Two Reviews of Foraging Books

At a certain point many foragers grow hungry for bounty beyond mushrooms and cattails. They seek meat – raw and wild – yet making the leap from acorn gatherer to elk killer is a daunting one that seems beyond grasp. Hank Shaw’s Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast narrows that gap with an entertaining, informative and approachable perspective on all forms of wild dining.

Read more at The Gastronomer's Bookshelf

Curious Kumquat

My latest Bauscher submissions

This is a tough dish to work with but has plenty of potential.

Bread Course: Brown butter hazelnut financier, black sesame tuiles, smoked butter, piñon panna cotta, foraged wood sorrel.

BBQ in the Park: Mustard kulfi, deviled quail eggs, baked bean shards, acorn dust.

Curious Kumquat

Foraged Possibilities

For all of my foraging friends if I suggested eating young, green acorns, what would you assume would be the taste experience? Probably astringent or tannin, right? These were green acorns off of scrub oak, pulled straight from the tree. I nibbled on one on the trail and was surprise how mild it was. I went back and pulled a bag full, braised them in a Chardonnay and then finally finished them with soy as they were cooling - the result was a tender, yet al dente nut with mild umami flavor. I added them to my current oxtail dish for texture and a bit of sharpness to counteract the richness and it worked very well. The nice thing is that there's plenty more available right now. My theory is that the tannins become more pronounced as the acorns mature, so I'll continue to test this theory as the season progresses.

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Poiré Cidre

I recently enjoyed a bottle of this French pear cider for dinner. I hadn't previously seen this but my new beer distributor has a few and they're quite nice.
Curious Kumquat

Electrolux MagicMill - Repair Lesson

I've bragged about the Electrolux MagicMill Assistant many times before. Its a work horse. It makes my KitchenAid Pro look like a scrawny Freshman trying to do a pull up. But it does have some minor flaws. One is that there is no on/off switch, rather there is a timer that turns it on and off. The problem is that if you want to stop the machine before the time runs out you need to manually turn the timer off. Not a problem except that it loosens and ultimately detaches the knob.

Well, I finally had to disassemble mine to fix it, so here is a pictorial on fixing this problem.

UNPLUG YOUR MACHINE

Notice the knob on the left turned past the off label. In fact, I could turn the knob back and forth a full inch or more before anything happened, and in the end the knob was clearly not attached to anything. I had assumed that I had broken the spring, so it was time to crack it open.

Start by pulling both knobs straight out - be careful to not torque them to the side - straight out. Then, if your nuts and washers are still in place remove them and remember how they attach.

Take a butter knife and pry from the side seam. Note that the bottom will pop out first. There are three flexible arms with catch triggers on the end on the bottom edge, while the top has three anchor points that will disengage once the bottom is off.

We can now see that it is a very simple mechanism inside. Be careful to not loosen any wires. The knob holder peg will stick out and just off to a side is a small pin. When the pin is in place the mechanism will sit at roughly 20º so don't expect it to sit horizontal to the machine.

See the little peg 2mm to the left of the knob holder?

Return the mechanism to its place, lock in the knob holder with a washer and nut. Be sure its tight and that the mechanism is no longer moving. Return the face plate by settling the three top anchors into their slots. Then snap the three flexible arms on the bottom into their slot. Double check your knob holder, and if its stable, return the knobs to their holders and give it a try.

Curious Kumquat

Winning Dish

Here is our winning entry in the Farm2Chef Challenge - Foraged Crawfish Cake, Greens (Frisco Farms), Cucumber (Gone Fishin' Farm), Garlic flower, nasturtium, borage (our own garden), tomato (Blythe), house cured bacon, raspberry vinaigrette, horseradish aioli, foraged watercress and wood sorrel. I think there was more but these were the highlights.

Curious Kumquat

Random dishes

I must be waxing nostalgic as my current menu winds down. Here are a few more old dishes that I've been serving.

Someone gifted me with kumquats so what's a guy to do...candy them of course. I still had some kumquat chutney from a previous batch so these just got a long candying and have been finding their way onto my menu in various places.


One place has been this dish which I call Gila Fields. The Town of Gila is 30 minutes North of us and is nestled along the Gila River. Great soil and so a number of my foragers and growers come from that area. This dish includes baby purple potato coated in kaolin clay, mushroom cake, sherry gelée, caper powder, piñon, lemon and sweet juniper.

Another iteration of the same in a beautiful Bauscher dish:

I called this pop-tart. Foraged mint, sweet pea tartlet on a Tafelstern Showpiece Bambu plate.

Not the best picture, but sweet potato, celery root, roasted tomato, sous vide radish and sweet pea, mushroom soil

That same Gila Fields with some flower bling and piñon oil powder

An early version of my cashew tower: Celery root, 14 day fermented cashew cheese, Salvadoran spiced roasted vegetables, cactus skin, black tea infused lentils

Cleaning House: More Recent Dishes

Here are a few more dishes that I've done as I clear out my photo album.

This is an old amuse bouche of acorn crema, mushroom soil, goat yogurt, purple carrot and parsley


An old version of a current dish: Cattail, cucumber, acorn


A dish so popular that it will surely make a comeback: Goat cheese cake, beet, dandelion


Recognize this? Another old variation: Goat yogurt, acorn, Jerusalem artichoke, wild grapes


Acorn, goat, piñon

Curious Kumquat

Bauscher and the Spoon

Many of you know of my relationship with the Bauscher Corporation who makes some of the most beautiful restaurant dishes. And many of you have seen my contributions to their Deep Plate Blog where they highlights chefs' creations using their dishes. For next month I was sent the perfect piece for my style of cooking.

Here are a series of my dishes that I refitted to the Tafelstern Showpiece Bambu collection:

Crispy duck, sweet potato, forest berry, cashew cheese


Cattail, cucumber, mint, garden flowers, acorn


Mushroom cake with cholla infused caramel


From my creepy eyeball collection: late harvest Torrontes infused local goat yogurt, butternut, shallot jam, sweet juniper

Curious Kumquat

Recipe: Cherry Pop-Tart

Ever since I posted my Pop-Tart recipe a while back which figured out the crust and a cinnamon filling, I've had numerous requests for fruit filling. Today I gave it a go and got the cherry just right.

The pastry recipe is the same as my original. The trick with the filling is that there are a lot of chemicals in the original recipe that make it the texture and taste that it is. My version may not last for a year on the grocery shelf, but its just as good, and probably better.

1/2 C Dried cherries
1/2 C Almond flour/meal
1 Egg White
1/4 C Powdered Sugar

Put all of the ingredients into a food processor and buzz into a fine mush. This takes a while so keep working at it. Eventually you'll get a rough but homogeneous glop. That's all there is to it. Fill the pastry, seal and bake. The flavor and texture were spot on. So, now you can make any of the fruit flavors so that just leaves the pursuit of the fudge Pop-Tart still to figure out.

The anal retentive reader will ask about the cherries on the frosting. I took some of the remnants of the filling, added more powdered sugar and baked at 300ºF for 15 minutes, let it dry then chopped into small pieces. It was still sticky so I put the pieces, spread out, back into the oven and that did the trick.
Curious Kumquat