6 foraging tips for free and adventurous eating
Why would you forage when you can just go the grocery store? Because foraged food is free! It’s also fun to go on an adventure looking for food while getting some fresh air and exercise.
Where, when, and how to hunt for morels
If you’ve never had the pleasure of eating a morel mushroom sautéed in butter, you need to go mushroom hunting. Like, now. Or at least the next time they’re in season.
I ate cicadas today — or as I like to call them, “sky lobsters”
I easily gathered eight cicadas while going about my morning chores on Thursday, and I popped them all into the freezer so they would perish quickly and then be ready for a lunch taste test. A couple hours later I cooked ’em up and I served them to myself. I ate giant bugs…and you won’t believe what luxury food they taste like!
A rainbow dinette, one red-and-blue-and-yellow house in Illinois, and a home built into Arizona boulders in this week’s reader photos
It’s our weekly roundup of reader photos and interesting Offbeat Home-ish links from around the web. This week we’ve got the lowdown on air conditioned doghouses, an upcoming steampunk fest in Massachusetts, and era-appropriate Disney princess cosplay. Click on through!
Water apples in Australia — like tiny watermelons in the trees!
I was delighted to find my favourite fruit in the wild this week. Water apples (also known as bell fruit) are familiar to me from my childhood in West Africa where I called them “pommes d’eau.” Get all the facts on this forage-able fruit within.
How to handle jackfruit — and three recipes to use with it!
Near our house is a botanical garden which includes a small, pathetic tropical fruit orchard. We visit every now and then, usually bringing home a few lemons, but not much else. Most of the things growing there are not super productive, because they aren’t cultivated or cared for, and there is usually only one tree from each species. The trees are also labelled with nothing but a name (and sometimes not even that), so it’s hard to know when things are ready for picking.
A few months ago we grabbed a jackfruit, but when we cut it open it oozed so much latex that we got scared and threw it away. Then we saw Australian celebrity chef Luke Nguyen make a salad with green, unripe jackfruit. He talked briefly about how to cook it. That was enough to inspire us to have another go.
A pink room in Russia on January 1 and a hot pot of stewing bison meat in this week’s reader photos
Start your week with our collection of interesting articles on the web and photos from our readers. This week: a couple images of wild and foraged food and a link to detailed photos from inside a house based on Up! In these Clicky Links you’ll find lots of sites to waste a little time on.
Click through, too, to find our links on submitting YOUR stuff to Offbeat Home!
8 ideas for the bounty of mangoes this spring in Australia
As America picks over Thanksgiving leftovers and gears up for Christmas, I’m loving summer here in Australia, because summer = mango season. My partner Andy and I are mango-obsessed, so I was not terribly unhappy to leave the US in the end of October, saying goodbye to its snow. Especially because it meant coming home to a box full of mangoes.