Although gleaning dinner from nature inherently offers some freedom from the social framework, COVID-19’s disruptions still reached many locals who normally take to the outdoors in spring to gather ramps, morels and other seasonal morsels.
Tag: Foraging
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Eat from the forest floor with foraged mushrooms
July marks peak season for gathering wild edible mushroom in Western North Carolina, and many tasty varieties are already popping up on local restaurant menus.
Wildly prolific: Cooking with WNC’s native spring perennials
Some of Western North Carolina’s freshest spring ingredients are found outside the garden.
Award-winning baker Sarah Owens debuts new cookbook with Asheville events
The New York City-based author and baker launches her new book, Toast & Jam, in Asheville with events at OWL Bakery and East Fork Pottery.
Asheville’s wild-food experts expound on medicine for body, soul and planet
Wild foods, foraged from Western North Carolina’s biodiverse environment, give a boost to health as superfoods high in nutrients, say leaders of local “weed walks.”
The mighty acorn: Some believe the wild nut is WNC’s food of the future
Long overlooked as a source of nutrition, acorns are nutritious, plentiful and free for the taking.
Nature’s bounty: A food foraging adventure with No Taste Like Home
A walk in the woods with a local foraging tour yields wild edibles, healing mushrooms and some new knowledge for participants.
Adventures in foraging: Looking for greenbrier, or Smilax
Greenbrier shoots, or Smilax rotundifolia, get an early start on spring, but they’re still out and plentiful, ready to be snapped off and enjoyed raw or cooked.
Wild sustenance: Lambsquarters provide backyard source of nutrition, flavor
Often considered a weed, locally prolific lambsquarter is actually a highly nutritious wild edible that we can harvest for free in our own backyards.
Foraging for food, fun and adventure
Foragers live along a spectrum, and I’m fairly moderate, somewhere on the tamer end. I tag along occasionally with those who hew to a wilder code of living and eat closer to the land. The other day I served as assistant to well-known local, Alan Muskat, “The Mushroom Man,” on a wild foods tour he had arranged for some out-of-towners.
Dandelions for dinner: Foraging and preparing a prolific spring edible
Far from the lawn nuisance it’s often considered in our culture, the dandelion has actually been celebrated since ancient times as one of the world’s top health-promoting herbs. Chris Smith of Sow True Seed offers several tasty and nutritious ways to prepare this easily identifiable and abundant wild edible.
Web Bites: Wild edible pesto with Marc Williams
Ethnobotanist and educator Marc Williams recently joined Xpress in the test kitchen at Selina Naturally, home of Celtic Sea Salt, to discuss wild edible plants and demonstrate how to make a healthy, delicious wild-plant pesto out of things many of us are used to thinking of as annoying weeds.