FABULOUS FOOD HITS STRAIGHT OUTTA THE PARK!
Feast on the beautiful bounty of our National Parks! We don’t just mean feast your eyes! We mean feast on some of the most beautiful wild food!
When you dream about what you might want to eat when you’re on vacation, you might be thinking about something fancy or exotic, or perhaps a local luxury treat. You might be thinking about a splurge -- either for your diet or your wallet. But some of the most beautiful food you can find is free!
Summer is the perfect time for enjoying the most delicious parts of our National Parks. Hike along forest trails and you will find gorgeous wild fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, and nuts ready for picking. You can snack as you make your way through breathtaking scenery. You can also bring a few simple tools and containers so you can collect enough to bring back to home base.
Foraging can yield incredible flavors, if you know what to look for, and where to look -- like acres of wild blueberry bushes that carpet Cadillac Mountain at Acadia National Park, in Maine.
Wild berries taste way better than the supermarket kinds. A walk through most wooded areas of the parks in summer and autumn will likely be fruitful. Look for wild blackberries, raspberries, serviceberries, and thimbleberries.
Red currants appear like brilliant jewels as they glisten in the sun. They will make you pucker on their own. We love them paired with fresh chevre or scattered in stews. Red currant jams are fabulous, both on toast and in recipes.
Elderberries hang heavy from their trees. They offer a tart floral burst upon tongues, or can be savored later as elderberry wine.
Foraging for wild mushrooms requires expertise to make sure you don’t pick the poisonous ones. Edible and poisonous mushrooms often look dangerously alike.
But if you a fortunate, you will be rewarded with the luxury of earthy morels, delicate fragrant apricot-colored chanterelles, lovely hen-of-the-woods, and more.
Nuts, such as wild hickory nuts, chestnuts, and black walnuts are wonderful finds, if you can beat the squirrels to them.
If you are into wild greens, forage for fiddleheads, edible mosses, wild ramps, cress, and more.
Glean sea vegetables and seaweeds from National Seashores.
Even the desert parks yield fruits, like delicious prickly pear cacti growing in the Southwest.
There’s so much more wild food growing in the parks than you could ever imagine. Learn about what’s plentiful and what’s endangered. Learn about seasonal availability. And learn what tastes good.
Be careful not to forage on private lands. And definitely check the rules on public lands -- they differ from park to park. Many limit your harvest to personal consumption. All require licenses or permits for hunting, fishing, and harvesting wildlife.
Here’s a great resource for National Parks foragers, with information about rules, regulations, limitations, availabilities, permits, licenses, and more.
Read more about Beautiful Vacations Part 1 in 10 Beautiful Trips with Friends, Being Beautifully Chill, Free Floating Vacation Inspirations, 10 Gorgeous Golf Vacation Spots, and 10 National Parks with Unusual Beauty.
And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.
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