Runs from March-November 2022

Many want to use herbs to improve their health, but find it challenging to make and consume herbal remedies at home. It doesn’t matter how good an herb or tincture is for you, if you never take it. This apprenticeship will prepare you to develop a radically authentic and utterly unique herbal practice that integrates seamlessly into your everyday life, delights your loved ones, and connects you back to the land where you dwell and the healing power of nature.

Food is a perfect medium for inviting the medicinal power of herbs and spices into your body. The inherent sweetness of flour can make even the most bitter herbs palatable, allowing you to sneak a lot of herbal medicine into your pasta. The near universality of noodles means that you don’t have to be Italian to have early and fond memories of pasta and tapping into our hard wired love of noodles is the best way to increase the diversity of plants in your diet. Make herbal pasta for the joy of it, the divine taste of it, and reap the health rewards as a delicious side effect.

Learn how to make medicinal comfort food through the art of herbal pasta, such as dandelion orecchiette, turmeric and reishi fettuccine, hawthorn berry and beet ravioli, ashwagandha and cacao farfalle, chamomile flower and anise seed dessert tortellini and much more. Pasta will be paired with sauces featuring medicinal herbs, such as burdock bolognaise, shitake marinara, and nettles pesto. Each class will be chock full of hands-on learning, gourmet lunches, and a depth of herbal knowledge to help you revitalize your health and your tastebuds.

This apprenticeship is for you if you’re an aspiring or experienced herbalist, a hobby pasta maker, a chef or caterer, a nurturer of other humans with food, or if you want to cook yourself nourishing flavorful food.

Overview of the 2022 program

Spanning spring, summer, and fall, this program includes virtual sessions and immersive, in person, outdoor, hands on day long classes on five different Saturdays, beginning at 10am and ending at 6pm at Rootstock Retreat in West Glover, VT. Each day long class includes a gourmet herbal pasta lunch featuring organic and local ingredients and any materials needed for the class.

8 month apprenticeship costs $999-$2222 on a sliding scale and includes:

Note About Gluten: This is a gluten rich apprenticeship, however, the Herbal Spa Weekend is 100% gluten free and includes a gluten free herbal pasta class. We will also be offering more gluten free herbal pasta classes in the future so if you are interested in those classes, please let us know and we will add you to our mailing list for gluten free classes.

2022 Schedule:

You Will Learn How To:

• Make basic herbal preparations including infusions, decoctions, reductions, powders, compresses, poultices, and succuses

• Integrate medicinal herbs into food (primarily pasta, but also sauces, salads, chocolates, beverages, and more)

• Integrate herbs into dough to create palatable nutritious and medicinal flour based foods (the focus is on pasta, but the same technique works with a variety of doughs and batters such as pizza, cake, brownie, cookie, pancake, and bread)

• Make hand formed pasta, such as gnocchi, orecchiette, and more

• Make sheeted pasta, by hand with a rolling pin and with a machine

• Make stuffed pasta, such as tortellini and ravioli

• Enhance digestion, resilience to stress, and immunity while minimizing chronic inflammation (the root cause of many chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, heart conditions, and cancer) through satisfying and nourishing meals

• Identify local wild medicinal and edible plants

About Melissa

For 24 years, I followed my passion for plants by studying organic farming, permaculture, and herbalism.

As an artist, writer, and a half Italian mutt from NYC, my many passions have pushed and pulled me from the concrete streets of my home city to the hills of Vermont.

In 2015, I founded a small herb school in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Fungi Flora Folkschool was a flurry of warmth, community, and the passion and excitement that is born of learning how to use herbs as food and medicine.

In 2017, at the age of 35, I became a mother and my life was radically altered in ways I could not have predicted.

Long had I rebelled against the Italian woman’s role in her family as domestic servants. Domesticity is not really part of my nature. I was always an outside and active gal who learned how to be hard and masculine to navigate the world safely and independently.

Motherhood threw all that I was out the window. I became my mother and her mother and her mother before her. Slowly, I started seeing the incredible burden of keeping a house as something I could no longer rebel against. I started understanding all of those Italian women who I had so terribly misjudged. I understood, for the first time, why they ruled their kitchens with a wooden spoon, how important the magic of their food was to keeping a family together, and how much power and dignity they possessed.

I could not embrace my new life as a mother, without remembering the matrilineal line of Italian mothers before me.

For the first time, I learned how to make pasta by hand. Being an herbalist, I immediately found ways to blend herbs and flour into deeply nourishing, medicinal food. The act of making bright and colorful herbal pasta infused joy and peace into my life and a boost of nutrition into my son.

Motherhood radically altered the way I related to herbalism, to cooking, and to myself. Making pasta is the way I knead, shape, and weave my passions and selves into a vibrant whole.

Pasta is a perfect vehicle for learning how to deeply nourish the self with herbs and vitally grown foods. It is damn yummy, too.

The magic of pasta was only the first stop of my journey to rediscover my Italian roots and the mystery and wisdom inherent in these tiny but powerful mothers before me. La Via, as taught to me by some very chatty and helpful ancestors, my stregoneria teacher Gianmichael Salvato, and my Benedicaria teacher, Gail Faith Edwards, have added a depth to my practice and helped me realize that health should not be measured by productivity but by my ability to stay present in my life and enjoy the riches and power inherent in the present moment.

The Setting

West Glover, Vermont was chartered in 1783, though the Nulhegan Tribe, The Memphremagog Band, and the Northern Cowasuk Indians have lived here - N'DAKINNA (Our Land) - from time beyond memory.

Rootstock Retreat is an elemental healing sanctuary, community-supported bathhouse in the making and small creative refuge designed for healing, conscious connection and joy. Ample gardens and wild spaces will provide the backdrop for your year and you’ll witness the healing vortex that is this rustic hill transform from Spring through Autumn. Coursework will happen in our garden amphitheater, wild hillside, outdoor classroom, tipi temple and Oasis.

Participants will be welcome to book accommodations or a campsite around their time here, immerse in the healing waters of our garden tubs, cold baths and wood-fired hot tub as well if they feel called.

Invest in your medicinal comfort

This utterly unique offering is so deep and so vast and also the first of its kind. The cost of the 8 month program is $2222-$999 on a sliding scale and a deposit of $300 is required to save your space in the program. Apprentices will also enjoy a 25% discount on Rootstock accommodations for the duration of the retreat, priority booking for the Herbal Spa Weekend (along with an epic goodie bag!), and a signed first edition copy of Melissa’s upcoming book, Herbs + Pasta = Magic: The Art of Medicinal Comfort Food.

Payment plans are available for folks needing some time though payment in full will be required by or before the halfway mark of the program in July. The deposit is non-refundable. Classes will run rain or shine.

The cost of the apprenticeship is $2222 and, if you’re able to exchange that energy, please do. The sliding scale is available to you if that’s not possible.

Limited to 12 people