Plant to Plate

Did you know you can eat dandelions? Have you thought about what plants, flowers, nuts, and berries around you are edible? You could save money by foraging for food—in the wild!

Your next meal may be in your own backyard.

Hunting and gathering were the way humans fed themselves before the age of farming and homesteads. The Earth can provide all you need, even in the wild and uncultivated areas of nature.

I will teach you what to find and how to make a yummy meal from wild plants.

I worked as a chef in a bustling city a lifetime before. The last restaurant I worked in, the sous chef specialized in serving wild and hard-to-find foods. I would often talk to suppliers from different parts of the world, from Japanese suppliers that sell us popping seaweeds called umi budo to a local farmer that forages seasonal mushrooms for us.

Whenever the boxes arrived, combing through the wild and wonderful produce made me dream about doing my own foraging. Of course, life happened—foraging was not a priority, but it was always there nagging at me as I walked down the aisles in the supermarket. The opportunity presented itself after we decided to move to the country after our wedding, and now we have The Manor. I learned that Mother Earth will provide—in more ways than one.

We saw the sprawling woods around it and decided that we couldn't let it go to waste. We renovated it ourselves—my wife, the museum curator, was delighted when we started accepting guests in the manor. Most of the menu items we serve to our guests in the manor are foraged from the woods behind us. We started to build something here, something we hoped could bring people together with history and nature. Connect with the world—food for your soul.

Foraging is something that can connect you with the world around you—it is not hunting, and I believe it is more sustainable than farming.