Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook

Signed by Dina Falconi and Wendy Hollender

Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook celebrates our local bounty and traditional foodways. The book features beautiful, instructive botanical illustrations and delicious, enlightening recipes. The creators share this project with you out of their long commitment to connecting with nature through food and art. The effort weaves together Dina’s 30 years of passionate investigations into wild-plant identification, foraging and cooking with Wendy’s deft artistic skills honed over 15 years as a botanical illustrator. For the past four years Dina has been writing, directing the art, and designing the book, as well as steadfastly testing the recipes, while Wendy has been drawing and designing the book with Dina. The result is an abundance of recipes and illustrations that celebrate wild plants and creative ways to bring them into our lives. We hope you will join us in this tasty culinary adventure.

Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook celebrates and reclaims the lost of art of turning locally gathered wild plants into nutritious, delicious meals — a traditional foodway long practiced by our ancestors but neglected in modern times. The book's 50 beautiful, instructive botanical illustrations and over 100 enlightening master recipes offer an adventurous and satisfying way to eat locally and seasonally. Readers will be able to identify, harvest, prepare, eat, and savor the wild bounty all around them.

The mouth watering recipes have been developed with flexibility in mind. They taste great when made with cultivated fruits and vegetable too. They also cater to various dietary restrictions: gluten-free, casein-free, dairy-free, grain-free, and sugar-free. Thousands of recipe variations arise from the master recipes.

The easy-to-use reference charts collate the information found throughout the book, helping to locate the harvest and use it tastefully.

The botanical identification pages focus on 50 wild, abundant and very common “weeds”. They are ubiquitous and can be found in many of the temperate zones throughout the world: North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Dina was unable in her research to pinpoint the exact world range for each plant, but knows that many of them (not all of them) can be found almost everywhere. Note: Dina has included a few plants that start as cultivated specimens where she lives in the Northeastern U.S. but then freely spread themselves, becoming wild in the landscape. They are wild in other parts of the world.

The plants focused on in the botanical pages grow in various zones, ranging from 2 to 9, with zones 4 to 8 being more typical.

By the way the Kitchen Arts cookbook section will be useful anywhere in the world. The recipes are designed as master templates so you can plug in a variety of wild plants or cultivated ones for that matter.

http://www.botanicalartspress.com/