recently harvested black walnuts and hickory nuts and more. There are lots of ways to incorporate some of these yummy foods.

These days our meals tend to be vegan or vegetarian and gluten-free. So here are some ideas:

• Add burdock root to lentil sweet potato stew.

• Make candied black walnuts to top this raw cranberry sauce, you can find the recipe for this dish here.

Wild Mushroom Stuffing (gluten-free, vegan)

• 1 chopped onion
• 2 cloves chopped garlic
• 2 cups wild mushrooms (oysters or maitake/hen of the woods)
• 2 stalks chopped celery
• 1 cup chopped nettles (sure, why not! If you don’t have it you can omit or add spinach or parsley instead.)
• 2 cups cooked rice, quinoa, or cut-in-little-pieces gluten-free bread
• salt, pepper
• dried sage
• dried thyme
• olive oil
• optional: nutritional yeast or parmesan cheese (not vegan)
• optional: grated cheddar cheese (not vegan) or grated vegan cheese like Daiya brand, which usually melts.

1. Saute onions, garlic, mushrooms and salt in olive oil until soft, at least 5 minutes.
2. Add chopped celery and saute a few minutes more.
3. Add nettles until wilted.
4. Add pepper, sage and thyme and rice (or quinoa or bread. If adding bread you may need some water.)
5. Stir all together over heat, adjusting seasonings, adding nutritional yeast or Parmesan cheese if you prefer.

My favorite way to eat this stuffing this fall is in baked squash: either delicata or acorn squash.

To bake squash: Cut in half (lengthwise for delicata) scrape out seeds (and save seeds to roast: we are foragers! we do not throw away the seeds! We may save some to plant next year…but the rest we roast!) Rub squash with olive oil and place face down on oiled baking pan, baking at 350 for 20 - 40 minutes until soft.

• Put stuffing in squash, top with cheese (optional) and reheat in oven until cheese melts.

To roast squash or pumpkin seeds: wash off squash debris, coat with olive oil or melted butter, add salt, spread on baking tray and bake while squash is baking 10 -15 minutes, stir up, spread again and bake 5 to 10 more minutes, until dry and crispy.

Enjoy your holidays!

Stay safe, stay wild.

~ Melissa and the folks at Food Under Foot

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We are in the process of making dandelion wine! Or should I say…the wine is made, it just needs to ferment some more before we cork it and let it rest until winter solstice.

I read quite a few recipes for how to make dandelion wine, and solicited your favorites on our facebook page (please join us on facebook!) I combined them together to do what I did. Unfortunately I do not have the ability to let you know whether this is the most amazing dandelion wine ever or not….I did take a sip as we were pouring it into bottles and I will tell you it is still very SWEET! Maybe that will mellow in time.

Here is the recipe:

• 1 gallon dandelion flower heads (I kept the greens on, I read to do it both ways (pulling the yellow petals off of the green necks and just using the petals…I used the whole thing.)
• 1 gallon water (I was going to use more but it turned out both my largest pot and largest crock could only hold a gallon, so that’s what I used.)
• 3 lbs sugar (organic sugar cane is what I used.)
• 1 packet yeast (photo below)
• 2 organic oranges, with rinds peeled and saved, the orange sliced (photos below)
• 1 organic lemon, with rinds peeled and saved, lemon sliced (photo below)
• handful of organic raisins
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 Tbsp whole cloves

2. Boil a gallon of water and pour over the dandelion blossoms. Cover loosely and let tea steep for 2 days.

3. Strain tea (reserving liquid of course! You can compost the flowers at this point) and return to the stove. Add 3 lbs of sugar, lemon and orange rinds, cinnamon and cloves. Bring to boil and simmer for about an hour.

4. Pour from pot into crock and add the sliced oranges, lemons and raisins.

5. Once it has cooled to body temperature, sprinkle a packet of yeast on top.

6. Cover with a cloth and let sit 3 days to a week (I did 3 days). When you put your ear close to it you can hear it fizzing (crackling.)

7. Strain (reserving liquid!!!!). I first strained it through a colander to get the big stuff out, then strained it through two jelly bags.

8. Let sit another day, covered with the cloth (will let extra “stuff” settle to the bottom.)

9. Pour into bottles, leaving some room at the top. Cover bottles with balloon which will indicated (by inflating) that quite a bit of fermentation is still taking place. You can poke a pin hole in each balloon so that it doesn’t get too full and pop or fly off the bottle.

10. Once the balloons stop inflating, you can cork the bottles and store in a cool dark place for at least six months.

Dandelion was my original wild ally! And though I made dandelion wine back then, it was 20 years ago. If you make dandelion wine this year, be sure to let me know how it turns out!

Enjoy!!!

~ Melissa

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I have chosen nettles as my wild ally this year…have you chosen your ally yet? There are lots of plants popping up out there: dandelion, chickweed, violent, nettles, burdock, garlic mustard.

We relocated some nettles to our backyard last year, and this year an abundant crop has sprung up. Yesterday Ella and I harvested some young nettles, steamed them, blended them with egg and kneaded them into buckwheat flour to make our own gluten-free buckwheat nettle noodles!

Here is what we did:

1. Harvest young stinging nettles. You’ll need three cups of chopped fresh nettles (which will steam way down) for the pasta. *When harvesting and chopping fresh nettles, you may want to use gloves to avoid being stung.*
2. We are gluten free so we like to make our own flour, which we do easily in our Vitamix. Today we ground buckwheat groats into flour and used 2 cups, plus extra for kneading on.


buckwheat groats ground into flour using our vitamix

3. Place steamed nettles and two eggs into a blender and mix.
4. On a table or in a bowl, make a pile of flour with a well in the middle.
5. Put the nettle/egg mixture in the well and mix/knead into the flour
6. If too sticky, add more flour.
7. Place dough ball under wet cloth and let it “rest” for 15 minutes.
8. Cut about a fourth of the dough off and roll it out on a floured surfaced as thinly as possible. (If you have a pasta maker by all means use it!) Cover the dough you are not rolling with the wet cloth.


rolling out the pasta

9. Cut into strips and set aside as you continue to roll and cut all the pasta.
10. Place the pasta in boiling water and cook about 3 minutes (fresh pasta does not need much time to cook.)
11. Drain pasta. I returned it to the pot and added some butter, fresh chopped tomatoes and salt while I sauteed the rest of the veggies, which I then mixed in.
12. In a separate pan in butter, saute 1/2 large onion, 1 clove garlic, 1/2 cup chopped mushrooms and 1 cup chopped fresh nettles. (You may want to use gloves while chopping the nettles.)
13. Mix into noodles, add salt to taste and enjoy!

I hope you enjoy this recipe! This vegetarian recipe can easily be made vegan by substituting olive oil or earth’s best margarine for the butter. I’ll be sharing lots more things I do this year with my wild ally, nettles. If you haven’t gotten a chance to check out The Wild Ally Workbook, please do!

You’ll also find a video review of vitamix blenders here, along with a coupon code for free shipping!

Have a great day!

Melissa Sokulski
Food Under Foot

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We love collecting wild foods in the city. One thing our little house with it’s 20 by 60 foot property does not afford us, though, are maple trees.

Fortunately we have friends with land that live nearby and this year they have invited us to tap their trees to collect maple sap and make syrup! We are so grateful and super excited!

We got up bright and early this morning and collected some sticks from staghorn sumac trees. The hole in the tree will be 1/2 inch diameter, so we tried to find sticks that were just a little bigger. Sumac trees have a soft pith inside which is easy to push out with metal coat hanger. Then we widdled one end down to less than 1/2 inch, this is the side we will hammer into the tree (after drilling a 1/2″ diameter hole about 2-3 inches into the tree, see our next post which tells exactly what we did.)

This is how a staghorn sumac looks during the summer, just in case you are wondering which tree I am talking about:

Now there are no leaves, but the old red berry clusters are still on them, which makes them very easy to identify. The staghorn sumac has velvety branches, but you can use any red berried sumac. Poisonous sumac has white berries, so as long as you see trees with clusters of these red berries (which may not be as vibrant red now, but they will still look red) you have the right tree to use. I believe elderberry trees also have a soft pith that can be pushed out, so if you happen to know of an elderberry tree you can use those instead.

We put 11 spiles into 8 trees and have been collecting sap and boiling it down into syrup for 3 days now! We’ve made delicious maple syrup and delectible maple candies. I’ll share more later…with pictures and maybe even a video or two!

Enjoy mud season! It’s also maple syrup season!
~ Melissa Sokulski
Food Under Foot

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I have been so lax about posting here…I am so sorry! If you haven’t joined us on Facebook, please do so! It’s a bit easier to be active in little blurbs, and there’s a lot of action over there.

But there’s actually a lot going on here as well, just behind the scenes. I’ll make a commitment to put it up in the forefront…I’ll try to get more posts up here!

We’ve been having a fun fall, gathering and cooking acorns, finding black walnuts, and today was glorious when we found a Chicken Mushroom! (Also known as Sulphur Shelf or Laetiporus sulphureus).

I didn’t have my camera on me at the time, but you’ll notice the unmistakable orange/yellow color. They grow on dead wood like old stumps of trees and the underside has very tiny pores (NOT gills.)

Like almost all wild mushrooms, these need to be cooked before eating, so I sliced some up and sauteed them in olive oil:

Then in a hot wok, I sauteed red onion, garlic, scallion, zucchini, and pumpkin seeds, adding the cooked chicken mushroom at the end. I seasoned with tamari and mirin.

Finally I served it over brown rice.

It was very good!

Do you have any favorite ways to prepare chicken mushroom? Any favorite recipes you’d be willing to share? I’d love to hear!

Thanks,

Melissa Sokulski
Food Under Foot

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Sometimes we find our food under foot in the yard, sometimes in the woods, sometimes growing right out of a bag!

We’ve seen oyster mushrooms growing off dead or dying trees and logs, but for the first time we grew our own oyster mushrooms from a bag of cottonwood fluff. At our amazing local mushroom organization’s (the Western PA mushroom club) meeting last month, we received a bag of the cottonwood fluff and an inoculation bag of oyster mushroom spores.

After boiling the cottonwood, draining it, and letting it cool, we mixed in the spores and put it back in the plastic bag (to retain moisture.) Once we saw some mushrooms budding a couple weeks later, we cut some holes into the bag, and a week later: voila! Oyster mushrooms!

I mad a delicious mushroom gravy to top lentil burgers.

First we harvested our mushrooms:

Then I sliced them and sauteed them with chopped red onions in olive oil.

I added 2 Tbsp whole wheat flour and mixed to coat, then I added 1 1/2 cups water, salt, tamari and pepper to taste. I simmered and stirred until the sauce had thickened, adjusting seasoning and adding a little more water if it got too thick.

Delicious! What do you make with oyster mushrooms? Do you find them wild? Have you ever grown mushrooms? We’d love to hear! Please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Melissa Sokulski, herbalist, acupuncturist

Birch Center for Health and Food Under Foot

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On our last morel hike, we found four small black morels, and some larger yellow morels. This time we added them to a potato kugel. The flavor of the morels was somewhat lost in this dish, so it wasn’t the best way to showcase the morels. But it was delicious, so I wanted to share it with you!

A Kugel is a Jewish dish made traditionally with pasta or potatoes and eggs. It is often sweet but can be savory like this one.

Morel Potato Kugel.

• Morels, chopped
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups chopped spinach
• 2 Tbsp butter or olive oil
• salt
• pepper
• 4 potatoes, cubed and steamed
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup grated cheese, such as cheddar (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350.

Peel and cube 4 potatoes and steam them.

Saute chopped morels, onions and spinach in butter for about 15 minutes, until onions are translucent and morels are wilted.

Mix four eggs with 1/2 cup milk, yogurt or cream, salt and pepper.

Mix eggs, potatoes and vegetables together and pour into a 9 by 13 baking pan.

Sprinkle a cup of shredded cheese on top.

Bake about 45 minutes.

I hope you enjoy the kugel!

Have you found morels this year? What do you like to do with them? What else are you eating this spring? We’d love to hear from you!

~ Melissa Sokulski

Food Under Foot and Birch Center for Health