Johnna Holmgren - Tales from a Foragers Kitchen : the Ultimate Field Guide to Evoke Curiosity and Wonderment with More Than 80 Recipes and Foraging Tips

JOHNNA HOLMGREN is the blogger behind Fox Meets Bear. She lives in the woods of Minnesota with her husband Max, the illustrator of Bear Fox Chalk, and daughters Luella Beane, Minoux Wilder, and Juniper Eisley.

Acknowledgments

T o our parentsthank you for the endless amounts of love you gave through nature walks, unicorn hunts, books, sleepovers, and time spent with our girls while we created and wrote this book. Thank you for your endless excitement and support through this journey. I love you and couldnt have done this without you all!

To my siblings and close friends, I dont deserve the incredible support, phone calls, ideas, recipe testing, manuscript editing, multitudes of messages, and genuine interest you all offered to me through this project. I love you all so much.

To the beautiful online world and readers of Fox Meets Bear ! Thank you genuinely so much for your support and loving words. Thank you to those who have changed or challenged my perspective in ways to view things differently, for taking interest in us and the way we do life. Thank you for purchasing this book and supporting our family.

Endless thank yous to my editor, Dervla Kelly, who took my beyond-messy conglomeration of ideas and recipes and made actual sense of them. Thank you for believing in this book and grasping my vision for it all from our very first phone call. I am so thankful to you and for your wildly abundant talent as an editor.

An enormous thank you to the team at Rodale Books. Rae Ann Spitzenberger (designer), Anna Cooperberg (editorial assistant), Nancy N. Bailey (copy editor) Sara Cox and Marilyn Hauptly (managing editorial team), Angie Giammarino (marketing), and Aly Mostel (PR). Thank you all for allowing me to be integrated into the formation and design of this and for all of the time and heart you all put into it, which Im sure I cant even fully grasp the extent of. I am so grateful for you all.

Thank you to my agent, Kim Perel, for believing in the birth of this idea and representing it and grasping the dream for Tales from a Foragers Kitchen. Thank you to Olivia Herrick, for helping launch my vision for this cookbook into proposal form and spending so many hours next to me at the computer designing it all.

A huge thank you to Matt Lien, my photographer, for syncing up so well with me on the vision for this. This has been such a beautiful journey to create with you.

Thank you to so many incredible businesses that were woven through this book:

Alice and Ames

Bobs Red Mill

Bodega Ltd.

The Foundry Home Goods

Hackwith Design House

Mercury Mosaics

Mette Duedahl

Minnetonka Moccasin

Rejuvenation

Sanborn Canoe Co.

Schoolhouse Electric

SoftStar Shoes

Traditional Medicinals

Vivo Barefoot

Chapter 1

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I believe in the idea that foraging can be experienced in the woods, on a roadside, or on top of a mountain, but it can also be experienced in a grocery store. You either picked up this book because you forage yourself or you are intrigued by foraging. But even if you dont live close to dirt or woods or rushing streams, you can still adhere to a foragers mind-set. A forager stays open to possibilities. A forager is drawn to the goodness of the earth. You can be a forager of the woods, but you can also be a forager at the farmers market, hunting and gathering and letting your senses carry you to new small wooden cases of goods. You can even be a forager at the most conventional grocery store in the world. You can give yourself the freedom to break away from the norm and the mundane and create your own wonder, your own adventure, just by having the mind-set that something could be beautiful if you just open your eyes, see it, taste it, and experience it.

We have to give ourselves permission to be free and open to new possibilities on this earth!

Tales from a Foragers Kitchen consists of recipes, resources, supply lists, odes to earth-grown goods, intention and homage for connecting with the earth, and fairy tales for either yourself or your kids. This book is intended to be a practical guide to planting your own forest and cultivating sustainability and generosity for the woods, as well as a conglomeration of all things wild and free. It includes a combination of elements that intrigue me.

There are many ways to use this book just as there are many ways to do life. It can be read from cover to cover. It can stay in your kitchen. It can sit in your living room as a coffee table book. It can be flipped through and experienced at random. If you decide you hate it, you can use it for fire starter. It can be a source for learning about specific herbal aids and remedies or used as a field guide to foraging. I describe taste, touch, sound, sight, and smell and am drawn to magical realism. You can pull it out and read the short stories to your children while you bake a new recipe. You can gift it to the naturalist in your life or page through it while you wait for something to cook in the oven. This cookbook, to me, is like the ultimate field guide for curiosity in the kitchen. Its a reminder of how intensely life-giving it can be to connect with nature every single day in some way. It is a reminder to be open to spontaneity. If youre a planner, I hope it will remind you to plan time to be spontaneous.

Sit back and let the instructions take you from ingredient to ingredient at whatever pace suits you. Put this here. Add this there. Its okay to make notes inside of these pages, to flip each page with fingers dripping of honey or with dirt from a dandelion root. A book should be loved and used and engaged with as a fuel to help us have fresh eyes on familiar ingredients and give us the confidence to explore new ones.

All the food recipes yield for a family of four or five people. Some will have leftovers to be stored away for the next day or in glass jars to be frozen for a few weeks out.

The recipes should be altered or ingredients substituted to your liking. Connect with your preferred nuts or milk alternatives. This is a starting point to launch into different forms of exploration in the kitchen. Its a guide to look down at your plate and appreciate a meal that exemplifies sustenance. Ive chosen ingredients that are wholesome and nourishing and provoke intrigue. I hope it makes you feel a little closer to moss and ferns and the feeling of the forest. I hope it gently nudges you to notice a ladybug in a new light. I hope it brings the woods to you among the taxis streaming by. I hope it feels like an invitation to escape to a different place!

I hope you use this cookbook to stoke your appreciation for the raw goodness of this earth. I consider it the antithesis of a weekly meal plan. Its more like a whisper to be brave and bold and try something new.

A FORAGERS MANIFESTO

We believe in nature.

We believe in curiosity.

We believe in the beauty of the seasons. The mud, dirt, roots, berry-stained hands, slush, and summer-dripped sweat. We love all of the messes of each season and believe they are all good things.

We believe in small clippers and big baskets.

We believe that we are absolutely never too old to be bubbling with awe and a wide-eyed perspective for whimsy and wonder.