This is a great recipe for using all of those extra chanterelles and pieces that may not be in the best condition - the dregs at the bottom of your foraging basket, the older ones that have been hanging out in the fridge, etc. They do need to be clean, though. Making chanterelle pâté is a nice way to feature the natural color and flavor of chanterelles. It's super rich, so it only takes a little. We eat it on crackers and bread and freeze what we don't use immediately.
We're lucky to have lots of Georgia pecans - both wild and planted. Most strains of pecans you can buy now are bred to be big and storable, which means they have a lower oil content. That also means they have less flavor. Wild pecans, for the most part, are small, more tedious to get into and a lot tastier. We forage of mix of Seedlings (the wild strain) with our planted pecans.
I remember when a lot of wild food recipes were more about subsistence than enjoyment. They didn't do much to win over anyone but die-hard foragers. More and more these days we're getting to see the foodie side of wild food. I do love knowing my entire meal was growing wild only hours ago. There's something really visceral about the experience and it's good to know I can find food if I have to. But it's not always that practical. I also like the everyday accessibility of incorporating wild edibles in my domesticated meals. And I like it all to taste good.
My first experience with eating wisteria and redbud flowers was at a wild food potluck years ago. I had recently read you could eat both but hadn't tried. The mild sweet of wisteria, the acidic sour of redbud and the complementary beauty of both sounded perfect for a salad.
So I spent an afternoon foraging the flowers and a few greens around an old abandoned home site. My salad was a big hit with the kids...especially the little girls. They loved picking out the flowers one by one to eat them.
We've been wanting to make this for a while. Since we do our best not to eat factory-farmed meat, it's been a long time since we've eaten anything but tempeh in our Reubens. But I will say it's hard to beat a tempeh Reuben. We've also been trying to stay away from the nitrates in cured meat. One week they'll kill you. The next they're perfectly harmless. Who knows?
Bear grease is a wonderful thing. Anyone who knows me knows my enthusiasm for evangelizing this all natural, all free product. In Camp Cookery, Horace Kephart says, "All of the caul fat [of a bear] should be saved for rendering into bear's oil, which is much better and wholesomer than lard." Made right, it has almost no flavor.
Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus), or sunchoke, is a wild sunflower native to the central United States. Sunchokes grow up to 12 feet tall.
The leaves may be up to three inches wide and eight inches long, while the yellow flowers, occurring in August and September, are generally between one and a half and three inches in diameter.
Plantain, (genus Plantago), is a common weed that originated in Europe but has naturalized throughout the U.S. Common plantain (Plantago major) has rounded leaves, while English plantain, or Narrowleaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata) has elongated lance-shaped leaves. Plantain has a vast history of medicinal use and has long been considered an important herb. Emerging in early spring, it may be harvested and used until freezing weather kills it.