Stir-Fried Wild Rice

by Callan Randall

Active Time: 40 minutes Total Time: 40 minutes Servings: 3-4

Ingredients 4 tbsp canola or vegetable oil 1- 8oz package of mushrooms (shitake, bell, or oyster will do), sliced 1 tsp salt 1 ½ tsp fresh grated ginger 1 ½ tsp fresh grated garlic 3 scallions, thinly sliced + 1 extra for serving 1 ½ cups cooked wild rice 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce 2 tsp rice vinegar 1 tsp sugar 4 cups kale leaves 1 celery stalk, chopped 1/4 cup celery leaves, chopped Pinch black pepper

Directions 01 Add 2 tablespoons of oil to a large pan and saute the mushrooms over high heat, about 4-8 minutes. Set aside in a bowl and sprinkle with salt to draw out any moisture. 02 In a large skillet, add the remaining oil over high heat. Add your ginger, garlic, and green onions and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add rice, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and remaining salt. Stir until well combined, and everything is coated in oil, and the rice is warm. 03 Add your mushrooms and kale, stirring until it is wilted, about 5-10 minutes. Once the kale has wilted, add in the celery and celery leaves. Cook until celery leaves are wilted, about 2 minutes, then transfer the rice to a plate. 04 Top with green onions and pepper, and serve immediately.

Home Grown and Hand Gathered: a journey with the land

Couple shares their food journey and the challenges of growing and foraging in an urban setting.

Silvan Goddin and Jordan Tony share the TikTok and website Home Grown Hand Gathered (homegrown_handgathered on TikTok), a place where they share the journey they’ve had with growing and foraging their food in an urban setting. They aim to educate through the experiences they’ve had, as well as continuing to challenge themselves, and gear their content toward both the average person and younger people who might be interested.

Living off the land has interested the couple for a long time. Goddin grew up growing food with her family, and Tony started a vegetable garden in high school. The pair even met in a community garden they both went to in college. Renting a plot of land from small farmers, Goddin and Tony grew vegetables and sold them at local farmer’s markets. This eventually transitioned into growing food for themselves, friends and family.

When their journey with living off the land started about five years ago, it was simply a challenge Tony set for himself. He wanted to see if he could be sustained off only the food they were able to grow and gather.

“The first time it was just me trying to go one week without any store bought food, and I was basically just starving for a week,” Tony said. From that week, the pair learned that, if they wanted to be able to sustain themselves on what they grew, they needed more substantial foods.

“That was a great lesson because we learned, okay, we need to grow more beans and corn and things you can actually make a meal out of rather than just tomatoes and zucchini,” Tony said.

From there, it snowballed. At the beginning of the year in 2021, the couple went one entire month living on food they’d hunted, gathered and grown. Throughout that year, they continued to do week-long challenges that encompassed three months total.

When creating recipes for these challenge periods, they get inspiration from cultural and childhood meals and the recipes of others, modifying it to suit the ingredients they have available. They also often research how a food was used historically and base the rest of the meal around that.

“I think a good example is we eat a lot of acorn flour now, which is something that neither of us grew up eating, and we didn’t really know what to do with it so we looked up how Native people have used acorns as food for thousands of years,” Tony said. “They’re so prolific around here, they just fall out of the sky and they’re all over the ground, and there’s pretty simple techniques that you can use to render them edible so we make pancakes out of them and other kinds of cake and things like that.”

by Morrgan Zmolek

The biggest challenge for the couple is the available space — as in, they don’t have much. They’ve learned how to pack foods in and use successions — planting one right after harvesting another — to their advantage so they always have something growing. They also rent some community garden plots around their area to maximize their space and use public lands for hunting and foraging. A concern for them in using this public land, however, is pollution and contamination issues caused by living in an urban area. They mitigate this by knowing the area and what gets used on that land before harvesting anything from it.

The pair, though they wish they were able to live without killing animals, don’t see that as a viable or realistic option, given that so many animals are killed in trying to keep them away from crops. However, their philosophy in hunting allows them to reduce their own impact on other living beings in order to sustain themselves.

“When you’re sitting there with a bow and arrow and you see the living animal in front of you and decide to take its life for the express purpose of sustaining your own life, leaving any of it to go to waste just feels disrespectful or careless,” Tony said. “When you’re trying to live off of the calories that you’re producing with your own hands, you really need to maximize the amount of protein and calories you can get from each hunt, and that also reduces the number of animals you need to kill within a given year to support your life.”

Goddin and Tony get the bulk of their calories from dry flour corn, drying beans, pumpkin, winter squash and potatoes, all of which they grow themselves. In addition, they also grow fruits and veggies, like tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs and strawberries. While they do cultivate some mushrooms in logs they have in their yard, they also forage a lot of them as well. Wild greens, like garlic, mustard, dandelion and some fruits, like crab apples, are also on the forage list.

“One thing that we’ve learned from getting more and more into foraging is I think a lot of people have this perception of it as like, you’re just grabbing a couple of little pieces of greens here or a little stick to chew on there, but when you know where to find the stuff, you can make piles of food,” said Tony. They said they often pick up items in public spaces that people aren’t aware are edible. For those looking to get into growing food in an urban setting, the couple advises to look into resource groups, particularly for foraging and mushroom identification. Their favorite YouTube channel for this purpose is Learn Your Land, created by Adam Haritan. In particular, they highlighted his mushroom identification series one skill or one plant, expand from there.”

Food isn’t just food; there is much that food touches in human life. Goddin recognizes this, and notes the importance of getting involved with different aspects of food. “Food touches so many aspects of our culture and our society and I think it is an important thing to be involved in,” Goddin said. “You can be passionate and curious and involved with it in so many ways from policy to farming to public land access to cooking and I think it’s a great way to move forward and like create a society where people do have access to have food sovereignty and having that connection with their land and the ability to grow food, should they want to, or just the ability to really have access and choose the foods that they want to be eating and I think that’s really important.”

Though they do not recommend using trial and error to discover which foods are edible, particularly in terms of mushrooms, they do use trial and error in adapting techniques in cooking to a variety of recipes.

“The first time you’re going to forage something, you should always either go with somebody who’s experienced and can teach you what to look for or just do a ton of research and make sure you’re capable of understanding how to identify something,” Tony said. “We have degrees in biology, so we learned a lot of the basics to be able to understand—I don’t think you need to have a degree in biology to be able to understand plant identification, but that’s where we got the basic knowledge to differentiate one plant from another.” as being helpful. They said there are also often walk-throughs hosted by an expert to supply that knowledge to those who want to learn in a more hands-on way.

In terms of growing, however, Goddin said it’s best to jump right in. “The best way is just to do it but start small and take it piece by piece,” she said. “It’s easy to just be ‘I’m gonna start this huge garden!’ and then in the middle of summer everything’s full of weeds, and it can get very overwhelming. I’d say start with some of the things you really love to eat and be like ‘okay, maybe I can grow this,’ and even if it’s in a container on a balcony, you probably can. So, just kind of starting and, once you feel you get really good at For more information about Goddin and Tony’s journey, visit their website Home Grown Hand Gathered or follow them on TikTok.

mixed berry orange jam