I started foraging when I was a toddler and my Greek great-grandmother took me to a park to gather dandelion leaves. I read foraging field guides almost incessantly (still do). Eventually, I got a certification in Ethnobotany and went professional. I love teaching and sharing my passion for wild foods through my books, workshops, and videos. One of the most rewarding moments for me is when a student realizes that something I’ve just identified as a safe and delicious edible is a plant that grows all around them. It’s a game-changer. They can’t go back to seeing any plant as “just a weed."
Rather than focusing on survival food or a fun outdoor activity, this book zooms in on foraging as a source of unique flavors that cannot be purchased. From salts mixed with wild herbs to pine needle vinegar to homemade beers infused with the tastes of the forest, Pascal is interested in much more than “Is it edible?” He wants to know what each wild ingredient is going to do for his (and our) taste buds.
"A gorgeous book . . . . [Baudar's] methods, ideas, and aesthetics . . . are truly inspirational."-Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation
"A beautiful book, loaded with recipes and techniques for preserving and eating wild plants."-Saveur
With detailed recipes for ferments, infusions, spices, and more!
The New Wildcrafted Cuisine explores the flavors of local terroir, combining the research and knowledge of plants and landscape with the fascinating and innovative techniques of a master food preserver and self-described "culinary alchemist."
Author Pascal Baudar views his home terrain of southern California (mountain, desert, chaparral, and seashore) as a…
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
Sometimes you just need a coffee table sort of book and though it is paperback, Frédéric Raevens photography in this book is worth the purchase alone. When I’m buying cookbooks I make sure to buy cookbooks written by chefs from other countries as it offers a lovely diversity of ingredients, techniques, and approaches. Emanuelli lives in Brussels and I found their perspective refreshing. The first fifth of the book is full-page mushroom porn in the best possible way. You could stop right there, but there’s so much more; recipes such as Glazed pork belly with truffled honey and Caramelized Belgian endive with black trumpet mushrooms, and Porcini and Chestnut soup. When I decided to write a mushroom cookbook, I was so pleased that my book stayed away from many of the others on the market by simply adding butter and cream to every recipe and calling it good. And then…
This French buy-in is an extremely beautiful guide to buying and cooking mushrooms. More an evocative pleasure-read for mushroom lovers than a straight-up reference book for serious foragers, this book contains more than 120 uniquely French stream-of-consciousness recipes and colour photographs on every spread, with more than 200 photographs throughout.
I love the outdoors, and there are so many benefits to playing, imagining, and being outside. I grew up on a fruit farm in Southern Ontario, so I spent much of my growing years playing outdoors and enjoying the natural world. When I became a professional educator, I read the research about the very concrete benefits being outside every day has on young learners. Bring on the recess! Books have a way of sparking action. When we read about how someone else enjoys the outdoors, it makes us want to do the same. Books are inspiring.
The Mushroom Fan Club is a quirky nonfiction book about hunting for mushrooms that will make you laugh! The mushrooms “look like aliens from outer space” and the illustrations prove it. Facts, diagrams, and fun incidents the author has experienced with her children encourage the reader to try mushroom hunting. But even if you don’t want to hunt, mushroom by mushroom, Gravel will convince everyone that mushrooms are indeed very cool.
Elise Gravel is back with a whimsical look at one of her family s most beloved pastimes: mushroom hunting! Combining her love of exploring nature with her talent for anthropomorphizing everything, she takes us on a magical tour of the forest floor and examines a handful of her favorite alien specimens up close. While the beautiful coral mushroom looks like it belongs under the sea, the peculiar Lactarius indigo may be better suited for outer space. From the fun-to-stomp puffballs to the prince of the stinkers?the stinkhorn mushroom?and the musically inclined chanterelles, Gravel shares her knowledge of this fascinating kingdom…
I started foraging when I was a toddler and my Greek great-grandmother took me to a park to gather dandelion leaves. I read foraging field guides almost incessantly (still do). Eventually, I got a certification in Ethnobotany and went professional. I love teaching and sharing my passion for wild foods through my books, workshops, and videos. One of the most rewarding moments for me is when a student realizes that something I’ve just identified as a safe and delicious edible is a plant that grows all around them. It’s a game-changer. They can’t go back to seeing any plant as “just a weed."
Steve’s funky sense of humor and obvious love for the wild foods he describes make this book a classic. It is especially useful for urban foragers in the Northeast. Anyone who has ever been on one of Steve’s foraging tours will recognize the playful way he delivers essential botanical information. And that playfulness makes the information memorable.
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places shows readers how to find and prepare more than five hundred different plants for nutrition and better health. It includes information on common plants such as mullein (a tea made from the leaves and flowers suppresses a cough), stinging nettle (steam the leaves and you have a tasty dish rich in iron), cattail (cooked stalks taste similar to corn and are rich in protein), and wild apricots (an infusion made with the leaves is good for stomach aches and digestive disorders).
I don’t usually read post-apocalyptic stories, as I tend to find them too dreary and sad for my taste.
But I heard too many good things about Little Mushroom to not give it a chance, and I am so glad I did. Despite the worryingly high body-count and literal end-of-days plot, the story is so full of hope and love for the future of humanity that I actually felt uplifted by the end of it.
I read this book and its sequel in a ridiculously short amount of time, losing sleep to finish them, and even now months after finally putting them down I still find myself thinking about the plot. It’s the kind of story I wish I could read again for the first time.
In the year 2020, Earth's magnetic poles disappeared and humankind was nearly wiped out by cosmic radiation. Within the span of a hundred years, living creatures began to mutate and devour each other while the remaining humans, numbering in the tens of thousands, struggled bitterly in their man-made bases.
In the Abyss, home to the mutated xenogenics, there lived a sentient little mushroom. Because it had been nourished by the blood and flesh of the deceased human An Ze, not only did it take on a similar-looking human form, but a similar name as well:…
My first favorite food was a mushroom and as a budding young chef, my first dish, made at 6, was a terrible take on mushrooms on toast points made with Wonder Bread, margarine, and a sad can of mushrooms. My father pretended to eat it. For his sake, I’m glad he didn’t. Things have improved for me since then and I turned my passion for mushrooms into a lifelong love of cooking them which led to my book Shroom, a cookbook for both mushroom lovers and avowed fungiphobes. Mushrooms have distinct culinary personalities and the diversity in edible mushrooms is as vast as that between a salinic, ocean-kissed oyster and a smoky, meaty grilled ribeye.
Full disclosure, the author Langdon Cook is a friend of mine based out of Seattle where I live and we’ve foraged together, taught classes together, and made a spectacularly crappy batch of blackberry wine together but that’s not why I’m recommending his excellent book The Mushroom Hunters. Langdon takes the reader on a rollicking ride to places we didn’t at first think we wanted to go and then leaves us wanting more when he moves on. He skillfully teases apart the myths versus facts behind historical turf wars and gun violence in matsutake patches in one chapter and shadows Doug, a self-described redneck, throughout the book as he traverses the changing demographics of pickers and buyers, now firmly in the hands of many in the Southeast Asian community. The characters that frame his book, the pickers, buyers, and chefs that occupy the universe of wild and foraged foods are…
“A beautifully written portrait of the people who collect and distribute wild mushrooms . . . food and nature writing at its finest.”—Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia
“A rollicking narrative . . . Cook [delivers] vivid and cinematic scenes on every page.”—The Wall Street Journal
In the dark corners of America’s forests grow culinary treasures. Chefs pay top dollar to showcase these elusive and beguiling ingredients on their menus. Whether dressing up a filet mignon with smoky morels or shaving luxurious white truffles over pasta, the most elegant restaurants across the country now feature one of nature’s last truly wild…
One way I bring lightness and wonder to my life is through the joy of observing something new around me in this world. The new thing might be the forty Heavenly Blue morning glories that bloomed one morning for my father and me, finding an ancient fossil shell in a skirt of fallen shale at the bottom of a cliff or hearing Balinese gamelan music for the first time. But each time one of these wonders lights up my day, I am reminded of how limited our ability to observe is. Each of these books gave me a view into a world I had not even dreamed about.
All my life I’ve loved looking closely at the natural world to see as much as possible: Why is that leaf broken? Was a chipmunk digging here? Is that a different kind of mushroom? But no matter how closely I looked, I was unaware of the overwhelming complexities and sophistication of the fungal world.
Sheldrake shows the interconnections, not metaphysical ones but actual physical and chemical connections, between fungi, plants, and even living, moving animals. If that chapter about ants doesn’t change how you see the world, I don’t know what will. Fungi own the world, and we are just lucky to live in it.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
Mary Losure is the author of The Fairy Ring, or Elsie and Frances Fool the World. Though she doesn’t happen to believe in fairies herself, when she went to Cottingley, England, and explained that she was writing a children’s book about the girls who took the Cottingley Fairy Photographs, she met a surprisingly large number of people who did. Plus, she’s always been interested in imaginary worlds. Her most recent book, Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d, is the story of a magic-seeking boy who grew up to become the world’s greatest alchemist. Oh, and also discovered the secrets of the universe….
For a serious look at English fairy lore, try The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature by K.M. Briggs. It’s only one of the author’s many books on fairies, so if you’re interested in English fairy lore, the work of Katharine. Briggs is a gold mine.
Fairies fascinate young and old alike. To some they offer tantalizing glimpses of other worlds, to others a subversive counterpoint to human arrogance and weakness. Like no other author, Katharine Briggs throughout her work communicated the thrill and delight of the world of fairies, and in this book she articulated for the first time the history of that world in tradition and literature.
From every period and every country, poets and storytellers have described a magical world inhabited by elfin spirits. Capricious and vengeful, or beautiful and generous, they've held us in thrall for generations. And on a summer's morn,…
I’m an academic who has written medical textbooks and medical research papers, but I also have an enduring passion for murder mysteries. As Hugh Greene I have written the bestselling Dr. Power mystery series which follows forensic psychiatrist Dr. Power and Detective Lynch solving murders and exploring the minds that executed these crimes.
Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the founding crime writers of the Detection Club, and this book of hers was written in the classic era of detective fiction, when such works followed the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, devised by Ronald Knox, a fellow author.
These various constraints allowed the reader a fair chance of solving the puzzle inside a murder mystery. For instance a supernatural solution is not allowed and the criminal should be one of the several characters mentioned reasonably early on in the novel. This permutation of the classic puzzle is disseminated in various documents presented to the reader.
It’s a tribute to the author that this device is so engaging and enrapturing. Every clue is there for the reader to solve. There’s a remote and glorious Devon setting to explore, and tension in every mushroom encountered!
An epistolary crime novel from Dorothy L Sayers, creator of the classic Lord Peter Wimsey series - a must-read for fans of Agatha Christie's Poirot and Margery Allingham's Campion Mysteries, and introduced by author and journalist Libby Purves.
The bed was broken and tilted grotesquely sideways. Harrison was sprawled over in a huddle of soiled blankets. His mouth was twisted . . .
Harrison had been an expert on deadly mushrooms. How was it then that he had eaten a large quantity of death-dealing muscarine? Was it an accident? Suicide? Or murder?
I grew up in a family of nature lovers and went with my parents and my brother on numerous nature hikes. These are my most precious childhood memories. I learned as a child to appreciate nature, I was fascinated by wild animals and inspired by the beauty of the natural world. As I grew up, I became more and more aware of how fragile the natural world is today and how important it is to protect it. This is one of the main motivators for me to create books for kids that will inspire them to love and respect nature.
I loved this book because it is so full of surprises and fun things to discover!
Reading the book felt like going on a nature hike. When I’m in nature I always look for the little discoveries–an insect, a special plant, a beautiful bird, mysterious footprints. And this sweet book is full of such discoveries.
I got inspiration from the book and ideas for fun activities to do in nature, and I loved the three fun characters of the traveling sisters, I wish I could join them on a hike!
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What is this book about?
With lyrical language that captures the majesty of the natural world coupled with fun narrative featured throughout, this spirited picture book tells the victorious story of three girls' friendship-and their tribulations and triumphs in the great outdoors. Here is the best and worst of any hike: from picnics to puffing and panting, deer-sighting to detours. Featuring a glossary, a sketchbook by one of the characters, abundant labels throughout, and scientific backmatter, this book is a must-have for budding scientists, best friends, and all adventurers. And it proves, as if proof were needed, what epic things can happen right in your…
