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Zoe Yang

@jingtastic

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Nanjing born, Brooklyn based. Writer, cook, all-things forager and preserver. DM for private dinners, tours, and workshops

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I missed cooking for my friends. Part one of a little feast i made featuring the beautiful backstraps of the buck i shot. How many wild autumnal ingredients can you count? Recipe for the barberry jelly is from Forage and Feast by @meadowsandmore by @jingtastic

Join us this Sunday at FMFM! 🪁 Zoe will take participants through the tradition of wind-curing meat in China and contextualize these practices within communal life, harvest rituals, hunting culture, and the changing seasons – in China and beyond. Participants will learn the key principles of wind-curing, witness how a salt cure is made, and then get hands on with rubbing their own duck legs to take home to cure.

RSVP at link in bio or through stories ⭐️ by @jingtastic

(Only) one year of marriage in, @johnnyfbowman has unlocked levels of being Chinese that even I’m impressed by.

Happy Anniversary, 老公. I know life will not always be robot exoskeletons and lamb testicles, but you bring love and craic and a willingness to dance everywhere you go, and that is everything. 😘 by @jingtastic

6/21 SOLSTICE PARTY, ROCKAWAY PENINSULA NYC

The pizza party at the end of the semester. Thank you to new friends and old who showed up and added your magic to Field Trips and to this FEAST (so so many not pictured!!) (Some) food deets in following captions, many others lost to the sands of (a good) time.

📸 @mollymargs, behind every important event in my life 💕

Little snackies on the grill

糟卤 duck tongues glazed with magnolia soy glaze. The last of Brother Zhao’s mountain honey went into the glaze.

The Lisk Self Basting Heritage Turkey Roaster in an outdoor firepit situation

Lucas checking on the buried treasure

Two hours later: whole lamb shoulders marinated in pine cone honey and roasted in a nest of black cherry branches, bayberry branches, and mugwort. This is inspired by Irish methods of cooking lamb in hay.

Who sells seashells by the seashore? @mercurymovesme, slanging lemon mugwort possets served up in oyster shells 🥹

Dani and Taylor also accidentally (serendipitously) made elderflower butter right there on the beach

There were also real oysters, raw and grilled, with ramp leaf mignonette. The ramp leaves were fermented in Hainan’s pickled yellow chilies, a gift from Wenjing

Moon snails, stuffed with pork, snail meat, lemongrass, and chili pickle spring bamboo. A riff again on 螺蛳粉snail noodles

Sandra went hard with this saffron and beach rose tart. I MEAN LOOK AT IT 😤

Kate foraged these bamboo tubes during the Bamboo workshop, and i stuffed them with forbidden rice and shredded coconut

It’s stone fruit season! So i made a peach, apricot, and plum salad with beach rose syrup. Rosaceae family unite!

A mini midden 💕 by @jingtastic

6/20 SOLSTICE FORAGE, FORT TILDEN

So fucking special to end FIELD TRIPS at my favorite place in New York, the place i first felt like i had kin here, the place i got engaged (all these things are related).

There is so much to say about this place. About the immigrants and military settlers and birds that have shaped it. About the Breezy Point Irish and how any group of foreigners becomes White in America. About Robert Moses and the manmade wildlife refuge and the private club opening at Riis and the plight of the piping plovers preceded by the plume trade…I think next year I should just do an entire series in the Rockaways, what do yall think?

📸 by the incredible Julia Lecato @cyber__julia by @jingtastic

Year 4 of making rose pastries - 鲜花饼 - from Rosa rugosa, native to China and invasive on our shorelines.

Though rose pastries are associated with Yunnan, land of eternal spring and the flower capital of China, Rosa rugosa, China’s wild rose, originates from the cold, sandy, maritime soils of Dongbei (which explains their vigor here!). The first rose pastries were served at court in the Qing Dynasty hundreds of years ago, while rose pastries in Yunnan (a landlocked province) were only popularized in the 1980s when commercial cultivation took off. These days, wild Rosa rugosa is highly threatened in its native range and listed as a protective species in China.

The rose pastries sold for a few yuan each in the touristy Old Towns of Yunnan (last slide) have fillings that contain less than 10% rose petals - the bulking filler is wintermelon paste and the flavoring comes from rose essence. Doing it the right way is hard, and even more so when you’re gathering from truly wild roses, which only have five petals per flower rather than cultivars, which have ~30.

And do the bumblebees care if a rose is invasive? I try to take only the ones they’re done with. Foraging math: 3 hours of picking yields about 500g petals, which become a quart of jam after half an hour of gentle massaging with sugar. That jar of jam makes about 30 rose pastries (I add a small amount of toasted black sesame seeds or pine nuts for flavor). A tiny, precious, once a year treat. Would these pastries be such big business and cost so little if they were all still made like this? Is it democratization, or bastardization? 🤔

Come taste what the emperors did. This year’s batch of wild rose pastries will be served on Saturday’s Solstice Forage. by @jingtastic

5/24 BAMBOO COOKING WORKSHOP: The snail noodles deserve their own post.

I first made snail noodles (螺蛳粉) from foraged snails in 2021 (see highlights) and vowed to never do it again. It was labor intensive enough without prepping my own toppings and fermenting my own bamboo.

Welp.

This time, @whiwhiwhis and i gathered Crepidula fornicata, a native limpet that has been running amok as other native shellfish populations continue to decline. Even the invasive European periwinkles i used in my 2021 version have disappeared from the shorelines close to the city.

Crepidula turns out to be a very worthy substitute - savory and sweet, delicious even raw. (Their shells also were what i used to calcine into lime for the previous century egg workshop). From there, we took the traditional 螺蛳粉 template and continued riffing, using the ingredients that are available here and now: the Sichuan peppercorn trees in Prospect Park (the baby leaves make great tempura), American woodears from the Ravine, and the cilantro macho which always beats regular cilantro at my Food Bazaar. The toppings were all made in house - lacto bamboo and chili bamboo i put up in March, ramp leaves and long beans in April. Peanuts and yuba and tempuras and PUFFY OMELETTES (the way they soak up broth 🤌🤌🤌) all fried a la minute.

The only thing we didn’t make was the noodle. Maybe next time… by @jingtastic

5/24 BAMBOO COOKING WORKSHOP

A few years ago i started throwing Harvest Hangs where my friends would gather and we’d make big batches of ferments together. Processing botanical bounty, particularly messy wild foraged stuff, can be tedious, and time passes faster if you’re doing it with other people - and being fed!

This workshop was an expansion of that idea because each bamboo shoot takes approximately 1 second to gather but 1 whole minute to trim and peel.

We fortified ourselves first: snail noodles with a ton of homemade feral toppings, stuffed fried tofu, beignets dusted in sumac sugar. We also passed around artist Billy Martin @illybeats amazing bamboo instruments made from a grove he’s been tending for decades. (Yes you can and should buy them!)

And then we made an epic mess of the kitchen putting up bamboo shoots. We made some jars with 3% salt brine, and the more risk-driven among us also tried out Guangxi’s 酸笋, which is a SALTLESS lactoferment. It only works with very fresh bamboo harvested within 24 hours (so that sugar content has not degraded) and spring/mineral water (we used my handy RO tap). If we’re successful, the next batch will be easier since the brine can be used as starter for future jars. I don’t know anyone who has successfully done this in the US 😂

To borrow a phrase from Billy, bamboo is our teacher. by @jingtastic

5/23 BAMBOO FORAGING FIELD TRIP: another rainy one but this time i was prepared!! We set up “camp” in the middle of the grove and as everyone went off to forage, i grilled the fresh bamboo shoots they gathered on a comal before dressing them in miso and sansho leaf (also wild gathered) mayo. It was super special to be able to do this, because unlike most bamboos, fresh Phyllostachys species are so low in cyanide that you don’t need to parboil as long as you cook them very thoroughly! To sip, there was spruce honey tea.

Our quarry, Phyllostachys aureosulcata, hails from Zhejiang, so i made classic beggar’s chicken (叫花鸡) stuffed with bamboo shoots and winecap mushroom confit. I wrapped the chicken in invasive burdock leaves rather than the traditional lotus leaves and roasted the whole birds in beach clay. Everything was foraged/local, including the chicken (Rhode Island Reds). When we cracked the clay shells and unwrapped the chickens, they were still warm 🥰

A meadow borders the bamboo grove, so i had gathered mugwort and sweet vernal grass (of Braiding Sweetgrass) the week before to dry, which brings out its vanilla notes. They both went into a local “grass jelly” - quotes because unlike true grass jelly, these plants don’t have gelling properties of their own. But flavorwise, it was great! Very evocative of traditional grass jelly, but with its own thing going on (mugwort will do that). The last of 2025’s rosa rugosa syrup went into the red bean topping.

As everyone ate, i yapped about bamboo biology, how and when different bamboos came to America, the many lives Phyllostachys has had here, and the (il)logic of the suburbs. I leaned on excellent legal research on bamboo trespassing (both by humans and bamboo itself) conducted by @dkt_0325

On the way back, a car piled high with humans and bamboo. by @jingtastic

A forest is a process, and that fact is nowhere more evident than in a burn. I spent two magical days at ~4800 ft (the sweet spot) hunting burn morels with @northamericanmyco in the Placer Creek burn of July 2025. Nearly a year later, plant medicines are coming up in the opened canopy, morels dot the ground, and animal life abounds. Swipe with sound on to hear the cronch cronch of the bark beetles in slide 8, and marvel at the tiny perfect eggs of a dark eyed junco in slide 9 with mama’s anxious little cheeps in the background (i didn’t get close and left quickly). I saw one pileated woodpecker and heard many more, and moose poop was EVERYWHERE.

I could have stayed up there for weeks, even in the pouring rain (slide 14). In fact, we saw the camps of professional foragers who do just that. Had i known that was a life option in my twenties… by @jingtastic

Last night was a real “pinch me” moment. So much happening at once, and so wonderful to be present for. We had two amazing Sichuan chefs and our dynamic mutual forager/connector friend come hang out and cook with us. They made incredible Sichuan dishes with squirrels, duck legs, and all kinds of foraged delights, and we made them some wild turkey Pakistani style. A pattern is emerging and growing in my life since I started working on Hunter’s Harvest, in which people who make fantastic food and community come in and add their magic to my magic. It has been so joyful and gives me confidence that even though season 1 is yet to be released, we’re doing something special that people are going to love. Thank you @jingtastic for bringing @chefwendyz and @wei.collective into my life! Look for Chef Wendy to be in the woods with me in the fall for season 2! by @jingtastic

by @jingtastic