The Earthy Delights Recipe Blog
Celebrating wild harvested, traditional & artisanal foods
Many of our favorite wild foods seem to appear all at once in the early spring, which can make it hard to appreciate each one adequately. A practical way to enjoy the season’s abundance is to combine several of them together into a single dish. Another is to preserve the fresh flavors of the spring wild harvest so they can be enjoyed all year round. This dish does both. The flavor and texture of the morel is well known, and these unique, …
The quickest, easiest and – some would say – best way to cook a steak is to pan-fry it. Certainly, this is an attractive option in the depths of winter, but the results are exceptional enough to make it a preferred method year round. After a quick sear on both sides, the steak can be cooked to perfection in 10 minutes or less without all the fuss and mess of a broiler or grill. With the steak right there in …
The artichoke is technically a thistle, but its prickly exterior and leathery leaves aren’t enough to deter devoted fans. Underneath that tough exterior lies a tender, delicately flavored and meaty heart. Once the artichoke is cooked, whether by steaming, boiling or roasting, the outer leaves can be stripped away, one by one, and their succulent tips devoured, revealing the hidden prize inside. The artichoke lover’s dilemma: eat the heart now or save it for another use? It’s often too much …
This rather unusual salad is one of those dishes that comes together quite naturally in the early fall. The first frost has not yet arrived and while nights are cool, the days are still sunny and warm. Colder weather is just around the corner though. Days are growing shorter and backyard gardens are winding down, yielding the last few sweet, sun-ripened peppers of the season. But while tame, cultivated crops are ending, wild mushrooms are exuberantly bursting forth from …
Wild mushrooms and fava beans are the perfect combination of forest and field, robustly earthy and delicately sweet at the same time. This dish offers some of the best that the late summer harvest has to offer, flavors so good and so satisfying that it’s worth a little extra effort. These elegant crostini are equally well-suited to a casual dinner party, a light lunch or a healthy between-meal snack. While there are several steps involved in making them, they’re not difficult to prepare, and to make …
Among the most well-known and best-loved of wild mushrooms, chanterelles figure prominently in the wild mushroom seasonal cycle, usually starting up in late spring or early summer, just as the season for fresh morels begins to wind down. After that, chanterelles can be depended upon to be be growing in some part of the world for the next 6 to 8 months, and frequently longer. Their cheerful orange-yellow color and distinctive trumpet-like shape make chanterelles one of the most easily …
Recipes like this one are made for easy, no-fuss meals. It only takes a few minutes of prep and a very short cooking time – and the results are nothing short of phenomenal. To transform simple grilled skewers of chicken into an elegant center of the plate showpiece, we alternated tender chunks of moist chicken thigh meat with firm, fresh whole “button” chanterelle mushrooms – then brushed the whole thing with a finger-licking sticky glaze. Fragrant thyme is frequently paired …
This simple, velvety soup with the aroma of an autumn woodland allows the delicately sweet flavor of chestnuts to shine. Fresh chestnuts are a popular staple in fall soups, both on restaurant menus and in the homes of creative cooks. Since chestnuts are a seasonal delicacy and aren’t available for most of the year, it’s a great idea to enjoy them as much as possible now while they’re fresh and at their best. Most recipes for chestnut soup pair them with …