Edgelands Research — A Dinner for the Changing Seasons

'A Dinner for the Changing Seasons' is our most recent foraged dinner series. Over the course of a month we prepared a series of multi-course meals using ingredients foraged and gleaned from the metro Denver area. Guests were invited to eat together, and to participate in conversations about food sourcing, urban ecosystemic relationships, decolonizing our food systems, and indigenous and diasporic foraging practices. Since this dinner took place in the fall, we crafted a menu to celebrated the traditions of the season; every foraged ingredient was featured in at least two ways, one fresh and the other preserved. This series was created in collaboration with Morgan Anker.

About our foraged dinners

We have three main intentions with this practice; to craft delicious food from overlooked, unexpected or often rejected edibles. To learn about and celebrate indigenous and diasporic cultural traditions around wild foods. And to use foraging as a starting point for sparking engagement with our local ecosystem, questioning the environmental costs of pollution and industrial agriculture, and imagining possible futures in the face of globalized food chains and contemporary environmental collapse.

Foraging in the US would not be possible without centuries of indigenous wisdom. Living in the unceded land of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute and other tribes, we recognize that many indigenous communities face food insecurity as a result of laws that prevent them from maintaining their historic land practices. We believe foraging education offers a path to repair urban relationships with the land — a path that should lead to the rematriating of land to indigenous communities, repealing of anti-indigenous foraging laws, and a widespread shift towards indigenous practices of sustainable land management.

Dinner Menu

• Toasted Elm Samara snack
  
  
• Seeded crackers with sprouted dock butter
  Sprouted and dried Curly Dock seeds
  
  
• Fresh, pickled and raw salad
  Pickled Wild Plum, Purslane, unripe Green Pear, Tomato
  
  
• Kentucky coffee beans in broth, with mint and parmesan
  Kentucky Coffee Beans, Wild Mint
  
  
• Wild grape leaf & brown rice dolmas, with grape reduction, grape leaf salt, and cow parsnip seed feta
  Wild grapes, Cow Parsnip seeds
  
  
• Apple and potato Latkes with sour cream, applesauce & wild mustard
  Neighborhood Apples, Chive-Blossom Sour Cream, Field Pennycress Mustard
  
  
• Birdcherry cake with chantilly cream, sand cherry compote and mulberry leaf matcha
  Birdcherries, Sand Cherries, Mulberry leaves
  
  
• Perfect crabapples with aged gouda and fried sage
  Wild Golden Crabapples, Wild Sage
  

Drinks

• Wild hops and rosehips tea
• Wild plum and shiso margarita
• Carrot and fennel vinegar martini
• Fragrant Sumac and tomato 'lemonade' (sans lemons!)
• Wild grape kombucha