New News is Good News

One - Illustrated Wild Foods Calendar Giveaway!!
A lovely local blog called Are You My Ghost? is having a calendar giveaway and all you have to do is post a comment and you may be picked! So awesome, so easy. Thanks Renai! Ends Tuesday afternoon, December 22nd.

Two - Its gift time, and it's almost 2010. It is time to move these babies! - The Illustrated Wild Foods Recipe Calendar is on SALE. At the farmer's markets or online on the Nettletown Etsy Shop - 2 calendars for $20! Now you don't have to wonder if you should get one for yourself when it buying as a gift for someone else! Just do it, someone once said.

Three - Emily Counts and I have put our friend powers together and formed an alliance of lovers of time, art, and food. Please join our The Illustrated Wild Foods Recipe Calendar Fan Club on Facebook!!! TIWFRCFC for short. I am kinda tired of typing out the name of the calendar, what were we thinking!?!

And a final blurb that really isn't news - A special thank you to all of you who have supported my calendar venture and this lil' blog called Nettletown. In this new year arriving soon, we hope to get better and bigger and to grow under the the warm wing of your continued interest and support!!!

Cider Press at the Corson Building

This is a bit of a late notice but I just made arrangements with The Corson Building to provide recipe calendars for purchase at the Cider Pressing tomorrow. $5 dollars of the calendar proceeds will go to Teen Feed, an organization that provides hot meals to homeless youth.
The Corson is a fabulous place to go for special events, they are always festive and the garden is a great place just to hang out no matter what else is going on. I urge you to check this one out - Press your own cider, eat some delicious food, and get a t-shirt and recipe book! More info on their website journal. Some of these beautiful posters will also be available for purchase.

Events, Happenings, Dinners

I am tromping through the (greater) Seattle landscape with wild food calendars in tow, reaching my arms far and wide to spread the good recipe word. I am having a number of calendar happenings in the next few weeks, come one and all to hear the wild food word.

Food- Ins

Cooking Demo at the Puget Sound Mycological Society's Annual Fall Mushroom Show.
I will be demoing this Saturday from noon to 2 pm on Saturday. I will be making the Kashmiri Morel Curry Recipe with dried morels from June in the 2010 calendar, and other mushroom goodies using fresh chanterelles and matsutake.
The exhibit features a fabulous display of hundreds! of mushrooms set up in a natural habitat (think overblown high school science fair). There is also an mushroom art contest gallery, talk by Langdon Cook of Fat of the Land, Mushroom experts to ID your forest finds, mushroom books, t-shirts, etc for sale, and a cooking demo kitchen open the whole time.

Admission- $7 general, $5 students and seniors, 12 years and younger free.
Saturday October 17th - 12noon to 7pm
Sunday October 18th - 10am to 5pm
The Center for Urban Horticulture (CUH), University of Washington
3501 NE 41 Street (Mary Gates Drive)
Seattle, WA 98195

The Corson Building Wild Foods Calendar Dinner - November 16th
Chef Matt Dillon and I will be putting together a four to five course dinner featuring a couple dishes from the calendar and focusing the whole of the menu on seasonal wild mushrooms and other wild foods.

There will be two seatings - 5:30 and 8 pm. Reservation only.
Cost $60 and includes one copy of The Illustrated Wild Foods Recipe Calendar. Additional copies will be available for the special price of $10.
Make reservations here or call 206-762-3330.

Local Roots Farm Dinner-
All summer Farmers Jason and Siri have been hosting visitors to their farm in Carnation for tours and enjoying a meal featuring the farm's awesome produce cooked by local chefs. The date is not set yet but I will be doing multi-course dinner featuring wild dishes from the calendar and other foods from the farm. Like the Corson dinner it will include a copy of the recipe calendar.
In the summer the dinners are set outside in the middle of the fields, in the fall we head inside to the greenhouse to keep warm and dry. I did a dinner last week that was Asian- themed. A fun challenge to use as much seasonal and local foods for the dinner as possible.

The date will probably be either the Friday 30th of October or Monday the 2nd of November.
Donation- $90 and includes wine and a calendar.
Send Jason an email if you are interested or would like to be on the mailing list - jasonsalvo@earthlink.net.the rustic local roots farm setting

Calendar hot off the press!

Here a few pictures of the press check for the calendar. I went to look at the first run off the press to make sure the color match and color intensity are what we are looking for. The bright green needed a little more saturation to make it pop off the page. In the end Emily's artwork looked vibrant and still held all the nuances in her watercolor and line work.

Strawberry, meet Elderflower

...meet Onepot, meet Foodista.....

Elder flowers are one of the prettiest ingredients around. Tiny white star shaped flowers gathered on droopy pom poms, thousands full. I was shaking these pom poms around at the dessert course for a special event with One pot and Foodista last Monday. One pot is a organization that puts on experimental eating events in Seattle and around the world. Recent boring events have included a hike through LA culminating with dinner on a "island" next to I-5 and a slightly more plebeian dinner with the Master Musicians of Jajaouka from Morocco. (I saw these musical wonders perform in February. I wish I knew about that dinner!)
Foodista is a locally based website that is an editable(wiki) encyclopedia of food and all things related. Posts range from bacon grease to supreming(cutting citrus segments from pith). The cool thing is if you don't like a post you can change it!

Michael Hebb from One pot, Conor Donahue- a chef newly relocated from San Fran, and I created a menu featuring only foraged and local food for Foodistas core team and guests. All the recipes were transcribed as we cooked them and posted on the website. This was an interesting experiment to showcase the strengths of the Foodista website as and tool for instantly and easily sharing food inspiration and wisdom with the masses. Here is a description of the event on the Foodista blog with the menu and recipes attached. And here are links to some recipes:

I harvested 5 different varieties of basil, and 2 shisos from my garden for this scallop dish.
And we used Taylor Shellfish dry pack scallops. Taylor is the only company locally farming scallops and they are selling them fresh and untreated.
Go see Oyster Bill at the farmers market for these sweet tender morsels.



One of my favorite dishes from the event-

Elderflower Shortbread and Strawberries

At the dinner, Conor commented that this was a very feminine dessert after I heavily laced the strawberries with elderflowers- well I am a lady I guess. This would be very nice served with vanilla ice cream or ricotta. The syrup also can be used for summery cocktails or sorbet.

Elderflower Shortbread Cookies

This dough can be rolled and cut into desired shapes, or made into a cylinder and easily sliced into cookie rounds.

1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup elderflowers, removed from stems, plus a handful more for baking
1/2 pound butter(2 sticks), softened
3/4 tsp salt
2 cups all purpose flour

In a food processor combine sugar and flowers, grind until flowers are fine. Add butter and salt, blend until well creamed. Add flour and pulse to combine, pushing down ingredients on the sides of work bowl. Remove to a piece of plastic wrap or parchment and form into a cake(if rolling out cookies) or a cylinder(if slicing cookies). Refrigerate dough for a few hours or overnight. Heat oven to 300F. Roll and/or cut dough into desired shapes 1/4 inch thick. Sprinkle some elderflowers on top of cookies and lightly press on with fingers or a rolling pin. Bake for 18-20 minutes until edges are just beginning to brown.
Makes about 30 small cookies.

Elderflower Syrup

2 cups sugar
2 cups water
1 lemon, zested and juiced
5 cups elderflowers, removed from stems

Heat sugar, water and zest and lemon juice together in a sauce pan over high heat. Bring to a simmer, add elderflowers, remove from heat, steep at least one hour or up to 3 days. Strain through fine sieve. Makes approximately 3 cups.

Strawberries with Elderflower Syrup

Fresh local strawberries
Elderflower syrup
Elderflowers

You probably will need about 1/2 pint strawberries per person, depending on appetites.
Clean, trim and cut strawberries. Toss with enough syrup to coat berries with a little pool on the bottom of bowl. Sprinkle in some elderflowers. Let sit for a few to macerate. Serve with cookies and creamy stuff if desired.