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Glad to see y'all are interested in this. One of the things I was most looking forward to was good nights' sleep. The cabin is very dark because there's no outside lights (street lights and such), and always a bit chilly at night, and the hypnotic sound of cicada, crickets and bullfrogs always lull me to sleep. Well, I say always, but not this past week. The Sunday that we left I taught a foraging class through Dabble because I wanted to see how effective that medium was for getting attendees. Since I wasn't doing my normal deep woods foraging I only sprayed my ankles with Deep Woods Off. That was a mistake. A big one. That night, and for the next four nights, my body was covered with no less than 50 chigger bites, which were so bad that I couldn't sleep. I finally took Benedryl one night to try and get through, but one night out of seven of sleep...not good. I was pretty grumpy all week. Many of you have seen my baby girl, Lexi. She's been with me since she was 5 days old, and now at 13+ she doesn't move quite as fast. Before moving to St Louis I had never foraged/hiked without her in over a decade. She's such an amazing forager that I did an essay about her in my cookbook Acorns & Cattails, and was particularly good at finding the best juniper berries, acorns and morels. Now she's retired. She just likes to sleep. Where she used to easily do 10 mile hikes with me, now I'm lucky to get her across the park next to my apartment. But being at the cabin really rejuvenated her. She didn't walk much further but there was a lot of spring in her step. I spent a lot of hours out gathering this week, mostly focusing on pawpaw, acorns and any mushrooms I happened to stumble over in the dryness that we've had. I think I have my year's supply of the former two and am already pretty well stocked with the latter. In New Mexico I gathered Grey, Arizona and Emory oaks. Here in Missouri I am more interested in Whites and Reds. Where I used to be able to eat straight off the ground with no processing, here the acorns are very tannic and need some work. One lucky day I stumbled onto these very young and fresh oysters But as cool as those are, the highlight of the week is this Any ideas what's in the pot? What if I show you this? Salt! Back in New Mexico I used 4-wing salt bush, which was really challenging, but here I have found a source for as much salt as I need. The only reason I found it is because of the cabin. You may remember in the driving directions in my initial post that you cross Saline Creek. As a kid I never thought about why it was named that, but it didn't take long for a few farmers to explain that Saline Creek is fed by salinated springs - all of which are on private property. One kind farmer made the connections for me and voila - 2 gallons of spring fed water. I put it in a pot and boiled it down and ended up with about 2 or 3 tablespoons of very dirty salt. Before I use it in the restaurant I need to figure out how to clean up the water some. If I brita filter it won't that remove the salt? Maybe the algae/moss/plantgunk is safe to eat because of the purification from the salt. I need to do more research obviously. By the way, I was well covered in Deep Woods Off for every forage this week. The second morning Tyler and I were already getting antsy - we're not the sit-around-and-do-nothing types so we decided to take the ferry to Illinois which I had never take before. On the way to the ferry, just outside of Ste Gen proper is this sign showing the numerous floods that the town has endured over the years. One of the interesting things we kept hearing as we toured was how the Mississippi has changed course over the years. In fact, it has changed enough in modern times that we have photos of the before and after. Past that sign, through the locks and we were on the smallest, ricketiest ferry I've ever seen. I don't scare easily but I was pretty unnerved by this 5 minute trip across the Mississippi. But we made it and spent the day exploring Illinois. Btw, those oyster mushrooms...they became this omelet using farmer eggs found on the drive down.

Interesting. I bet it was something like a common Better Homes project, but my mom specifically remembers her mom painting them.

I spent this past week at my family's cabin in the Mark Twain National Forest of the Ozarks. I haven't spent more than a night there in over 30 years, and I don't know that I've ever spent a night there without a swarm of family around entertaining each other. As some of you may know I've been in the very slow process of opening a new restaurant in St. Louis, and the delays have given me more free time than I would like. The vacation, however, also falls smack dab in the heart of my most intense foraging season which I can't relax during or I won't have supplies for the upcoming winter. I wasn't expecting much of the week other than hanging out in the woods, but it turned out to be one of those beautiful moments where you get to see your childhood through the lens of a mature adult, and view the world very differently. As a kid we would go to the cabin most of the summer, spending time with our cousins from Cincinnati. My mom's family is from Ste. Genevieve, a small town of about 2,000 an hour south from St. Louis along the Mississippi River. While being just a rural Missouri town, it is actually quite important in that it was the first European settlement west of the Mississippi (although I lived in New Mexico long enough to dispute that marketing line...ahem...Santa Fe). I'll share more on Ste. Gen (as we call it) later, but we have to drive off onto the country roads first to get to the cabin. Getting off at I-55 Exit 150, we head south on Hwy B through a number of corn and soybean fields, driving through River Aux Vases (a town of less people than I have fingers), past Hwy P (where the first winery is found), over Saline Creek to Hwy WW at Coffman (our family tradition is to cough the entire way through town...takes almost a minute) and finally turning off at Bidwell Creek Rd to enter the Coldwater Game Preserve. Coldwater was founded in 1925 as a getaway hunting lodge for Ste Gen folks. Often times people have an image of cabins as a fancy photoshoot locale for Outside magazine...this is not that. Hand hewn log cabins with plaster insulation. It was quite the drama when the first cabin brought in a golf cart...and you can imagine the uproar with the first satellite for tv. These are just not things that we do at Coldwater. We like the simple life of our damned up creek, our square dancing venue - lodge and shooting range. There are maybe 30 cabins there but you never see that many people except on the 4th of July. This also happens to be where I viewed the eclipse because it was smack dab in the heart of totality. My family bought their space and built their cabin in 1945. There's been a couple of additions over the years but all very traditional. We built a shed for our new golf cart last year and among the family we did not have consensus on whether we should. As I said, a very sparse cabin still heated with a wood burning stove. I never thought about it as a kid but I suppose we are decorated with traditional Ozark folk art. My grandfather, who I never knew, built the cabin. He was the owner of a hardware store in Ste Gen (his father too). There's a brewer and a baker somewhere in my past as well which I love. I didn't realize how long my family had that hardware store but it was already 75 years when this certificate was given to my grandfather, which was in 1965. Before leaving Ste Gen to get on the country roads we stopped in the Audubon's Grill and Bar for a catfish sandwich. Apparently, Audubon lived in Ste Gen for a while...who knew?1 That would explain so many things named after him in the area.

would appreciate a link to your friend's own website even if it is in Japanese. I'd like to see source info. Looks interesting. Thanks.

One of the keys to my foraging is the networking that I do. I am always seeking out private land to forage on and tips. A tip yesterday led to this: (This is my sous chef holding the basket)

Always got deals working...and hopefully I can share some of that shortly. But in the meantime, here are two pics from inside the building we expect to lease. I know the door will stay but I'm hoping the boxes will too.

Two thoughts on this. I subscribe to YouTube channels so that I can go to my page and see what new videos have been released without getting notifications. From the perspective of the uploader, if they have ambitions for a book or paid videos or such then the more followers you have the better, but I don't think that's what the OP is getting at here. I think my former answer is more relevant.

Thanks for sharing this with us.

The goal at my restaurant is to get to 100% foraged. Possibly not realistic, and certainly near impossible, but we're doing pretty good. Here is a dish we did over the weekend that was pretty darn close. Foraged maitake, oyster and chanterelle mushroom pate, pickled blackberry, blackberry syrup, cattail pollen, cattail glass, foraged spice dukkah with Missouri pecans. 100% spiced and salted from forage. Salt from a salinated spring...still working on upping output on this. The glass was the exception since I used kuzu starch but I've been playing with cattail root starch and almost have it clear enough to sub in. HERE is the topic about the restaurant for anyone not reading it.

Dave has it right - you gotta keep up with dishes or you'll drown in them. That said, most commercial machines have a 3 minute cycle so you can fly through that stack. But even with that you're hand washing before they go in. Over the years I've also learned to recycle bowls/tools when it makes sense.

That's the quote I put on my high school graduation mug and have lived my life by it ever since.

Yeah, those are definitely not the numbers I'm looking at. By all accounts I'm in at less that a quarter million easily, and I'm a cheapskate so I won't go crazy when it is time to spend. You may remember I worked on two Kenmore ceramic top ranges ($425 each) for nearly a decade. And @Tri2Cook That is exactly how I'm feeling and a huge reason why I don't sleep. Then things like last night happen where I made that omoshiroidesu (sassafras sochite umeboshi) using foraged plums and sassafras, and I realize how quickly I'll be back in the game once I have my own kitchen again. I've learned a lot about patience and humility over the past year. Oh, and I almost forgot that I was on a PBS cooking show HERE

I have two things I'd like to share. First, is that since this real estate process is taking so long, my investors are becoming concerns. Two different investors have had major life changes so now their funds are in question. I'm not concerns because I know others will step up, but most wrote me a check seven months ago that I'm just sitting on. Relatedly, I'm sure many of you saw this Eater article on how much it costs to open a restaurant. Scary numbers. The second is that I'm getting nervous about progression in my social media followers (which hopefully translates into later supporters/customers). I spent the weekend reaching out to some of the more successful food bloggers and social media players. That led to me starting my Instagram business page, working harder on my hashtags, and switching from my cookbook photos back to my personal pics, which are good but not overly polished. In just a few days I've seen big results in followers and engagements.

3 layers of buttermilk chocolate chip cake, espresso buttercream, vanilla custard, marshmallow fluff, black cocoa macarons, black cocoa crumb, berries and granola. I was channeling my inner Andy Bowdy.

And add to the mix that Millennials are now the largest generational subgroup and their spending habits are different. They value experience over stuff. They demand transparency in their food. They expect it to be properly (ethically and locally) sourced. They expect it to be fresh. And yes, Blue Apron and the like are teaching Millennials that cooking doesn't have to be difficult, which is showing a new generation that fresh food is better than 95% of the crap you get at restaurants which has sat in a steam table or under a heat lamp. Yes, I follow these trends very, very closely since I'm preparing to open an "expensive" restaurant. And I believe I check all of the survivor's boxes

On a side note, the original Art of Eating book proclaimed the large bay leaves bought at Indian markets were superior to the small ones bought everywhere else. I don't use bay often enough to know if its true, but at 10% of the price I've stuck with the larger leaves ever since.

My concern is one that I have in all sorts of daily food commerce and that's diversity of offerings. Our food system is becoming so homogenous, and now further concentration of resellers has me increasingly concerned.

I converted to Crystals at 45 after a lifetime of McIlhenneys and have never looked back.

I'm trying something new tonight. A pawpaw patch has started dropping some of its fruit (too dry or too wet or something), and so I chopped them into my green mango relish - shallot, garlic, chile, jaggery, salt, cilantro, sauteed cumin and mustard seeds. I am canning it right now and I'll let you know how it is in a month or so.

Welcome Chef Eureka! It looks like a post above where we believe a blast from an air compressor was used to spread the cocoa butter. BTW, in the past I've tried this technique and my compressor wasn't strong enough so I used canned air (the stuff used to clean inside keyboards). I didn't serve those because I vaguely remember there being a chemical involved.

Let me back up. I want to align myself with a small number of perfectly fit organizations with whom I can make my charitable contributions. The wolf center is one of them. In New Mexico I was in the heart of where wolves are released, including wolves from this center, and I gathered from wolf ecosystem for nearly a decade. It's a perfect fit for me to be with these guys. For the menu I had expand beyond what wolves eat (obviously), hence the ecosystem idea: 1. Flavor of the Forest: Cocktail slushy of foraged plants harvested this week and finished with bergamot shrub and spicebush blossom vinegar, finished with bergamot salt (This has become a recurring thing that we do - create an opening drink of items foraged that week, so guests truly can taste what is forageable right now.) 2. Rhubarb poppers and salted rhubarb sauce, goat cheese mousse, pickled cattail stalk 3. Seeded crackers with Apache red grass and amaranth, Chicken of the Woods paté, cattail pollen, wild onion blossom 4. Nettle fettuccini, duck confit, mustard & onion sauce, maitake salt, pickled yucca, wild mustard infused oil 5. Woodear mushroom, trumpet mushroom honey, redbud caper, redbud jelly, pork terrine, kombu beans, lichen rye bread 6. Venison tenderloin, apricot/grapefruit molé, roast vegetables from farmers market, pickled onion bulbs 7. Hibiscus sorbet, violet sorrel sugar, sumac macaron I really wanted to serve rabbit but haven't established my source relationship yet. Working on it since rabbit was my go-to protein back in NM. We also tried out some new language on the back of our menu this time: And thanks @Anna N. I've learned to not need fancy shmancy equipment...except I did order the new centrifuge At the end of the day don't we just need a little heat and a little cold from time to time?

Latest update: Really nothing to report - we found a perfect building but it needs two or three tenants, not just one. The developer thought he had all three tenants on board, but the other two weren't as solid as thought, so now the developer is holding until he can have more leases signed on the day he purchases the building. My broker is beating the bushes for new tenants, as am I. In the meantime, i continue to do pop-ups. Last Sunday was at our Endangered Wolf Center where I did a Eat What the Wolves Eat dinner highlighting the ecosystem of wolf habitat. Fun dinner, and had a couple fly in from Houston just for the meal. This was the "kitchen" we worked out of. No running water. 2 induction burners. 2 blenders. 1 cutting board.

This convo is turning to a larger debate, but I too would just finish it on a ceramic rod to knock it down a bit. Still very sharp, but not razor sharp.

This one is similar although not the same. Mine is aluminum and no fine mesh, only the wire mesh. But don't get stuck on the tool - there are countless objects out there that can serve as templates.

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