Avoid Gurus, Follow Plants.

I find it curious and exciting that, in late summer, the foods shining here in the garden and wilds of Maine seem to be perfectly aligned with the palate of Palestinian cuisine - a place so far away as the crow flies, but so near in heart and mind at every meal. Preparing for my most recent wild food walk at Tuckaway Farm, this synchronicity would not be ignored.

“Avoid gurus, follow plants,” an old Terence McKenna quote, comes to mind often as an unfailing compass. The plants that held my attention while planning the meal for this walk were sumac, mint, sweetfern, autumn olive, purslane, tomato, eggplant, pepper, zucchini, and armloads of herbs.

This book presented itself, like some kind of oracle, and everything fell into place. I collected my ingredients, home plants from my home land, set everything I thought I knew of them aside, and let Sami Tamimi take me somewhere new. I played recordings of Palestinian poets, I counted my blessings, I cooked.

Here is the menu and a few snaps of the meal, which I should be better at getting by now, but am not. It was a joy and a fortune from start to finish. Do begin with the poem above.

Brunch of leftovers at home the next day might never be topped.

Falastin was such a pleasure to cook and eat from that I looked up Sami online and found him here on Substack with a brand new book, Boustany, a celebration of vegetables from my Palestine. This post below made me so happy to see. On a whim, I’d decided to include purslane in the chopped salad, thinking I was taking a liberty and hoping it wasn’t a stretch, but it seemed like such a natural fit for the crunchy, succulent dish. To learn that it is indeed common to put purslane into a chopped salad and more so that this weed that is rather scorned here in modern-day United States, is regarded as a blessing from the land, there, for being abundant and growing without being planted - a little sanity in an insane world brought tears to my eyes. Hope you go find yourself some (sanity, purslane, sumac, wild mint, sweetfern, dinner, people to eat it with, hope).