Chuckanut Reader Featuring Jennifer Hahn

Reproduced from Chuckanut Reader, August 2010


             Foraging for mushrooms, huckleberries and wild greens helped Jennifer Hahn, lighten her backpack while hiking 1090 miles on the Pacific Crest trail. During her solo kayak trip from Alaska to Bellingham, Hahn, a Bellingham wilderness guide, writer and teacher, supplemented her pre-packaged dry grub with fresh wild foods.  Harvesting salmon, urchin, limpets, berries and sea vegetables--kept her kayak trim and manageable.
            The adventurous locavore was thrilled when Skipstone Press asked her to write a book about northwest wild food.PACIFIC FEAST: A Cook’s Guide to West Coast Foraging and Cuisine is Hahn’s second book. It’s a delicious blend of 65 northwest chef recipes, field notes, color photos, illustrations, and 20 essays describing foraging adventures along coastal rain forests, beaches, mountains and, even, her own back yard.
            “Today, there’s a renaissance in local-grown and wild-foraged food sweeping the country,” Hahn says. “When it comes to eating within your own foodshed, wild food is as local as it gets. It doesn’t get closer than, say, the distance of a salal berry bush to your mouth—or a clam to your bucket.”
            “This is the real thing--the unadulterated bite,” says Hahn. “Plus it offers earth-to-fork bold flavor and a nutritional powerhouse.”

            Of course, Hahn will be the first to admit, we can’t all go out and live like Daniel Boone or subsistence hunters in the outback of wild Alaska and British Columbia. However, we can harvest wild foods in a way that conserves the abundance for generations to come. It was with this in mind that she and photographer Mac Smith carefully selected the wild foods in PACIFIC FEAST and included carefully researched “Sustainable Foraging Guidelines.”
             Using Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program; the Marine Stewardship Council guidelines; USDA Plant Datebase; the David Suzuki Foundation’s recommendations; First Nation traditional ecological wisdom; and other conservation-oriented experts such as Tom Mumford of the DNR, mycologist, Fred Rhoades, rare plants botanist, Katy Beck, and herbalist / forager Linda Quintana—to name a few local resources—Hahn and Smith came up with a list of 50 delicious wild foods.
            “These are foods we love to harvest, too. The wild and weedy greens, berries and roses, trees and ferns, mushrooms, shellfish, and seaweed that inhabit our kitchens.”
            One glance in Hahn’s freezer reveals her passion as a foraging gourmet: sautéed oyster mushrooms and chanterelles “for pizzas and omlettes,” diced horse clams and butter clams “for risotto and chowder,” fiddlehead fern “for relish and tempura,” nettle pesto, and carrageen-rich Turkish towel seaweed “for thickening a ‘Chocolate Ocean Pudding.” Hahn says it rivals truffle ganache. Her pantry boasts Mason jars of roasted dandelion root “for churning into coffee-flavored ice cream,” dandelion wine, spruce-tip syrup, Oregon grape jelly, and sweet kelp pickles. I was a one-pot camp cook until I learned from so many talented and passionate chefs.
             Of the 65 chefs and foragers in Pacific Feast, a delicious handful hail from Whatcom County eateries including:  Ciao Thyme, Pastazza, Nimbus; Fool's Onion Catering, and Willow’s Inn--along with celebrity chefs such as Chez Panisse' David Tanis, Vancouver, B.C.--C Restaurant's Executive Chef Robert Clark, Tilth's Maria Hines, and The Herbfarm/Poppy's Jerry Traunfeld. Also, 15 of Hahn’s students at Western Washington University helped do research and test recipes.          
            “We’re all in this together,” says Hahn.  “It takes a community to sustain the west coast’s delicious heritage foods, write a book, and enjoy a great Pacific feast!”