The Forager’s Cookbook

The Forager’s Cookbook

Published in North America by Skyhorse on 7 February 2023, as The Forager’s Cookbook: Identify & Prepare Edible Weeds & Wild Plants, paperback, 9 x 7.5in, 256 pages, $19.99.

Identify & Prepare Edible Weeds & Wild Plants

This is a recipe book, a foraging book and a medicinal herbal, but also more. Here are 90 exciting plant-based recipes featuring common weeds, showcasing why they are delicious, nutritious, healthful, too good to waste, and free!

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The contents are: alexanders, blackberry, chickweed, cleavers, cresses, daisy and ox-eye daisy, dandelion, elder, fat hen and orache, ground elder, ground ivy, hogweed, honey mushroom, jack by the hedge, mugwort, nettle, nipplewort, plantain, sorrel, sowthistle, spear thistle and yarrow.

Sample recipes include: alexanders tempura, ground ivy kombucha, jack mash, nettle crisps, Zanzibari-style nipplewort, sowthistle bud pakora and yarrow za’atar.

Comments on Amazon

This book provides not only a range of international dishes all using weeds from your garden, but also a few pages on each weed’s medicinal use, herbalism and traditional uses. I found it fascinating. I have always enjoyed foraging, with this book I can now garden with purpose too. I'll be looking at weeds in a new light from now on.

***

I have enjoyed reading Julie's books over the years. Her knowledge is second to none. Kitchen Medicine was brilliant, Hedgerow Medicine was inspiring, but Eat your Weeds! is my new firm favourite.

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I love this book, such a wonderful resource.

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Do yourself a favour. Enlightening and beautiful book.

From an article by us in Permaculture magazine

Next time you are weeding, look at the edible weeds as a culinary resource full of nutritionally dense, tasty potential and appreciate them as a free gift. With worsening climate change, crops may fail, but our resilient weeds will not let us down.

Testimonial comments

A brilliant book … what could be better than a lifetime’s worth of knowledge: two lifetimes’ worth!
– John Rensten, author of The Edible City

As a professional gardener I have spent half a century engaged in botanical ethnic cleansing. Reading Eat your Weeds! has given me a new respect and fascination with the Auld Enemy. This is a beautiful and absorbing volume that should be on every gardener’s shelves. Buy it!
– Jim Buckland, former manager of West Dean Gardens, Sussex

Weeds are beautiful, nourishing, medicinal, and unbelievably tasty. I love this book. It’s surprising, beautiful, and turns your garden or walk into an adventure, a delight of new recipes.
– Martin Shaw, actor and patron of Viva!

Book Reviews

Julie Bruton-Seal and Mathew Seal have done it again with yet another gorgeous, inspiring, informative and sumptuous book! Eat Your Weeds! is an extraordinary testament to the history and edible qualities of many of those power-packed plants we call weeds. Its pages are filled with a very tempting array of plant-based recipes that will inspire everyone, from beginners, to wild food veterans, to get picking and cooking… and to deepen our understanding of these tenacious life-enhancing plants that are our allies, medicines and food.

As always with Julie and Mathew’s books, these pages are packed full with their knowledge of the medicinal qualities of the plants and the many uses these plants would have had in the past. They have also revived the spirit of our forebears, by making use of the plants that grow freely around them. Through their understanding of the plants and their willingness to be inventive and adaptive, and to meet our palates of today, they have taken wild food eating to a whole new level. Many of their recipes are adaptations of traditional recipes from around the world, transforming the humble weed into the exotic!

Eat Your Weeds! is alive with Julie’s gorgeous photos and Julie and Mathew’s personal stories. They know these plants intimately; they understand them on many different levels. Their identification tips, and foraging tips, whether foraging from your garden or the land, are based on real experience and true wisdom, and are absolutely invaluable.

Just like the natural world around us, Eat Your Weeds! is bursting with life, love and connection. It is an inspiration, a total delight and a beautiful book to gift to friends and to yourself!
– Permaculture Magazine, review by Glennie Kindred

This book is revolutionary! Each page is filled with nourishing information and heaps of new and creative ways to use these healing plants, not to mention the beautiful writing surrounding each plant's folklore, history and uses. For herbalists and foragers, this book is an absolute joy to read.
– Healing Weeds - Maria Fernandez Garcia [online]

A fascinating new cookbook which celebrates weeds and invites you to see them in another light. It takes inspiration from around the world with 90 plant-based recipes.
– Norfolk Life magazine

Inspires us to take our culinary skills up a notch and experiment with the free and delicious food from our gardens. It’s a comprehensive and beginner-friendly manual for eating weeds. All steps are covered, from foraging, to safely identifying the weeds, to the preparation and flavours to extract. You’re left with the confidence and tools to experiment with weeds in a variety of main dishes, snacks, desserts and drinks recipes.
– Plantlife magazine

All you need is a little courage to try something you haven’t before and you will have a whole new appreciation of the idea of foraging and living off the land.
– Piers Warren, Green Spirit magazine