What if you decided what to have for dinner by looking outside?
Instead of what’s lined up on the shelves at the store, selecting what’s plentiful and useful from nature.
A bowl of crabapples, a handful of greens and herbs like the edible weeds growing with the spinach. We’ve walked by them so many times…
Lamb’s Quarters and Spinach
free lamb recipes:
Pasture's Bounty Lamb Cooking Guide. How to cook Lamb fresh from your neighbor's farm
5 Recipe Guide Including Garlic and Anchovy Lamb Shoulder
Hunting and foraging for everyday meals
Sounds like a huge undertaking, but it can be simple.
Looking where you live and eating from that place is the basic concept.
Two questions usually come up when we prepare food:
‘What’s for dinner?’ And
‘What do I need to buy?’
We could eat more of what’s growing around us.
Familiar things like the apple drops along the roadsides.
Others you may not have tried or even heard of.
Connecting what’s here and what we eat is foraging.
Gathering this way can be a respite in our overstimulating worlds.
I’m sharing a specific meal here that I recently prepared.
Here’s how it turned out for me:
This meal began as a class project, but it became something much more useful to me: a new way of thinking about dinner.
It all came together for this beautiful menu.
This included scheduling time to go foraging, talking with knowledgeable friends, and preparing the meal.
Farmher Charcuterie used The Farmstand Cafe’s specialty crackers with Nettle Salt as the foraged item. ( www.thefarmstandcafe.com )
There’s more local here, too:
Laughing Child Currant Jam ( www.laughingchildfarm.com )
Old Gates Farm Cantaloupe, Watermelon, and Carrots ( www.oldgatesfarm.com )
SVTFarm Cherry Tomatoes
The second, authentic foraged item was crabapple that I made into a Maple Crabapple BBQ sauce to accompany the Braised Lamb.
My son helped crank the squeezo for an easy, smooth sauce we can use to top sliders the rest of the week.
After blowing out the candles and everyone going back to their lives I was thankful for this amazing feast we shared, the places that provided it, and the connections made.
Not only did I enjoy this feast to celebrate my birthday, but I also created food for the rest of the week that fit our schedule.
I've been practicing a different relationship with food.
Making connections with what we eat is like a puzzle.
A meal can be a map of the places, people, and relationships around you.
look a little closer at what grows where we live and wonder what could become part of a meal.
The next time you’re wondering what to cook, look outside first. You might be surprised by what’s already there.