Forage. Gather. Feast.

Description

Celebrate the pleasure of the wilderness (or even your backyard) with this approachable forage-to-kitchen cookbook featuring 110 recipes using foragable foods—from seaweed love to mushroom lust and everything in between.

Identify foragable foods in your own backyard to create simple, rustic recipes from the bounty of the coast, forest, and urban spaces up and down the West Coast.

Featuring more than 100 recipes and chock-full of lush photography, this cookbook shows you what to do with the delicious foodstuffs you can dig, snip, or catch anywhere from Alaska to Northern California, then put it all together in homecooked meals best shared with friends and gorgeous sunset views or cooked in the wild over a campfire.

Recipes include: 

• Morels, Asparagus, Fava Beans, and Fiddlehead Ferns with Burrata
• Black Truffle Pot de Crème with Preserved Sakura Cherry Blossoms
• Fire-Roasted Butter Clams with Seaweed Gremolata
• Spruce Tip and Juniper Berry Sockeye Salmon Gravlax
• Chilled Huckleberries with Campfire Caramel and Seaweed Salt

Reimagine your cooking and unlock new flavors from the abundance that surrounds us.“This gorgeous book is a celebration of wild food, foraging, and cultivating connection to the natural world. The recipes inside highlight ingredients from coast to forest and inspire you to get creative, get outside, and participate in the surrounding ecosystem; to live a healthier, more pleasurable, and more delicious life.” 
—Emma Teal Privat and Claire Neaton, co-owners of Salmon Sisters and authors of The Salmon Sisters: Feasting, Fishing, and Living in Alaska and Harvest & Heritage
 
“A deliciously thoughtful book with plenty of recipes for beginning or experienced foragers. I’ll have the mushroom pâté, cheesy pasta with truffles, and a candy cap old-fashioned, please.” 
—Alan Bergo, James Beard Award–winning chef and author, and winner of Hulu’s Chefs vs. Wild
 
“Flaming Pine Needle Mussels! Stinging Nettle Gnocchi! Cherry Blossom Truffles! With her backwoods bona fides and visionary palate, Maria Finn has taken foraging to the next level. No matter where you live, Forage. Gather. Feast will draw you into a delightful ‘adventure with purpose’ as it unlocks the layers of meaning and deliciousness permeating our woods and coastlines. Your kitchen game will never be the same. Neither will your soul.”
—Rowan Jacobsen, author of Truffle Hound and A Geography of Oysters
 
“Steeped in the magic of the West Coast, Forage. Gather. Feast. is a beautiful book. Maria’s deeply intuitive approach to cooking celebrates an abundance of wild foods from seaside to forests. Her book will be favorite in my kitchen for a long time.”
—Jenny McGruther, author of The Nourished Kitchen and Vibrant Botanicals
 
“With both simple and aspirational recipes, and delightful prose throughout, Maria Finn draws you into a deeper connection to nature through its wonderful, wild foods. Food is the lure, but the end goal is a realignment of human systems in sync with the pace and beauty of Mother Nature.”
—Becky Selengut, author of Good Fish and Shroom
 
“Forage. Gather. Feast. encourages you to get more awe into your daily diet by spending time in nature—delicious food is the lure. Maria’s recipes will inspire you to head for the woods, waterways, and urban green spaces to forage, gather, and feast your way into a better life.”
—Tiffany Shlain, artist, author, activist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker and founder of The Webby AwardsMARIA FINN is an author, chef, and maker who lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, with her truffle dog, two tabby cats, and a native oyster garden. She creates food, art, and storytelling experiences inspired by ecosystems like kelp forests and redwood watersheds; her work explores themes like love, awe, desire, and grief in regard to our relationship with the natural world. She founded Flora & Fungi Adventures, where she hosts wild food-centric adventures in California all the way north to Alaska. Visit her at MariaFinn.com.

MARLA AUFMUTH has been telling stories through her lens for twenty years. A California native, she brings a quirky, honest aesthetic to capture a rich, bold documentary view. Marla is also an avid gardener with a passion for capturing nature’s ebb and flow through her photography. You can often find Marla wildcrafting dandelion wine, harvesting Pacific seaweed, or preserving plum chutney. Visit her at MarlaAufmuth.com.Introduction
 
“The world is a huge place. How will you know where you fit in unless you explore beyond your comfort zone?” —Sir Ernest Shackleton
 
Planet earth’s beauty and pleasure is everyone’s birthright. Ripe berries and chanterelles for all! Going out into nature to find your own food is at once a primal part of our being and yet has grown unfamiliar. Sure, you may get stared at snipping spruce tips or reaching into overgrown blackberry bushes as if performing a deviant public act. But a deep part of us still yearns for berry-stained hands and the sizzle of food cooking on live fire, and foraging is a way to make space for beauty in our lives and preparing delicious edibles creates pleasure.
 
And being outdoors is good for you in so many ways. It reduces the stress hormone cortisol, it can lower your heart rate, and reduce some types of illness, improves sleep, and more. But there are the non-quantifiable reasons for heading into nature that are just as important. It’s fun and keeps us learning and curious and engaged with our surrounding world. And it helps us tune in and connect to the ancient cycles of our planet.
 
This book guides you into the woods and water’s edge for an adventure with purpose. It helps you see delicacies hanging over the sidewalk or slipping through the cracks. Harvesting wild food is an unscripted experience that requires us to follow nature’s rhythms of tides and seasons, rain and dry spells. If we do this, she gives us incredible, nutritious food for FREE. Those $45.00 a pound porcini? You can go find your own! Pickle rosehips and oranges, make seaweed butter, ferment your own vinegar blends—you’ll have a very esoteric pantry that makes the simplest dishes more intriguing. Find miners lettuce and stinging nettles—the delicious specialties that still have the bitter, sour, yummy complexity of food before it was dumbed down for uniformity in grocery stores. 
 
Foraging is the antidote to our too-too busy lives and crazy, convoluted, complex food systems. And when we are out in nature, we learn to live by nature’s s rules. Check the tides before going for clams or seaweed. Notice rain patterns for mushrooms. Learn what confluences between fresh and saltwater that native oysters love. What if we accepted the generosity of planet earth with reverence and passed it along? Could we then start becoming a keystone species that improves habitat for all other life on earth? 
 
When going out to find your own food, you may get wet, or muddy, or scratched, or scared. Often, you will get tired. You may find nothing, or so much you can barely carry it home. But it’s in these dark hollows, amidst bushwhacking, or escaping waves in the impact zone you will meet parts of yourself you’ve long lost, and even discover new aspects of yourself. 
 
Sharing the wild food you find with others is also sharing these newly discovered aspects of you with friends and family. The more time you spend in nature, the more you will recognize yourself, refracted back to you from a thousand different places—rays of light filtering through branches, mushrooms opening to release their spores, ferns unfurling, the carcass of deer left by a predator, the sting of a bee, a modest orchid, the hush of sunrise. No aspect is bad or good, they just are parts of a whole and you’ll start seeing them in yourself. Rachel Carson wrote that our blood has the same saline content as the ocean; in the book, in the book Scent and the Scenting, Dog William Syrotuck wrote that it’s estimated our skin has the same bacterial content as the soil. We are fractals of planet earth and deep down, we crave nature. This book encourages you to rewild yourself and eat inspired by our surrounding ecosystems. This I termed “Ecosystem Based Eating.” Create dishes according to the ecosystems where you found the food; as well, follow nature as a guide for what to eat. Does your plate look like an intertidal zone, a boreal forest? 

How to Use This Book
This book does not have any recipes where meat and poultry are the center of the plate. It’s not intentionally a pescatarian or vegetarian cookbook. In the woods, there are nuts and fungi; and at the coast, there are underwater seaweed, small fish, bivalves. I try to mimic nature as much as possible on the plate. I’m not a hunter. I’m not against ethical hunting for food. I just don’t do it. 
 
I strongly believe that food systems that benefit the earth are also good for our bodies—hello oysters and truffles! And, by mimicking ecosystems, we have a deeper sense of the unique and beautiful places where we live. A big pork chop or chicken breast at the center of the plate doesn’t tell a story of these landscapes we love. Wild plums, morel mushrooms, kombu, and fir tips tell the story I want to be a part of. This is why you’ll find recipes organized by coastal, forest, and urban ecosystems. So this book is plant forward, low meat, and regenerative-focused foods. There are options for gluten free, keto-ish and vegan included in some of the recipes.
 
Think of this book as part instruction and part inspiration. It is by no means a comprehensive guide to wild foods, and it doesn’t advocate trying to “live off the land” and eat primarily wild foods. There are too many people for that. Rather, the foraging tips, recipes and DIY’s are meant to get you outside, interacting with the natural world and translating that experience in your food. If you just harvest salt once a year, every time you sprinkle it over your dishes, you’ll have a memory of being at the ocean’s edge, pelicans flying by in formation, the spout of a whale in the distance. The goal of this book is for you to fall in love with nature in the most visceral possible way – through food. The recipes are simple, yet the ingredients a bit esoteric. Some you may be able to find seasonally at the farmers market or grocery store, but the fun is in finding your own patches of rosehips and huckleberries.CN

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