The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: The Foraging Gourmet
Review: "Happy Foraging"

WILDMAN STEVE BRILL
THE FORAGING GOURMET
author of
The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook:
A forager's Culinary Guide
(in the Field or in the Supermarket to Preparing and Savoring Wild (and Not So Wild) Natural Foods with more than 500 Recipes.
Published by The Harvard Common Press, Boston.
500 pages with five appendices:

The Wildman's mission is thus:

"The local environment has sources of foods that are delicious, healthful and organic, including herbs, greens, fruit, berries, nuts, seeds and even mushrooms."

Q. Who is Wildman?
A. Good-natured, with a sense of humor, Steve Brill has been guiding foraging tours in and around New York since 1982. He enjoys telling the story of how he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park, a food resource area he highly supports. He's lectured in schools, for youth programs, museums, libraries and environmental groups for years. Brill is also a foraging and natural-cooking expert whose new cookbook teaches you to use nearly 150 of America's finest wild food plants to prepare tasty meals.

Brill does caution and wisely so:

"It is the reader's responsibility to identify and use the information in this book sensibly." He sums up the 29 pages of pre-foraging information with an admonishment to pay particular attention to correct identification of foods in the wild and recommends the additional use of his book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not so Wild) Places.

A TRIP THROUGH THE BOOK

The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook starts by introducing wild and purchased natural foods and basic methods for preparing them. He gets into seasonings, tips on adapting natural ingredients to traditional cooking methods and explains how to harvest wild foods safely.

Next he goes into recipes for "unwild foods." Tofu-based cheeses are basic to many of Brill's recipes, and he presents his recipes for Tofu Cream Cheese, Tofu Cottage Cheese, Tofu Sour Cream, and the like. While he employs a lot of in-book cross-references, he creates few, if any, unsolved mysteries.

The book is divided into seasonal sections featuring:

Winter and early spring: hearty wild greens and roots
Mid-to-Late Spring: best time to find wild vegetables
Summer with its plethora of fruits, flowers, greens and mushrooms.
Autumn: The further abundance of mushrooms, fruits also nuts.

His Table of Contents is a large, helpful, non-alphabetical, listing of recipe names grouped with the wild food it calls for, plus page numbers. His Index is an alphabetical index of types of foods and associated recipes. Here's an overview of just a few of his recipes:

WINTER WILD FOODS

Winter Cress Kimchi
To winter cress, he adds garlic, red onion, dill or coriander seed and chili paste to taste.

Chickweed Bean Spread
Brill combines adzuki beans, olive oil, vinegar,
bayberry leaves, herbs and dried epazote leaves, stems or flowers

EARLY SPRING WILD FOODS

Daylily Wine
Sugar, water, daylily shoots, lemon juice tarragon, dill, poppy seeds and a little champagne or wine yeast

Curried Dandelions
A small amount of oil, dandelion leaves,
garlic tofu, miso, fresh lime juice and
curry powder (recipe also in the book)

Stinging Nettles Indian Style
The Sauce: Chick pea flour, Garam Marsala
(recipe in book), seasoning,
tumeric, tofu, lime juice, water
The veggie: garlic, chilis and 8 cups
stinging nettle, chopped

Scalloped Fiddleheads
Spread fiddleheads in a casserole dish,
top with Tofu Cream Cheese and Bread Crumbs (recipe in book), bake

MID-TO-LATE SPRING WILD FOODS

Garlic Beans
Black or white beans, wild garlic bulbs, fresh chopped epazote leaves, cumin, olive oil and seasoning

Exotic Rice
Mixture of wild and sweet brown rice, currants, shredded coconut, raw cashews, red onion, Garam Masala, bayberry leaves and seasoning

SUMMER WILD FOODS

Mulberry Kiwi Ice Cream
Soy milk, tofu, glycerin, honey, barley malt, lecithin granules, lemon juice, vanilla, liquid stevia and mulberries

Blackberry Spiced Wine
Ala Brill: sugar, water, blackberries, spicebush berries, cloves, cinnamon sticks and champagne or wine yeast

AUTUMN

Hot Cheese Tacos
Tofu cream cheese, red chile sauce (in book), acorn tortillas (in book)

Acorn Noodles
Brown rice flour, acorn flour (in book) arrowroot or kudzu, nutmeg, marjoram, sage, seasoning, corn oil and water

Vegetarian Chicken Salad
Chicken mushrooms, celery, romaine lettuce, olives, almonds, Wild Mustard Seed Mayonaise (in book) and chopped field garlic leaves

Simply Oysters
Olive oil, oyster mushrooms, chiles, garlic, lemon juice, fresh dill, tamari soy sauce and White Oak Wine (in book)

If you, somehow, cannot roam the woods for your particular culinary adventure, this is a great book to deliver the adventure to you, also witness the sincere inventiveness of its enthusiastic author. ...

Rating:
Summary: Packed with unusual dishes
Review: Foragers who enjoy using wild ingredients will appreciate Steve Brill's Wild Vegetarian Cookbook, a unique vegetarian cookbook which focuses on natural foods available in field and in market. From ramp leaf pesto and milkweed rice Indian style to purslanepotato salad, Wild Vegetarian Cookbook is packed with unusual dishes which need only access to wild ingredients to prove successful.

Rating:
Summary: A truly "must have" cookbook for anyone who loves to cook!
Review: I'm not Euell Gibbons or Emeril, but if you were to cross those two together, it's as close as you'd be likely to come to finding someone who might be able to write a book as wonderful as "The Wild Vegetarian Cookbook" by "Wildman" Steve Brill. Wild food aficionados in particular have good reason to rejoyce, now that Mr. Brill's new cookbook is available. During the past two months, I've made nearly 20 of his recipies, and my experience has been that each one is better than the next. Fortunately, all of them seem to be easily adapted to suit available ingredients or taste preferences. Most of the sections utilizing "featured" ingredients have an interesting background about the particular plant (or in some cases, mushroom) that adds the appreciation of the dish, and the entire book is organized intelligently, in order to make cross-referencing easy. Furthermore, I've seen nothing even remotely like this book on the market today, or at any time, for that matter. Between my wife and I, we must own close to 50 cookbooks, and this is far and away our favorite. We happen to be vegetarians, but we've given the book as a gift to non-vegetarian friends on several different occasions, (As well as having entertained company using recipes from the book) and the reviews have been very favorable, to say the least.

Rating:
Summary: Makes me want to go outdoors and graze!
Review: THE BOOK IS A DAILY DELIGHT. I pick it up go outside and say, "What's for supper." Whether you live in the city or country you can have fun with this cookbook! The Wild Vegetarian CookBook offers an excellent way to teach your children or grandchildren about exploring nature, plants, and ecology. It's also a wonderful book when you want to impress and amaze your dinner guests. "Just something I threw together from the yard" is a favorite quote now that I have this cookbook.
"Wildly" crazy about it!
Connie McCabe
Andrews, NC

Rating:
Summary: Makes me want to go outdoors and graze!
Review: THE BOOK IS A DAILY DELIGHT. I pick it up go outside and say, "What's for supper." Whether you live in the city or country you can have fun with this cookbook! The Wild Vegetarian CookBook offers an excellent way to teach your children or grandchildren about exploring nature, plants, and ecology. It's also a wonderful book when you want to impress and amaze your dinner guests. "Just something I threw together from the yard" is a favorite quote now that I have this cookbook.
"Wildly" crazy about it!
Connie McCabe
Andrews, NC

Rating:
Summary: good, overall
Review: There are some fascinating recipes in here, and good information about vegetables that are usually ignored in cookbooks. Be aware, however, that this is a vegan cookbook--I personally was disappointed by this. I know that at least one recipe calls for pennyroyal, and I really don't think that using pennyroyal internally is a good idea at all.

Rating:
Summary: ANOTHER GREAT BOOK!
Review: THIS BOOK HAS SOME PRETTY NEAT RECIPES. "WILDMAN" STEVE BRILL WRITES A NICE DESCRIPTION OF EACH PLANT AND FUNGI BEFORE GIVING YOU THE RECIPES WHICH I THINK IS GREAT CONSIDERING IT'S A COOKBOOK. ALSO, THE PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED ACCORDING TO THE SEASON IN WHICH THEY ARE BEST CULTIVATED. IF YOU WANT AN EXCELLENT BOOK ON FORAGING, GET HIS Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants by Steve Brill.

Rating:
Summary: ANOTHER GREAT BOOK!
Review: THIS BOOK HAS SOME PRETTY NEAT RECIPES. "WILDMAN" STEVE BRILL WRITES A NICE DESCRIPTION OF EACH PLANT AND FUNGI BEFORE GIVING YOU THE RECIPES WHICH I THINK IS GREAT CONSIDERING IT'S A COOKBOOK. ALSO, THE PLANTS ARE ORGANIZED ACCORDING TO THE SEASON IN WHICH THEY ARE BEST CULTIVATED. IF YOU WANT AN EXCELLENT BOOK ON FORAGING, GET HIS Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants by Steve Brill.