Happy January, food & foraging friends!
Let me be the last to wish you a happy new year! This month’s edition is intentionally late, in order to be able to report back on the highly anticipated winter edition of the Forager’s Supper Club (which took place three days ago, but I swear I’m still full from it!)
The assignment: mobilize a small gathering of foodie-chef-foragers to assemble a seasonal feast featuring wild ingredients. The date was set a few months in advance, which meant our winter greens and mushrooms could be snowed in, or we could have unseasonably balmy days delivering preemie flowers. This January, we had both — and luckily in that order, as the snow melt fed some hearty greens that withstood the snowfall. Late last week, I scurried around my community garden, yanking up carrots that had overwintered, snipping cold-hardy chickweed, and harvesting other cross-training greens like onion grass and bittercress, in addition to salvaging limbs from tossed Christmas trees. All went to work in my kitchen.
If you’ve taken my evergreen class, you know how enamored I am with the nutritious, versatile needles of most conifers. The winter forager’s supper club was a chance to let this often overlooked ingredient shine. Juniper greens and the pointy needles of a native Bahamian pine I gathered during a quick island getaway scented our guests’ parting gift, an olive oil sugar scrub. Pine salt flavored a sipping broth featuring eight wild mushroom species, while pine-infused vinegar made a citrusy base for my wild garden salad. And last but not least, fir needles got ground into sugar for shortbread and a lemon-evergreen ice cream with black walnuts gathered from Rock Creek Cemetery. (The ratio of gathering to processing time of black walnuts is probably 1:10, just a heads up for the uninitiated!)
And those were just the book ends of our incredible multi-course meal.
Left/top: Evergreens featured heavily on the winter table, including Chef Julian’s persimmon pine sour mocktail, and Nevin’s butternut squash crostata with spruce we’d gathered the day prior. Conifer cones of different sizes made a fun tablescape bordered with juniper boughs.
Right/bottom: Mushrooms made an appearance in every course, including a plant based mushroom cheese, wild mushroom sipping broth, Jonathan’s black garlic/black trumpet mac and cheese, Julian’s sauteed morels and hedgehogs (procured from the West Coast), Stephen’s chocolate porcini tart and the unveiling of MAW’s second annual mushroom beer.
We kicked off the meal with a charcuterie board flush with wild boar sausage and prosciutto, truffle cheese, wild winter pesto and homegrown carrots, Nevin’s wild wineberry jam, and Julian’s handcrafted cheese (because that noma-trained chef knows no half measures), among other goodies, while sipping on homemade spicebush sodas and persimmon pine sours.
For the main course, Chef Julian treated us to sautéed west coast morels and hedgehogs; charred beets dusted with cranberry dukkah; fava purée topped with bitter rapini (an Italian classic he says is the oldest winter dish since the Roman Empire); and a decadent roasted leg of local venison. In contrast to his elevated ingredients, Julian dubbed me the frugal forager, an honor I will accept, given I served a bouquet of bittercress I found growing out of a stone wall in my neighborhood. To each his own!
Side dishes also included contributions from guests like Jonathan Till‘s hearty black garlic/black trumpet mac and cheese with shiitake breadcrumbs, Lior’s homegrown oyster mushroom shawarma, and host Nevin‘s buttery butternut squash crostata with spruce salt. Chef Stephen’s chocolate porcini tart topped with yogurt and gummy porcini and blood orange bits forged a sweet and savory bridge to the dessert course.
The meal was arguably better than anything you could buy, precisely because it wasn’t something money could buy, at least not the wild and homegrown ingredients incorporated. And the conversation and camaraderie was just as delicious as the food. Sharing food with people who share your passions is a precious thing, which is why I continue to write, teach, and otherwise connect people through food and foraging.
While we have limited capacity to expand this particular gathering (unless someone has one of those Citizen Kane-sized tables), I’d love to connect with you elsewhere in the kitchen or on the trail this year! One of the easiest ways is to join the Mycological Association of Washington, and then sign up for its culinary committee, which I chair. This Sunday we’ll have a mushroom-themed potluck and start planning events for the year. Our culinary events include our flagship cooking competition and tasting, mushroom beer making, an annual mushroom-themed banquet, a potluck picnic and more.
Wildly yours,
April
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