Culinary Adventures with Camilla

for·age (verb) ˈfôrij,ˈfärij  to search widely for food or provisions Purposeful foraging is fairly new to me. I mean, I've always loved picking berries besides creeks during hikes, but to go out with the purpose of picking wild foods for cooking and preserving later...well, that's a recent addition to our kitchen adventures. One of the books that has inspired me is Foraged Flavor .* You can also see some good foraging guidelines, written by Alexandra Risen, in one of my posts for the #UnearthedParty that was timed with Risen's book release: here . We've foraged fiddlehead ferns ,   miner's lettuce , and pine needles for an evergreen tisane ; I even cooked with Japanese maple leaves, making Momiji Tempura with them. So when I saw a tree teeming with elderberries, I made a note to go back with the boys. They cooperated to clip and collect about 8 C of elderberries. At home, we rinsed and let them air-dry. You'll see these in a few...

No, my husband is not smooching a tree. The boys discovered this tree. It's a kind of pine, but I have to do some research as to what kind of pine it is. When you stick your nose up to the bark, it has a distinctive butterscotch scent. I'm not joking. Jake and I talked about making some butterscotch bark bitters. The Enthusiastic Kitchen Elf and I went on a little foraging mission with Katie Blandin of Bar Cart Cocktail Co. last week. So, as we were hiking around Yosemite this past weekend, D kept pointing out edibles. "Mommy, we could make something with the pine tips...Mommy, look at the wild berries." But I explained that we do not collect from National Parks. I told him we'd drive outside of the park and as soon as we saw the same things, we'd pull over and forage a few. So, I'm sure you can imagine what happened: I followed rules about not collecting, we drove outside of the park, and...we couldn't find the tree anywhere. We pulled over ...

After having photographed the Cooking Foraged Foods Class at the Big Sur Foragers Festival  in January, I was duly inspired and ordered a copy of Foraged Flavor: Finding Fabulous Ingredients in Your Backyard or Farmer's Market  by Tama Matsuoka Wong and Eddy Leroux [amazon affiliate link below]. I still am not going to forage mushrooms without an experienced guide to lead me. But other things, not potentially deadly things, I will happily try.  And you can't spend a day with me without some sort of culinary adventure, right? So, when the boys and I went hiking with a friend in the Forest of Nisene Marks - and spotted fiddleheads - we gave them a tiny nibble. The kids said, "They're grassy tasting." Okay. I remember loving pickled fiddleheads. So, if I can find enough of them, I'll definitely give pickling them a try. For those unfamiliar, fiddleheads are the unfurled tips of ferns. I'm going do some more reading about when we can ...