A New Master Recipe Cookbook for Foragers & Gardeners

Foraging season has begun.

Perhaps you’re ready to give this new (old) trend a try, excited by a lecture or what seems to be the endless forest bathing lifestyle of foraging influencers.  After all, it is a BIT like gardening. It’s nature. It’s dirt. It’s quiet and thinking and referencing and observing.

Perhaps you’ve already come back with your basket of spring goodies after a gorgeous day sourcing flower, shoot, ‘shroom, and root.

Now what?

Exactly. Half the enjoyment of foraging is using the items you’ve carefully gathered; but with unfamiliar ingredients, the newish forager-cook can be forgiven for defaulting to the ubiquitous butter and garlic sauté and feeling well-served. 

Well, it’s time to up your game. In her new book, The Forager’s Pantry, Ellen Zachos takes the hands of both beginner and seasoned foragers and guides them through the woods AND the kitchen – providing master recipes, flavor profiles, availability charts, and an encouraging, witty voice to help you adapt the familiar dishes you love to the hobby you may find yourself pursuing for the rest of your life.

 

The Forager’s Pantry. By Ellen Zachos. Gibbs Smith, 240 pages, $24.99

I speak from experience on that last bit. Though I am first and foremost a gardener, in my early twenties, a friend introduced me to the pleasures of foraging food for free (which is after all, handy in one’s twenties).  I’ve been doing it ever since – whether it’s chickweed from the garden beds or oyster mushrooms from the woods, it still gives me a buzz to harvest crops sown and grown by the bountiful hand of Nature. 

Master Recipes Make The Forager’s Pantry Stand Out

I was thrilled to get this book, not because I need to add to my cookbook collection (which is quite frankly absurd at this point), but because Zachos beautifully illustrates and promotes a technique I heartily endorse – the use of master recipes to allow you to adapt what you’ve collected to what you have in the pantry.  If more people cooked like this generally, the grocery stores and gas stations might see a drop in profits, but our household budgets and carbon footprints would be the all the lighter for it.

So, you’ll find a master recipe for Chocolate Nut Candy, not Chocolate Walnut Candy, because it might be hickory, pine or California bay nuts you discover on your walk.  You’ll find a master recipe for Summer Pudding or Clafoutis, so you can incorporate ALL the free and fabulous berries you find, not just a precise amount of several high-end berries that might have you running to the store. And you can make Puff Pastry Swirls with your choice of foraged greens such as chickweed, lamb’s quarters, purslane or nettles – whichever one happens to be in season.

Don’t have wild blueberries to make this fruit fool? Zachos helps you substitute what you CAN forage, such as serviceberries or wild blackberries. Photo credit: Ellen Zachos

Don’t know which greens to use?  Zachos conveniently provides summaries of flavor profiles to help you match the dish to your taste, and also provides charts of when to look for certain ingredients during the year. Including the mysterious and misunderstood mushroom.

Forage Through the Seasons

Seasonality features big in this cookbook, for although Zachos gives instructions on preserving, freezing and drying many ingredients, foraged ingredients are always at their peak of flavor when used fresh. I am currently waiting for my magnolias to fully open so I can sneak a few blossoms for her Flower Cream Cake, but I could use redbud, or wait for late spring roses if the cruel freeze tonight zaps those magnolias.  Zachos gives the forager-cook flexibility, and the encouragement to take a chance on a new flavor by setting easy to follow parameters.

However, should the freedom of substitutions alarm you, there are also specialty recipes in the book, for Zachos has spent much time perfecting the pairing and proportions of certain flavors, such as cattail flowers with parmesan and eggs to create a special breakfast dish that lets the ingredient – not the filler – shine; or Deep-Fried Lotus Root with Sumac and Field Garlic to meld many foraged flavors expertly (one of which you can simply forage in your local world market if you don’t happen to have a lotus-smothered pond nearby).

Cattail Flower Breakfast is a satisfying but simple way to experience the delicate flavor of cattail flowers. Photo credit: Ellen Zachos

Gardener. Forager. Cook.

Ellen Zachos. Photo credit: BackyardForager.com

Zachos is an experienced horticulturist and author with many titles to her name, but her first foraging title, Backyard Foraging is a book I recommend and lend over and over to friends who want to dabble and might not have a great deal of property at their disposal.  I’ve lent it so many times I’ve had to rebuy it twice (you know how that goes).

If you’re concerned about foraging, her experience and enthusiasm is infectious, and will help you dip your toes into all the things that make foraging so addictive: the fresh air…the quiet contemplation and observation… the discovery of treasure on a glorious spring afternoon.

It’s addictive alright, and The Backyard Pantry will make that kitchen of yours a lot easier to discover too.

Thumbs all the way up. I guess I’ll have to buy a second lending copy. – MW

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The Forager’s Pantry. By Ellen Zachos. Gibbs Smith, 240 pages, $24.99

 

A New Master Recipe Cookbook for Foragers & Gardeners originally appeared on GardenRant on April 1, 2021.

The post A New Master Recipe Cookbook for Foragers & Gardeners appeared first on GardenRant.

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