New Mindful Cookbook of Sonoran Desert Foods

Desert Harvesters, a grassroots organization promoting and enhancing the planting and use of native wild food sources, has published its second cookbook, Eat Mesquite and More: A Cookbook for Sonoran Desert Foods and Living, a 2017 Southwest Book of the Year selection by the Pima County Public Library.

The cookbook celebrates native food forests of the Sonoran Desert and beyond with 170 recipes contributed by more than 60 community cooks, chefs, and culinary artists. They feature wild, indigenous foods, including mesquite, acorn, barrel cactus, chiltepin, cholla, desert chia, desert herbs and flowers, desert ironwood, hackberry, palo verde, prickly pear, saguaro, wolfberry and wild greens. It is an expansion of their 2011 book, Eat Mesquite!: A Cookbook.

Co-author Brad Lancaster, also co-founder of Desert Harvesters, says, “We think of mesquite as a gateway food, or a low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Native velvet mesquite pods are easy to pick, and this tree—along with other delicious native bean trees—grow not only in the desert, but also in urban areas, where they thrive if we plant them within or beside rainwater-harvesting earthworks, which we encourage.”

To obtain a copy online, email [email protected] or visit DesertHarvesters.org.