John Kessler's Foraging Adventures

Do you enjoy diving into the sea of various restaurant reviews online? If so, you may be familiar with John Kessler, a well-known food writer and critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and long-time friend of Chef Nic Bour. He recently visited Serenbe for a few weeks not as a food critic, but as a guest of the artist in residency program as a way to work on his writing and find some peaceful respite during these hectic times.

In his recent article for the AJC  about his experience, John explains that by the time he arrived at Serenbe he had already been through most of the stages of “COVID Homesteader Syndrome”, as he calls it. He has tried gardening, baking sourdough bread, canning and even lacto-fermenting  everything in sight. Anyone else trying out their green thumb during lock down?!

While his visit initially consisted of “doomscrolling through Twitter” and writing at his desk in the Art Farm cabins, he was drawn to taking long walks through the trails of the community. As his walks became longer and longer, he says a new stage of homesteader syndrome took hold - foraging. It started simple, with wild garlic chives to flavor bottles of vinegar, then quickly grew as he came upon black walnut trees deep in the forest, where he had to use his T-shirt to bring his haul back with him.

This is when he called Nic Bour, chef at The Farmhouse at Serenbe to help him make the Italian nut liqueur called nocino. They spent an afternoon together cracking walnuts and setting them in jars with coriander seed, star anise, maple syrup and vodka (can you say yum?).

His foraging days did not end there, as he then discovered some mysterious little yellow fruit dropping from a small grove of thorny trees growing by a creek bed. The scent he describes is a combination of lilac, orange, pine and cinnamon. More specifically, John says, “basically, what you’d get if you dumped tide, Pine-Sol, Mr. Clean and the contents of your spice rack into a bucket”. When he took a taste, these mystery fruits were not completely unpleasant but were apparently bitter.

John sent a photo to Chef Nic, who had no knowledge of what these could be. He hiked back to the tree grove and filled an entire sack with these cute little fruits, and returned to his cabin to do a deep Google-dive and soon learned that he had discovered trifoliate oranges, sometimes called hardy oranges.

During his research he learned that trifoliate oranges can be a skin irritant and mildly toxic when consumed raw, but also read a lot about making marmalade, inspiring him to make a batch. While the pectin-rick gel was floral yet bittersweet, the pieces of rind were still hard and as bitter as “biting into aspirin”, he says. He filtered out the gel, which was undeniably tasty by itself.

The trifoliate oranges may have made a bitter marmalade, but they did serve John as a source of direction during an accidentally-long hike on the Serenbe trails. He had a highly productive day of writing and thought a late afternoon walk would be a great reward, until he found himself lost amongst the trails late at night as rain began to near. As he was frantically preparing to call for help, the wind delivered a sweet, familiar smell. Following his nose, the scent led him to the trifoliate oranges growing by the creek bed. From here, he knew his way home!

The next day, he purchased a 4-pound bag of sugar, to turn the rest of the oranges into a big pot of jam. As he prepared to leave his AIR Serenbe experience, he gifted the jam to Serenbe residents (from a safe social distance)  who had befriended him during his stay. He says he’s not sure if these oranges saved his life, but they surely made his stay even more memorable and distracted him from the horrors of this year.

Read the original article for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution here.

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