Happy January, food & foraging friends!

“I picked the wrong country to do dry January in.”

I almost spit out my drink reading that one. With the state of the world and country, it’s indeed been a month I’ve wanted to reach for liquid comfort.

I try dry January every year to challenge my habits and give my liver a break. While I don’t tend to drink to excess, I do drink more frequently than I’d like. But many non-alc options don’t cut it for me flavor-wise, and some of the ones I do like are as expensive as booze, like Curious Elixirs. The good stuff tends to have a complex array of botanicals that rightfully make them pricy. So I got to thinking, what if I tried to reverse engineer some of these drinks myself with some foraged ingredients?

If you’ve subscribed to my newsletter for a while, you’ll know I love making amaros, bittersweet herbaceous liqueurs in which wild ingredients shine. This month, I took out my witchy stash of dried wild botanicals — including hawthorn, juniper and spicebush berry; fig and sassafras leaf; mugwort; and chaga and turkey tail mushroom. But rather than steeping ingredients in vodka, I boiled them into a bittersweet syrup that has made a great base for mocktails, adding things like chaga bitters and kombucha.

Another alcohol-free bevvy I really like is Ghia. They have a sumac and chili spritz that is uber flavorful without a lot of sugar. I have a lot of wild harvested sumac from the summer idling in my fridge, and the combo of Ghia and an episode of Wild Harvest inspired me to make a sumac syrup. It had a lovely color and a subtly sour flavor. I would try this again but triple up on the sumac; mocktail ingredients are easiest to play with when highly concentrated. In addition to making my own spritz with the sumac syrup (adding orange bitters and club soda), I used the syrup to finish some kombucha and stirred into Greek yogurt for a snack. I’m thinking to try it in a sweet and sour sauce too.

Kin Euphorics is my favorite non-alc brand so far, and they are the most reasonably priced: I just got a variety pack to get me through the rest of the month. Some brands (true of cocktails at many bars as well) rely too heavily on citrus, which has started to irritate my throat recently. Kin goes light on that and heavier on other sources of sour, like tamarind. They use ingredients you can find in the wild too, like milk thistle, reishi, birch bark and passionflower.

Having looked at many a label, it seems the best recipes for success start with some kind of juice, include botanicals that add sour, smoke, earth and bitter, and end with spices like clove, cinnamon, and chili, sometimes adding sea salt too. I’ll be continuing to experiment on this front and welcome hearing from you on anything you may try too!

Another drink that is replacing my evening glass-of-red or can-o-beer ritual is a wild spin on a golden milk. This Bon Appetit piece breaks down this Americanization of haldi doodh, an anti-inflammatory Ayurvedic beverage that traditionally is just straight milk and turmeric. I’ve been making mine more the bastardized (and drinkable) version, adding honey, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and wild spicebush berry, which makes it more like a chai minus the tea. The oatmilk gives it substance and the warm feeling going down the gullet provides a similar sensation that a glass of wine does for me.

One last application of wild botanicals to share this month: watercolors. I cleaned out my fridge for the new year and rediscovered the wild paints that had been languishing at the back. See below a couple of cards I made with pokeweed berry, black walnut hull, onion skin, sunflower and other paints I made from simply boiling down plant matter.