Have you ever tried a serviceberry? I hadn’t, until this past Arts Fest weekend. My friend said she picked a gallon of serviceberries in downtown Iowa, and pointed out the […]
Botany
Botany: Flex your culinary muscle and impress your guests with this tasty recipe for roasted spaghetti squash
What does a zucchini and an acorn squash have in common? Genetically speaking, everything. Pumpkins, summer squash, spaghetti squash, pattypan, delicata, acorn squash and zucchinis are all domesticated variants of […]
Botany: Where to find Dryad’s Saddle and how to cook them
A few days after a particularly Old Testament-like storm, I noticed what looked like the Starship Enterprise sprouting from the trunk of a maple. It was a massive disc-shaped fungus […]
Forest gold: Find chanterelles while avoiding their poisonous look-alikes
I was selling mushrooms at a farmers market in Upstate New York last summer when this happened: “Forest gold!” said a self-proclaimed “old hippy” as he grabbed a few golden […]
New Oyster Cult: Mushroom foraging in the IC area
Early each spring, on sunny days when the oak leaves are still as small as squirrel ears, the “cult of the morel” emerges: Iowans, poking around south-facing slopes for the […]