Mia Wasilevich and Pascal Baudar created TransitionalGastronomy.com, and coined the phrase, as a response to friends, family and fellow wild food foragers’ curiosity about their passion for exploring local wild foods and creating gourmet cuisine using transitional methods. Mia creates, cooks and photographs all the material here and shares her recipes and dishes with you. She shares a special collaboration with Pascal Baudar as he provides the forages, his amazingly creative preserves and mutual love of food. Together, they contribute to the Wild Food Lab in their own unique way.

 

Transitional Gastronomy is a culinary discipline that aims to create a unique gourmet experience using accessible resources in our immediate environment, such as home gardens and edible plants you find in the urban wilderness (wild food). It’s very much a cooking style based on self-reliance and sustainability while incorporating old world, traditional food preservation techniques, simple ingredients and fresh, foraged wild food. The mission is to create sustainable, innovative, exciting, and nutritious cuisine that anyone can achieve. Most of the cooking is done off the grid and manual appliances (non-electric) are used, mainly, to prepare the food.

 

Mia is a chef, forager, photographer, food stylist and writer in Los Angeles, California. By the age of 15 she had already traveled to more than 20 countries. A Southern California native, Mia’s cultural background is a mix of Russian, American Indian and South American and through the lens of such a diverse heritage, her culinary lexicon embraces both the simple, homespun foods of the countryside as well as modern urban gastronomy.

 

Her culinary passions include studying food anthropology and applying traditional, as well as modern gastronomy to her culinary experiments. In addition, her interest in sustainable and local food sources led her to embrace learning about wild food foraging and her introduction to Pascal was serendipitous.

 

Having always talked about living a truly sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle, she has contributed to some notable green blogs and books, only recently has she been able to put this lifestyle into practice on a daily basis by living off her urban garden and the wild foods in her terroire.  This website is her opportunity to share her love of foraging, sustainable lifestyle and cooking with you.

 

Pascal Baudar is a wild food, outdoor/self-reliance instructor and author in Los Angeles, California. He has dedicated the past 12 years to studying self-reliance, traditional food preservation methods and wild food in the Southern California region and integrating them into a sustainable lifestyle.

 

Originally from Belgium, Pascal grew up in the rural farmland nearTournai where a close relationship with the land, knowledge of botany/agriculture and a hands-on approach to sourcing food was a natural way of life.

 

Specializing in wild food preservation and country Belgian/French cuisine, Pascal brings old world techniques and traditions to his culinary creations – including fermenting, salting, pickling, drying and various methods of canning, to name a few. He is also a certified Master Food Preserver / Food Safety Advisor.

 

His experience and artistic approach to sourcing, preparing and preserving food you find in the wilderness has allowed him to create truly unique gourmet dishes.

 

He has been teaching classes for the last 7 years in the Los Angeles area and has been featured in numerous publications and TV shows such as ABC News, NBC, Times magazine, Los Angeles Times, the "Wilderness Way" magazine, Pasadena Weekly and much more.

 

His philosophy is simple: "I consider myself a student first and continue learning every day from the world around me, people attending my classes and the wonderful people I seek expertise from whenever I don't have the answer."

 

Pascal is also an avid competitive marksman, outdoor photographer, as well as an accomplished, award winning artist and creative director.