Wilderness Kitchen: Seasonal Foraging and Meal Prep at Camp Earnest

We are collaborating with Camp Earnest for an immersive weekend devoted to teaching you how to see, identify and make use of wild foods. Not only will we discover our region's seasonal bounty, but we'll prepare improvised meals together.  We will hear from a number of visiting local experts on how to forage, cultivate, and prepare wild, feral and local foods in the beautiful setting of Camp Earnest.

Cooking isn't all recipes. In fact much of the joy in cooking is gaining the confidence to improvise, to fully embrace the creative process – you start with what’s available from the land, garden and local farms, then look for the meal suggesting itself through these ingredients. This is working with food from the perspective of culinary impressario (and east bay resident) Samin Nosrat, with her philosophy around balancing salt, fat, acid and heat. The emphasis is on pleasure and flavor more than a step by step process.

We’ll forage for wild morel mushrooms (should be great this year), pine tips and nuts, watercress, stinging nettle and other greens. Then we’ll guide you through making tasty, beautiful dishes through creative adaptation of what we’ve found. The weekend will also include a talk by our local biodynamic farmer and mushroom grower Jordan Lowery of Dambacher Farms, who will explain how, and why to cultivate mushrooms and the best uses for them.

We’ll wildcraft with culinary mushrooms and make porcini and pine tip salt and butter. We will also learn how to break down whole local trout or California halibut and make fish stock from its bones. We'll learn to prepare indigenous regenerative meats (not pig or cow) like bison and elk through sous-vide, koji curing, and braising. We'll make use of stone fruit, flour and butter as our canvas with a hands-on seasonal fruit galette class. We’ll have a wildcrafting cocktails and mocktails workshop and make bitters, shrubs, and adaptogen extracts. Maria will share some of her botanical shrubs and shrub recipes, offering alternatives for those of us who don't care to drink alcohol.

This weekend concludes with a GRANDE FINALE, a performance by The Neighborhood Sound, free time for hot tub under the stars, sauna, silent disco and lots of laughter and merriment.

Tickets and Details: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wilderness-kitchen-seasonal-foraging-and-meal-prep-at-camp-earnest-tickets-619456219227