Ugly Little Greens: Gourmet Dishes Crafted From Foraged Ingredients
224
Ugly Little Greens: Gourmet Dishes Crafted From Foraged Ingredients
224eBook
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Overview
Unique Recipes for the Adventurous Cook
Ugly Little Greens is the must-have foraging guide and cookbook for anyone looking to up their game in the kitchen. Mia Wasilevich shares the notes and dishes she’s cultivated over the years while working as a professional chef and educational forager. Her detailed profiles and up close pictures (plus possible look-alikes) allow you to safely find special ingredients to bring new and exciting flavors and textures to everyday dishes. And more importantly, the ingredients are unexpectedly some of the most common and forgotten weeds growing right under your nose and waiting to be harvested from your own backyard and surrounding environment.
Her recipes include:
- Spicy Cattail and Chorizo Salsa
- Elderberry Braised Pot Roast
- Acorn Sliders
- Pine Beignets with Pine Cream
- Lambsquarters Marbled Bread
- Succulents and Scallops
- Mallow Pappardelle
- Nettles Benedict
With information on how to forage for and cook with nettles, cattail, watercress and more— including helpful color photos, location maps, key identifying tips (and no dangerous mushrooms)—this book is perfect for foodies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781624144066 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Page Street Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 74 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ugly Little Greens
Gourmet Dishes Crafted from Foraged Ingredients
By Mia Wasilevich
Page Street Publishing Co.
Copyright © 2017 Mia WasilevichAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62414-406-6
CHAPTER 1
The Weeds in My Backyard and Beyond
Introduction – Why This Book
About These Greens?
Being home, in every sense of the word, means that you recognize something intrinsically familiar, secure and comforting. For most people, me included, food is often the hub and intersection of these three things. In addition, we all crave authenticity in the foods we like to eat and cook and integrity in how we source them. I think most people who are a little food obsessed think this way, at least a little bit.
The "ugly little greens" I write about in this book represent that "home" or grounding source for me for a few reasons: they can be found almost everywhere and are welcomed in so many regions and countries throughout the world as a staple.
This book focuses on the greens that are most prevalent throughout North America and, largely, Canada. They are the everyday greens and unsung heroes that faithfully pop up year after year. They are not the regional or exotic finds; rather, they are the "salt of the earth" staples. The recipes contained here are a mixture of my everyday and entertaining repertoire. These are the kinds of recipes I make for friends as well as for simple home-cooked dinners. They are a combination of my travels, daily life experiences and what I find on the trails in my immediate environment. I can be home anywhere I find these plants.
My partner introduced me to the world of foraging almost a decade ago. As I learned about the plants in my area, I noticed that many of these plants (or ones very similar) were common, everyday foods in many of the countries I had visited as a child. Only here in North America, many people pay other people to weed them out of their yards. And there's no judgment from me — it's just that people have forgotten about these kinds of plants and mainly just don't know what to do with them. If I had a dime for every time someone has asked me what to do with the weeds in their garden ... So I am writing a book about it.
In addition, in other parts of the world, people don't celebrate foraging in the same way we glamorize it here. (We can stop doing that now, I think.) It's just a part of the everyday way people do things in many other countries and in some parts of North America. I traveled a lot during my childhood, and those hyper-localized ingredients made the foods of various locales unique, special and memorable to me.
Once I reached adulthood and a short while after my partner introduced me to wild plants, I couldn't think of a reason not to use them as food as long as it was sustainable. I came to acknowledge that foraging is not only a practice in being self-reliant but also that these plants (and in particular the ones in this book) are both authentic to my environment and also universal, meaning they can grow in so many places all over the world and can be interpreted by so many cultures in so many different ways. I think that's neat.
North, South, East and West I Go
I'd love to say that I spent many happy moments cooking in the kitchen with my grandmothers and mother, but that wouldn't be truthful. I'm not even sure any of them enjoyed cooking and, in retrospect, I can understand why. One grandmother had eleven children and the other thirteen and my mother just had to work a lot. Both grandmothers lived in poverty on opposite sides of the world, one an immigrant in a country so unlike her own and one native to a land that didn't want her there. I feel certain that they must have felt like the kitchen was an absolute burden. That never prevented our family from enjoying and appreciating food, though. And that's the magic of food. It knows no geographical, social or economic boundaries.
When I was growing up, my family decided to forgo the holiday season, not for any religious reasons, but because that's the only time anyone had off school or work. Although we were not wealthy and we came from a very modest middle class, my dad made it a priority to travel to world. We scrimped and saved to do this. So, from a very early age (around two or three years old), I boarded economy-class planes, boats and trains with my family every holiday season. And by the time I was twelve, I had traveled to more countries than most people do in a lifetime. I don't know how my parents did that with two small children, but I know I must have been such a little angel, right? I think they thought that we might not remember that toy or game in the years to come, but we would never forget the trip or experience. How right they were. It made me feel like an outsider to not have Christmas presents or a Christmas tree, but I can clearly see that this was the right thing for our family and I'm truly grateful.
While traveling, we gravitated away from the hotels and were attracted to the modest neighborhoods where many of the restaurants were mom-and-pop or tiny family-run places where they'd just invite you into the kitchen. I think that's just what my parents were used to and what they knew as opposed to the finest restaurants in the city (where I think they would have felt out of their league). I haven't been to most of those landmark restaurants you hear about but hopefully I will someday. In the meantime, I'm happy to hang out in the kitchen with everyday chefs who love their craft.
I'm convinced that frequenting humble mom-and-pop restaurants as a child is the reason I have such a deep connection to comfort food, country food, roadside food and traditional foods. I literally felt at home in every country I visited because someone's grandmother was cooking for me. In essence, I was studying the cooking practices, techniques and traditions of a whole lot of grandmas throughout my entire childhood, and because I didn't speak their language, we spoke through food.
I'm half Native American from the Southwest and half Russian by way of Argentina. That's a lot of food culture right there. This, coupled with the amount of traveling we did as kids and the boom of food TV, created a food wanderlust in me. I now live in Los Angeles, where I don't have to drive far to have an authentic ethnic food experience from just about anywhere in the world. I'm inspired by my travels, my neighbors and the neighborhoods I have lived in (Korean, Persian, Armenian and Salvadorian, just to name a few).
If I'm making something or have a recipe in this book that seems foreign or exotic, it isn't exotic to me or my experiences. There are some definite Asian preferences in my palate. That said, I am an absolute champion of American food. I'm in love with it and am proud of all the regional specialties we have. If I had to describe my personal culinary style, it would be American, despite all the international and family influences. To me, the real American food is a microcosm of all the people who live here and have lived here. I'd love for these weedy staples to become more a staple of American food, as they must've been years ago.
What Is This Book? What Can It Be for You?
This book is an excellent jumping-off point for someone who has done some study and research about wild and foraged edible plants already. I give you some tips on where to start with basic taxonomy and identification with images, where the plants fit within plant families, as well as some field guide and foraging resources in the back of the book. I hope to whet your curiosity to study even more deeply on your own with the recipes in this book. That's how I got into foraging and cooking with foraged ingredients. As I learned about foraging, my amazement grew that these weeds could be not just survival food but food that I craved, enjoyed gathering and loved cooking.
If you haven't researched wild edible plants before, this is an excellent place to start, as the plants in this book are among the most common and easily recognizable in North America (as well as in some other parts of the world). Essentially, they are common weeds that are native nuisances, introduced or a hybrid of both.
Books, online studies and apps are a wonderful introduction to studying edible and foraged plants. But because no one is an expert of everything, we need local experts who are dedicated as well. Nature is not general but adapts to each region, so your particular region or area will vary in plant species. I think by now there are a few plant ID apps as well. I would like to emphasize that, in addition to your diligent studies, an actual person teaching you is the best source for learning about the edible plants around you. I suggest connecting with a local group or expert in your area from time to time.
Why should you seek out local experts for advice? Foraging is very much an oral tradition passed from one person to another. I feel that the connection between two people — teacher-to-student, face-to-face — creates an awareness and sense of responsibility that can't always be duplicated from learning something online or from a book. Plus, the validation from an expert gives you added confidence in being able to identify your finds. Also, familiarizing yourself and becoming an expert on at least five plants, however common they are, will go a long way in teaching you to be detail-oriented and diligent about being able to positively identify a plant before you consume it.
I'm a cook. I've had no professional training other than studying it on my own, with mentors and applying my knowledge for the past decade in my work. We're all always learning. All I know is that I'm madly in love with the creative and artistic aspect of cooking. It makes me extremely happy to cook for my clients, family and friends and I've been doing that my whole life. This book is not filled with difficult cooking techniques and, for the most part, it has very simple, basic ingredients. I style them fancy sometimes, but the ingredients themselves are super basic.
I don't use complicated, specialized tools, and I often cook outdoors. The recipes in this book are mainly meant to be cooked on the stovetop and in the oven. The most specialized tools you'll need are a digital scale, high-speed food processor or immersion blender, a cream whipper, tongs, a good strainer, garden pruners, scissors and maybe some gardening gloves.
As far as my pantry, I always have a variety of flours (all-purpose, corn, rice, hazelnut, almond, arrowroot, potato, sorghum and tapioca, to name a few), legumes, whole grains, cooking wines and vinegars, homemade and store-bought. I have a good selection of dried herbs and spices, wild-crafted and from the garden and market. I also have a variety of fats to cook with, from coconut oil to duck fat, lard, olive oil, bacon fat and plenty of butter.
It's a little bit like a cooking competition show when you're working with foraged materials. You may have a vague idea of what's in season, but there's no guarantee of what you'll find, even in your own garden, and you just have to come up with something on the fly. A pantry stocked with a diverse flavor palette of fats, vinegars, wines, flours, legumes and herbs are what keep my ideas flowing.
This book is meant to inspire you to come up with different recipe ideas, techniques, takes or approaches with the "ugly little greens" you have in your life, whether they grow in the field or in your own yard. I wholeheartedly hope you change up the recipes, make additions and subtractions, or just check out the recipe and run in a completely different direction with the ideas presented in this book. I know that's what I do when I read cookbooks. They are a starting point. Be creative and taste everything, please!
Don't Take Grandmother: Responsible Harvesting
While the following may not be the sexiest reading material, it's really important to take it in. Even if you've heard this information before, it's an important reminder.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are nine plant classifications. You can visit the USDA website to read more thorough definitions, but I've included the brief definitions that follow:
Native — A plant that is a part of the balance of nature that has developed over hundreds or thousands of years in a particular region or ecosystem.
Invasive — A plant that is both non-native and able to establish on many sites, grow quickly and spread to the point of disrupting plant communities or ecosystems.
Naturalized — A non-native plant that does not need human help to reproduce and maintain itself over time in an area where it is not native.
Exotic and Opportunistic — A native plant that is able to take advantage of disturbance to the soil or existing vegetation to spread quickly and out-compete the other plants on the disturbed site.
Translocated — A plant not native to the continent on which it is now found.
Weed — A plant (native or non-native) that is not valued in the place where it is growing.
Noxious Weed — A plant that is particularly troublesome or any plant or plant product that can directly or indirectly injure or cause damage to crops (including nursery stock or plant products), livestock, poultry or other interests of agriculture, irrigation, navigation, the natural resources of the United States, the public health or the environment.
As you can see by these definitions, native plants hold a special place at the top of this list, because they are an integral part of our environment, ecosystem and, importantly, our very culture. Native plants are what make where you are unique and reflective of your terroir. They make up the colors, textures and smells that make it "home." I know that when I travel and return home, the smell of sages, chaparral brush and yerba santa welcome and embrace me. In addition, native plants are an integral and participatory part in our chain of survival. If you want to use native plants, learn how to plant or propagate them.
In addition to learning how to plant or propagate native plants, it's important that you "don't take Grandmother." What I mean by this is that there is a hierarchy in the plant world, especially when it comes to harvesting. You want to leave the oldest, largest and most established plants and take special care not to uproot them or disturb their growth. They likely have seeded the area around them, ensuring the species' survival.
As I learned more and nature became more a part of my everyday life, I saw that the term "forager" is an incomplete title. Many of the "foragers" I know (people who actually use the plants for food and medicine) are also self-reliance educators, food preservers, ethnobotanists, naturalists, permaculture instructors, native-plant gardeners, farmers and stewards of the environment.
People who actually forage for food as a daily means of subsistence and those who use foraged plants as food and medicine know all too well that it's not easy. It's hard work-very hard work. It's not like the supermarket, where you will always find apples where the apples always are and broccoli where the broccoli always is. Seeds and plants move around, wildfires and flooding happen, climates fluctuate.
For these reasons, many people who forage also participate in forming food gardens and permaculture groups, giving as much as they take and learning to replant responsibly. I don't think these are just options anymore. I know these are things I'm actively exploring as I learn more as well.
Lastly, there will be disagreement among various groups whether to forage and what to forage. What I would love to see is people talking to each other with respect and compassion and really communicating. More often than not, we have much more in common than we think. If we could be as mindful of each other as we are to the plants, we'd have something special, wouldn't we?
Taxonomy and Identification
First question: Where to start?
Well, being curious and reading a book on the subject is the first and most important step. So, you've accomplished that already!
Second question: How and where do you start looking for plants to harvest?
This is a little more difficult to answer, but I'll take you through my thought process and hopefully that will clear a few things up for you and get you on your way. Unfortunately, there are no maps that I know of that pinpoint exactly where things are growing with up-to-the-minute accuracy.
I would start by simply surveying your own yard or property and seeing what is actually already growing there, weeds and all. Chances are good that a few of the weeds featured in this book are growing right under your nose. Feel free to use this book and other field guides on the plant you are observing. Take the books with you as reference. When I first started, I carried more than a few books with me and sat in a field with my loupe for hours.
Third question: What is taxonomy?
Taxonomy is a scientific, orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships or a scientific system that provides identification, classification and description. It's like a detailed checklist of the plants' components and characteristics that helps you confidently identify them. Even if I absolutely know what a plant is, I'll still practice this kind of detailed identification from time to time as it gets me into the habit of remembering what questions to ask when I encounter a plant I don't know.
Next, survey your local parks and nature preserves for identification purposes only. Do you see some similar plants? Good, great!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ugly Little Greens by Mia Wasilevich. Copyright © 2017 Mia Wasilevich. Excerpted by permission of Page Street Publishing Co..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Chapter One The Weeds in My Backyard and Beyond,
Chapter Two Delightfully Delicate and Tender,
Chapter Three Unexpected Flavor Doppelgangers,
Chapter Four Earthy and Spicy Brassica,
Chapter Five The Verdant and Herbaceous Nettle,
Chapter Six Dandelions and Curly Dock,
Chapter Seven Lambsquarters,
Chapter Eight Elderberry and Elderflowers,
Chapter Nine Acorns and Pines,
Resources,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Author,
Copyright,