If you’re a standard meat & potatoes person, or you’re stuck in a rut getting all of your food from a grocery store, then it’s time to get out of that cage and spread your wings.
So today’s special on the menu includes learning about the best time to eat knotweed, the joys of the first dandelion salad of the year, nettles, chickweed, alder-dijon mustard, sea olives and, of course, mushrooms. But let me warn you about this topic. These foods may seem innocuous, but the search for them can take over your life. As my guest noted, “It’s like a book that I open that I can’t ever put down.” Today we go down that rabbit hole of foraged foods and we find many delights there.
Shawn Dawson is a forager, marketer, author, educator, supplier to the finest chefs of St. John’s, food entrepreneur, and a generally practice-what-you-preach kind of fellow. He is helping to bring back taste – and appearance – and reminds us that the art of culinary preparation can start in the forest or the beach or the headlands. He’s a tour guide for all of us on our journey toward more local foods. However, he reminds us to look at what already grows here and then to re-define what we’ve been ignoring and cutting down and cursing – to re-define it as the food that it is. Not just famine food. But high-end, tasty, nutrient-dense, easily-available food.
I met up with Shawn in late January on a backroad near Portugal Cove St. Phillips. Move that cat from the chair and join us. Don’t worry. The cat will be back on your lap in no time.
Season 3 of Fit to Eat is supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.
