Urban Foraging
Find, Gather, and Cook 50 Wild Plants
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Your city is full of wild food, you just need to know where to find it.
Take a stroll to discover the ingredients for a wild apple tarte tatin. Turn the lilac bush found in a vacant lot into a delicious, delicately flavored jelly for your morning pastry. Discover a new way to feast on fresh food. Urban Foraging is a stylish, scrumptious guide to wildcrafting in the city. You’ll learn how to find, identify, harvest, and cook with 50 common wild plants, such as chickweed, dandelion, echinacea, honeysuckle, red clover, and pine. Expert forager Lisa M. Rose shares all the basics necessary for a successful harvest: clear photos that aid identification, tips for ethical and safe gathering, details on culinary uses, and simple recipes will help you make truly fresh, nutritious meals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Herbalist Rose (Midwest Medicinal Plants) shares in this encyclopedic outing tips for city-dwellers looking to forage edible plants. Each plant profile includes details about when and how to harvest, plus recommendations for uses. Rose covers common fare such as apples and mint, as well as lesser-known varieties, including hyssop (a "classic" cold remedy) and daylilies (which "can be stuffed with a soft cheese... then fried in butter like stuffed squash blossoms"). There's a recipe for each plant, among them mugwort bitters, autumn olive BBQ sauce, and wild garlic flatbreads. Rose cautions against searching along railroad tracks, as they're "known to be high in arsenic, which can be absorbed into plants," and advises that it's important to know what one is eating, since "poisoning is both possible and a drag," though, unfortunately, the work is light on identification tips. Seasoned gatherers will find plenty of clever tricks, though, and Rose skillfully mixes anecdotes with fast facts about everyday plants—"Japanese knotweed is at the top of nearly all invasive-plant Most Wanted lists," for example. Home cooks ready to branch out will find this a resource worth returning to.
