Happy October, food & foraging friends!

Every time I make it to Philly, I leave with one question: Why didn’t I come sooner?

I could write pages on my adventures to the City of Brotherly Love (starting with the adventure my purse took going from Philly to NYC and back without me), but I know you’re here for the food, so I’ll lead with the best meal this side of the Delaware: Honeysuckle.

This Philly visit kicked off a series of road trips to connect with bookstores and other businesses around my forthcoming foraging book. Honeysuckle is one of a few Philadelphia restaurants featured in the book as a place to experience wild foods in an elevated way.

Celebrating the cuisine of the African diaspora, Honeysuckle’s menu incorporates wild ingredients like sassafras, sumac and shiso foraged by a local father-son duo as well as heritage ingredients like sorghum, black eyed peas and sorrel. I was lucky to meet Teddy, head farmer for the restaurant’s farm Plowshare, and taste his homemade sorghum syrup, perfect for BBQ sauce (or just licking the spoon). Sitting at the bar, I talked foraging and ferments with the staff like we were old friends, the bartender giving me sips from a secret stash of house-infused passionfruit liqueur.

Another Philly highlight was a wild foods walk with Lady Danni Morinich, aka the Landed Gentress, a fellow urban forager and instructor also featured in my book. For two hours, Danni talked story and science as we inched along the pier at Washington Avenue Green, a small but mighty green space loaded with edibles and medicinals, including sumac, honey locust, juneberry, and dozens of others. I learned many new things about old plant friends, from Danni’s baby cornichon hack of quick-pickling oxalis pods to lore like Roman soldiers stuffing their sandals with mugwort to soothe their weary feet. Danni ended her walk with a poignant story about Doctor Caesar, an enslaved healer in colonial South Carolina who negotiated his freedom in 1750 by leveraging his invaluable medicinal knowledge of plantain and other plants.

Danni shared that the seeds in mature Eastern redbud pods could be cooked and eaten like lentils, which I gathered on our walk along with goldenrod for an ink wash. Back home, I realized that the seemingly infinite cook time required to soften these suckers up wasn’t for me (though I did get a few soft enough to nibble on and discover they have a surprisingly cabbage-like flavor). Instead, I decided to save my redbud seeds for one of many nature-based art projects on my to-try list: foraged crop art! If you’re wild-gathering seeds of an interesting shape, size or color this fall, I’d love to get a few to play with.

I also got to meet with culinary educator and chef Joe Rocchi, a citizen of Virginia’s Pamunkey Nation, over a fantastic meal at French-inspired Forsythia followed by old-fashioned sodas and ice cream at the vintage-vibed Franklin Fountain, where to my delight I found root beer syrup made with real sassafras and sarsaparilla. Joe has a nourishing recipe in my book featuring sumac and wild rice, and I’m grateful for the indigenous perspective he provided for my work.

My travel companion and I hoofed it around many a neighborhood seeing the sights and stopping in on bookstores (two of which have already expressed interest in collaborating, yay!) By the end of each day, my bag was weighed down with pounds of crabapples and hawthorn berries harvested from untouched street trees, including a set of trees right in front of Ben Franklin’s former rental properties! Back home those are getting put to work in a hawthorn oxymel and a crabapple syrup.

I promised to stick to the wild Philly highlights, but you can see more from my trip on Instagram, including the must-see Magical Gardens and Victor Cafe.