For those who love cookbooks, the recent release of One Big Table by Molly O’Neill will dazzle you with a huge supply of foods found throughout America. If you look deep within its 880 pages, you will find 3 of those highlighting myself and several wild greens found throughout America.

Molly O’Neill is the author of three cookbooks, including the best-selling New York Cookbook, A Well-Seasoned Appetite, and The Pleasure of Your Company. She hosted the PBS series Great Food and was, for ten years, a reporter with The New York Times and the food columnist for its Sunday magazine.

Check out this beautiful new cookbook from Desert Harvesters in southern Arizona….Eat Mesquite! Known as kiawe in Hawaii, the Prosopis genus provides delicious food for those in the know. This cookbook was inspired by the long lines of enthusiastic eaters at the Desert Harvesters’ annual Mesquite Milling Fiesta and Pancake Breakfast in Tucson, Arizona, who beg every year for the famous pancake recipe. Here it finally is, in print, along with nearly 50 other delicious recipes in celebration of mesquite flour, an abundant and easy-to-harvest native food of the Sonoran Desert and beyond. Also, learn from experts about the culinary and medicinal uses of Prosopis in arid lands, secrets for cooking with mesquite flour, and how you too can harvest, store, mill and enjoy mesquite pods with tasty, fun and nutritious results.

If you live in an arid environment you may wish to know about one of the Desert Harvesters’ Founders…Brad Lancaster. Brad is the author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond: Volumes 1 and 2
You can watch a video I did on Brad a few years ago by clicking here.

After a long hiatus from filming Hot on the Trail with Sunny Savage, I just signed my newly amended contract with Veria…with the addition of being Associate Producer this go-round! We’ll be filming the final 9 episodes of the second season in coming months. Veria is also paying me to make video blogs…so there’s added incentive. They will be launching their new and improved website www.veria.com in early March, so check in with them to find recipes/videos/comments/etc.

It’s official! Hot on the Trail with Sunny Savage will start airing on January 4th.
Tune into Veria, a network found on DISH channel 218, or Verizon FIOS, on Mon/Tues/Wed at 1:00 PM and 9:30 PM, Thursday’s at 8:00 PM, and Fri/Sat/Sun at 3:30 PM. Times are listed for EST (eastern standard time).

Another great year at the Wild Food Summit on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. This was our 4th Annual gathering and this year we had a spontaneous music recording with all the awesome musical talent attending. Listen to the Wild Food Summit song as you watch the video!

Another great opportunity to document an amazing plant person…David Bruce Leonard. I just moved to Maui after falling in love with Ryan, from the Hale Paliku video, and have been enjoying an amazing life here in Hawaii. So blessed to have met David Bruce Leonard and attend his Hawaiian plant medicine class for the past 2 weeks. Click here to order a copy of David’s book Medicine at your Feet: Healing Plants of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

David is working on a book of Hawaiian Edibles at your Feet. I hope to be contributing a few recipes to his new book, so stay tuned for some exciting new recipes. Am learning lots of new foods here in Hawaii, and am excited to start sharing them soon. Much aloha sent your way*

Processing acorns! Everyone does it a little bit different, and for me it seems like every year I’m somewhere different and do it in a little bit different way. This year I was in north central Texas, and luckily had myself some great help. You’ll follow from picking them up, to shelling them in my handy sheller, to letting them dry so that the papery sheaths can be removed, to grinding them up in my hand crank/hand powered blender, to leaching them with cold water to remove the tannic acid.

Click here for a recipe for Puffy Acorn Pretzels. Click here for a recipe for Acorn Black Walnut Bread. Click here for a recipe for Acorn ‘n Sagebrush Chicken. And click here for Acorn Hummus.

Ever wanted to see the inside of an eco RV?
I’ve been traveling on the road in this 2009 diesel Road Warrior by Weekend Warrior for the last 10 months. After finding out that I would be filming a television show about wild foods all across America, I needed to find a way to not be separated from my son for long periods of time. My cousin suggested an RV and it seemed like a great idea. The network I would be working for was not too excited about the idea of me driving the RV to filming locations, thinking that I could possibly be breaking down on the side of the road and unable to meet productions schedules. So, the trade-off was that I buy a new one with all the warranties and bells and whistles.

Similar to purchasing a new car, I had heard about the large amount of toxic fumes and particles released…especially during the first 6-12 months after its manufactured date…in a new vehicle. Unlike a regular car, we would be living in the RV with a friend full-time. I decided to put in the extra capital to make the RV as environmentally friendly as my budget and time would allow. We nearly completely gutted out the interior, installing recycled bamboo flooring using non-toxic adhesives, cork ceilings using non-toxic adhesives, peeling the walls of their carpeting and linoleum and applying non-toxic zero VOC paints that also included some clay to further absorb toxins from the air itself, stripped some of the wood and used non toxic stain, built custom frames for all the windows so that we could install 100% organic and wild crafted nettle curtains, we took out the existing mattresses and put in organic cotton filled ones…then covered them with bamboo and organic cotton sheets. We got some beautiful organic, wild-crafted, hypoallergenic milkweed filled comforters and pillows. We then installed 8 solar panels on the roof, creating enough energy for all our power needs (all interior lights/fans/computers/chargers/power tools/blenders/food dehydrators and more!). The rig is a diesel, so we were able to run biodiesel for much of the time. This rig is actually what’s called a toy hauler and the entire back side drops down so that you can drive a motorcycle (I have my 1998 Yamaha Virago 1100 Special parked in back), 4-wheeler, jet ski, smart car, etc. into. Besides its huge diesel tank, there is also a completely separate tank for unleaded gasoline for your toys. My dream was to convert it to run on vegetable grease that I got from restaurants. This motorhome is especially well designed to be a grease RV because it’s already a diesel and with some welding and conversion magic you could have the smaller ‘unleaded’ tank hold the diesel necessary to start the rig, with the much larger ‘diesel’ tank used to hold straight grease.

I recently ended filming my upcoming television series ‘Hot on the Trail with Sunny Savage’. I’ve decided to sell the RV, as well as the motorcycle. I think it would be a great for a family, as a traveling educational ride, or for someone wanting to bring a business on the road. If you’re interested in purchasing it please contact me at: sunnysavage@gmail.com

Here’s a little slice of paradise on Maui’s north shore…called Hale Paliku. Owner and visionary Ryan Luskin has created a beautiful art-filled vacation villa that is really a treat to stay in. Of course one of the draws for me is that he has planted over 100 fruit trees on the property! Imagine stepping out the door, to your own jungle garden filled with macadamia nuts, star fruit, persimmons, bananas, taro, purslane, miracle berry, lemons, passionfruit, mangosteen, noni, bread fruit, and more.

Give Ryan a shout out about renting Hale Paliku, as well as his eco adventure tours. Click here for bookings: http://www.mauiactivities.net/home_rental/index.html

*please excuse me as this site was recently changed to wordpress, and I’m feeling a bit lost as I try and navigate through a new way of posting pics, videos, and links….thanks for your patience!