Southwest Foraging

Zusatztext No one has advanced wild foraging in the desert Southwest as much as John Slattery. His plant knowledge! ethics! and practices are becoming more relevant! if not necessary! for our collective survival. Gary Paul Nabahn! director of the Center for Regional Food Studies ! University of Arizona A wonderful guide that will diversify our diets and lure us into the natural world. Brad Lancaster! cofounder of Desert Harvesters A must-have on the subject! Eloquent and replete with scientific acumen and stunning photos! this guide is a treasure. Carolyn Niethammer! author of Cooking the Wild Southwest Invaluable. Foodies West Accessible volume for beginning botanists. . . . Entries are organized alphabetically by common name with full-color photos and how-to information for safely identifying and responsibly harvesting edible desert plants. Edible Phoenix The Timber Press foraging series offers another set of books with high quality photography. . . . also available as handy Kindles. American Herb Association Quarterly Southwest Foraging implores us to eat what's growing around us. It is an opportunity to experience the intensity of the Sonoran Desert with mind and mouth. Tucson Weekly Informationen zum Autor John Slattery is a bioregional herbalist, educator, and forager who is passionate about helping people develop deep and meaningful relationships with wild plants. Visit him at johnjslattery.com. Klappentext Herbalist, educator, and lecturer John Slattery shares his expert foraging knowledge, including traditional methods of gathering and processing. Savor fresh mulberries along the trail, or blend them with foraged nuts and seeds for snacking. Enjoy a simple but delicious sun tea made from desert willow flowers. Along the way, learn what to look for, when and where to look, and how to gather the abundant wild edibles of the Southwest responsibly. An A-to-Z guide for foraging year-round Detailed information for safe identification Suggestions for sustainable harvesting Tips on preparation and use Vorwort Southwest Foraging profiles 117 plants, with detailed information for safe identification, advice on sustainable harvesting, and tips on preparation and use. Part of the Timber Press Regional Foraging book series, this is for foragers in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, southern Utah, and southern Nevada. Preface: Land of Abundant Beauty My path to wild plant foods is perhaps different than most. The idea of there being desirable, useful, or easy-to-find wild plant foods was not part of my upbringing. However, I strongly gravitated toward the use of local plants as medicine while traveling for a year throughout Central and South America. Meeting with indigenous healers and herbalists throughout this journey, I began to appreciate the concept of developing relationships with plantsnot just herbs as a capsule, tincture, or other product to be purchased off the shelf. This was one experience among many that opened my eyes and heart to what was available. Although my interest in wild plant foods and wild plant medicines occurred simultaneously, foraging initially took a backseat to botanical medicine. At first, I saw the pursuit of wild foods as a survival technique, a way to live as people once lived long ago. With limited opportunities to explore this style of living, I wasn't implementing many wild foods into my diet other than major foods such as mesquite meal, cholla buds, saguaro fruit, prickly pear fruit, and palo verde beanscertainly more exotic ingredients than the average person employs, but I wanted these foods to become an even bigger part of my life. I began adding them to my diet i...

Vorwort
Southwest Foraging profiles 117 plants, with detailed information for safe identification, advice on sustainable harvesting, and tips on preparation and use. Part of the Timber Press Regional Foraging book series, this is for foragers in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, southern Utah, and southern Nevada.

Autorentext
John Slattery is a bioregional herbalist, educator, and forager who is passionate about helping people develop deep and meaningful relationships with wild plants. Visit him at johnjslattery.com.

Klappentext
Herbalist, educator, and lecturer John Slattery shares his expert foraging knowledge, including traditional methods of gathering and processing. Savor fresh mulberries along the trail, or blend them with foraged nuts and seeds for snacking. Enjoy a simple but delicious sun tea made from desert willow flowers. Along the way, learn what to look for, when and where to look, and how to gather the abundant wild edibles of the Southwest responsibly.

• An A-to-Z guide for foraging year-round
• Detailed information for safe identification
• Suggestions for sustainable harvesting
• Tips on preparation and use

Leseprobe
Preface: Land of Abundant Beauty
My path to wild plant foods is perhaps different than most. The idea of there being desirable, useful, or easy-to-find wild plant foods was not part of my upbringing. However, I strongly gravitated toward the use of local plants as medicine while traveling for a year throughout Central and South America. Meeting with indigenous healers and herbalists throughout this journey, I began to appreciate the concept of developing relationships with plants—not just herbs as a capsule, tincture, or other product to be purchased off the shelf.

This was one experience among many that opened my eyes and heart to what was available. Although my interest in wild plant foods and wild plant medicines occurred simultaneously, foraging initially took a backseat to botanical medicine. At first, I saw the pursuit of wild foods as a survival technique, a way to live as people once lived long ago. With limited opportunities to explore this style of living, I wasn’t implementing many wild foods into my diet other than major foods such as mesquite meal, cholla buds, saguaro fruit, prickly pear fruit, and palo verde beans—certainly more exotic ingredients than the average person employs, but I wanted these foods to become an even bigger part of my life. I began adding them to my diet in novel and unconventional ways, parting with the traditions I had learned, and fueling my passion for wild foods with my creative impulse to cook—an impulse I’ve had since childhood. New creations were popping into my mind as they once did with cultivated foods. I was grinding barrel cactus seeds for flour to make bread or cooking its fruit into a chutney; combining flowering stems of wild plants to make sauerkraut; frying mesquite-breaded New Mexico locust blossoms with cinnamon in butter, topped with saguaro syrup. My perspective had shifted!

I was not alone in this new viewpoint. It seems there has been an increased interest in this direction for a certain segment of our population, and the enthusiasm continues to grow. Of course, it's far from accurate to characterize this trend as new. Mesquite pods, prickly pear pads and fruit, chia seeds, amaranth greens, and other superfoods have all been part of the local cuisine in the southwestern United States for thousands of years. The region, with its tremendously varied terrain, flora, and fauna, and its rich cultural tradition of interaction with the land, has the longest continual history of agriculture within our nation—4,000 years in Tucson, Arizona. And wild plant foods, prized for their dense nutrition and rich dietary attributes (not to mention their unique and delicious flavors) have long been widely known across the globe, cherished by foragers, and often cultivated wherever they have taken root. The people here gathering wild foods to complement their daily diets are both new converts and the most recent generation of a long ancestral chain.

If you have not foraged for your food, you have not yet fully lived on this Earth. Becoming fully en…