In planning this year’s Thanksgiving dinner,
Katrina and I discovered that her family was excited to try some of the wild
foods that we are always raving about. We decided to orchestrate a feast at
their home in Seattle that featured some of our favorite edibles. The culinary
choir included venison and salmon, acorns and wild rice, and wild greens and
huckleberries.
Menu
Appetizer
Crackers and Cheese
Local
Brie with Cranberry sauce
Vegetable
Stinging Nettles
Wild
Stinging Nettles* (Urtica dioica)
blanched
Steamed Beets
Locally
grown beets steamed to perfection
Chef Salad
Organic
vegetables tossed together with a light dressing
Main Course
Broiled Sockeye Salmon
Wild
Copper River Sockeye Salmon seasoned with South African pepper jelly
Venison Tenderloin Steak
Locally
hunted wild Sitka Black-tail Deer*
Wild Rice Pilaf
Wisconsin
Wild Rice* (Zizania palustris) with
Seaweed* (Alaria nana), American
Hazelnuts* (Corylus americana) and
homemade sea salt*
A-corn bread
Vancouver
Island Garry Oak (Quercus garryana)
acorns*, wheat flour, olive oil, and eggs sweetened with Wisconsin Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) syrup, seasoned with Katrina’s homemade sea
salt*
Dessert
Crabapple Meringue
Like
your favorite Lemon meringue but with juice from Wild Vancouver Island
Crabapples* (Malus fusca)
Wild Berry Pie
Local
hand harvested Evergreen Huckleberries* (Vaccinium
ovatum) and Red Huckleberries* (V.
parvifolium), mixed with a few Saskatoons (Amelanchier alnifolia) from Eastern Washington
*Items that we harvested from the wild
Preparing such an extensive menu was actually much easier than it might seem. We started with the desserts, since I prefer to let pie cool before serving. The Stinging Nettles were already blanched and frozen, so they only had to be thawed and steamed. The pilaf only required 20 minutes to boil and the acorn bread needed only 25 minutes to bake. Perhaps the most time consuming foods in a typical Thanksgiving are the stuffing and turkey. Our Salmon and Venison substitutions were both delicious and expedient. The salmon cooked in less than half an hour and our thinly sliced venison steaks cooked in less than a minute on each side!
