Food

NEW FOOD: BEAUTIFUL, WILD, & FREE

Courtesy of Maangchi. Foraging Myeongaju (Lamb's Quarters)

Food and drink outdoors has a special taste factor. Not only does it all taste better somehow but we have a more intense, more connected, more exuberant experience than we do indoors. Whether it’s rustic or haute, fresh air is an unmatched stellar ingredient.

While the range is as wide as the great outdoors, today we are featuring beautiful things happening right now in foraging.

Foraging, an ancient survival-necessitated practice, is having its neo-renaissance, You can find a lot of beautiful fresh food, growing wild, pretty much wherever you are -- countryside, cities, suburbs, beach -- with different baskets to choose from. It’s the ultimate in local seasonal eating.

Photo: Jason Pietra for Mads Refslund.

“Why go to a supermarket and buy a cucumber when you can go to a farmers’ market, or a beautiful field?” Danish super-chef Mads Refslund, told New York Times journalist, Joyce Lau.

Foraging has become cool vs merely life-saving. There’s an added thrill and increased aesthetic when you search for and gather wild foods.

Lau’s article, “Foraging in Hong Kong With Denmark’s Most Famous Chef” recounts Refslund’s recent performance, crafting a masterpiece meal out of vegetables, fruits, moss, and fungi sourced from the wilds of one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, at a food and wine festival at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Kowloon.

Photo: Courtesy of Mads Refslund. Aroma from the Woods.

Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, which Refslund co-founded in 2003, beat the long reigning Spanish jewel, El Bulli, in 2010, as the top-rated restaurant in the world. His latest inspired dining mecca, Acme, in New York, is already dazzling. His penchant for combining unlikely flavors and textures, using unexpected ingredients, and daring with a bit of whimsy, is a natural progression, extending from his longtime interest in finding, vs buying or growing food. With the help of two foragers, including Tama Matsuoka Wong, Refslund now sources from the wilds of the New York Hudson Valley and up into New England. In winter, not much to forage here so he uses wood as his ingredients — bark from the oak tree, and he makes fermented birch.

Photo: Mads Refslund. “Burnt Field’ of Smoked Vegetables.

We’ve been cooking with flowers and herbs for eons now, but once you shift into wild-mode, the flavors, colors, textures and scents offer a new dimension. And Refslund luxuriates in that. For his showpiece, he assembled wild yellow cucumber rounds, topped with thinly sliced raw wild abalone, “then piled on emerald seeds and bright orange blossoms,” as Lau describes it. “He crisped tiny zebra fish he had bought on the island and left one hanging from his lower lip, as a farmer might a stalk of grass. He arranged the rest as if they were swimming through an ocean of herbs and greens.”

Photo: Jon Angelo for Mads Refslund.

Smoked veal tartare with lumpfish caviar, horseradish, watercress, and pine.

And then this wild chef went over the top, turning this dish made of the wild outdoors into an outdoors diorama. “For a final touch, he spooned on powdered dry ice, which sent up wispy white plumes and turned the plate into a miniature Nordic landscape.”

Photo: Tavis Jacobs. View from Beacon Food Forest, Seattle

Seattle, Washington, has a new foraging hub right in the middle of its Beacon Hill neighborhood, the Beacon Food Forest. Funded by local community members, with land donated by the local utility, this is a new kind of city park, filled with edible wild plants. Now anyone can forage this 7 acre parcel for free. It will feature fruit-bearing perennials — apples, pears, plums, grapes, blueberries, raspberries and more.

Photo: Bill Bradshaw

If you don’t have an organized food forest in your neighborhood, don’t fret. Get an app for it! Falling Fruit, recently launched by Caleb Philips and Ethan Welty tells you where you can forage for free at over a half-million locations around the world. Get your vintage hunting and gathering tools ready.

Foraging locations are pinned with dots. Zoom in and click on one, and a description of the trees, bushes, and other wild food sources pops up, including information on seasonality, quality, yield, a link to the species profile on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website, and additional advice.

Photo: Courtesy of Alderleaf Wilderness College

Welty, a photographer and geographer based in Boulder, Colo., compiled most of the locations from various municipal databases, local foraging organizations and urban gardening groups. The map has more than 6,700 crowdsourced entries so far.

Philips, a computer scientist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, considers the app a community service, connecting people with free wild food, getting them away from the grocery store, and into the beautiful outdoors. The map includes sites for freely accessed fruits, veggies, beehives, public water wells, and even dumpsters with excess food waste.

Image: Foraging and Feasting

If you’re wondering what do do with all of your newfound wild food bounty, you can get some beautiful ideas from “Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook,” by Dina Falconi and illustrated by Wendy Hollender. The book features exquisite, instructive botanical illustrations and delicious creative recipes, connecting with nature through food and art.

Photo: Courtesy of Botanical Arts Press

Here’s an example of one of the gorgeous menus that you too can create after a fruitful outdoors adventure. The recipes are also annotated with lovely anecdotes and wise tips.

Image: Foraging and Feasting

One of our favorite recipes from the book is for Wild Tapenade, chock full of foraged field garlic, wild oregano, and bergamot. If you’re luck enough to live near where olive trees grow, you can forage those too.

Wild Tapenade Master Recipe

Makes about 1½ cups

As always, experimenting with the various wild herbs that flow through the growing season is part of the fun. Since this spread keeps very well, put up jars of it (they make great gifts) and enjoy the wild flavors anytime of the year.

½ pound (8oz) oil cured black olives, pitted

5 anchovy fillets, packed in oil

2 tablespoons capers, drained

4-6 field garlic bulbs, or 1 garlic clove

½ teaspoon citrus zest: lemon, lime, or orange

¼-½ cup aromatic, fresh, wild herbs, coarse stems removed (use the smaller amount if herb is stronger flavored like wild bergamot and oregano or use the larger amount if herb is milder like sweet cicely)

½ cup cold pressed olive oil

Place all the ingredients in a food processor except the oil and blend until the ingredients are finely minced into a coarse paste. Don’t over process the tapenade or it will become too thin. Add the olive oil and blend for a few more seconds. Place in small bowls and serve with good whole grain sourdough bread. Or put the tapenade in glass jars with tight fitting lids and store in the refrigerator where it will store for many months.

Watch Falconi and Hollender’s beautifully made video to learn more about their ideas and their process.

Video: Wendy Hollender

The beauty of the outdoors can nourish both your body and soul. Check out our other posts this week, Your Soul Outdoors, New Outdoors Sound and Vision, and Outdoors Eye-Candyland Now. And check out this week's competition. The theme is Outdoors. (Deadline: 8/18/2013).