Books

Dedicated to the practise of 21st century eating and foraging, Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine is my wild foods cookbook. Via 36 chapters, each featuring an inspiringly useful native or invasive edible plant, 510 recipes guide you right through the flavor profile and scope of each wild ingredient.

Forage, Harvest, Feast is written for cooks, chefs, and mixologists, gardeners and growers, farmers market shoppers and vendors. It is informed by my growing awareness of the importance of biodiversity, conservation, and balance in nature, and an irrepressible appetite for interesting flavors.

It is indexed for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and omnivores. 

Forage, Harvest, Feast is available online directly from Chelsea Green Publishing, or Amazon. To locate or order it at your nearest independent bookseller, use IndieBound. In my native South Africa you can order it from Loot. 

In the introduction to each plant I give an overview of its uses, habits, and season, and also offer cultivation tips so that they can be grown at home. Yes, you can grow native American ramps, Allium tricoccum (or European wild garlic - Allium ursinum), increasingly threatened in the wild by over-harvest and habitat-loss. 

Many of the plants in Forage, Harvest, Feast can be foraged internationally: amaranth,  burdock, dandelion, Japanese knotweed, lamb’s quarters, nettles (nettle galette, above), mugwort, quickweed, purslane, sorrels, and cresses are widespread. So are cattails (bulrushes). And American black locust is viewed as a European tree (usually called acacia)! 

Native American plants like bayberry, common milkweed, fiddleheads, prickly ash, ramps, spicebush, and sweetfern can – and often should, for reasons of sustainability – be grown at home, in community gardens, or on diversified farms. The book provides readers with the insight to use these indigenous spices that few Americans know - an irony that I love addressing.

The recipes range from pantry basics and preserves, to infusions, syrups, ferments, and hooches, to dozens of appetizers, entrées, desserts, and bakes. 

My first book, 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life,  offers monthly menus and recipes inspired by the year's 12 months, as I experienced them from the perspective of a small-space gardener, forager and cook. It is available on Amazon, or you can order to it from your local bookstore.

It is "creative nonfiction, cut from the same cloth as great nature writing," writes Gabrielle Langholtz, former editor of Edible Manhattan and the tome America: The Cookbook. 

Forage on!