Marie Viljoen

Marie Viljoen lives in Brooklyn and believes in food, flowers and plants you can eat (and drink). Join her on a seasonal forage walk or find her daily posts on Instagram @66squarefeet

IN OUR CURRENT ISSUE: Foraging for Burdock Stems

In our current issue, Marie Viljoen, mistress of edible weeds, waxes eloquent about the flowering stems of the burdock plant. “Those who eat burdock typically cook only the root. But the fast-growing stems are a delicious wild food. Cooked, they are a semantic and gustatory marriage of globe and Jerusalem artichokes,” she writes.

variety of apples

What’s Ahead for the Seasonal Eater? It’s Apples

Deprivation. That is what eating seasonally means. It means that in high summer you do not eat an apple. You walk right on by that crackling green Granny Smith that lurks year round in the grocery store bins. Because it didn’t come from around here. It means that in January you do not buy those stackable plastic boxes of raspberries (sometimes I cheat; I do), and it means that tomatoes are not the pink slices in silly salads or the vine-grown California ones in February, but the ripe, fat, sweet and bursting Brandywines of August.

tomatoes on a vine

It’s Serious Tomato Time, Says Our Urban Gardening Correspondent

Out on the Rockaways artist Frank Meuschke’s beach farm is pumping out tomatoes — at least until Irene pays a visit. We ate his Brandywines and Black Russians warm from the vine with burrata and torn up basil. Frank and his wife Betsy Alwin turn the crop that they can’t eat into sauce as fast as they can.