Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Eating the weeds

Onionweed is in full, lush bloom, so it's time to dig out the onion flower tempura recipe again.

I'm told by Kiwipurler that tempura should really be made with rice flour and will be extra crispy and delicious that way, so that's what I'll try this year.

In other foraging news, Lus has a great post on chickweed on her blog.

Also, I gave a talk yesterday morning on foraging to the Kapiti Herb Society. They are an amazing, friendly, and LARGE group! I really enjoyed talking to and with them, and I think it went well - apart from the bits where I was overcome with klutziness and did things like walk in front of the speaker with the microphone (twice), making everything screech and deafening everyone (twice).

The different local herb societies around the country are branches of the national Herb Federation - which incidentally has a great website. Of particular interest are their Data Sheets which include some brilliant information on a number of foraged herbs.

(Update 2 hrs later: Oh! And I've just seen Nigel has a fantastic new gorse flower cordial recipe up at Curious Kai!  Spring is ... new foraging recipes and info!)

4 comments:

Brian said...

I'm still waiting for them to flower here in Hamilton (or at least the ones on my property)

As soon as they appear they are going on our new Vegetarian dish at work for garnish

Sarah said...

I keep on meaning to head over to the Japanese supermarket, because they have special tempura flour there (on the to-do list with a hundred other things). I have a bumper crop of onion weed this year.

Juliet said...

How interesting to hear that onion flowers can be eaten. I just put a post about them on my blog, and then was directed through a comment to your website. Great to get this information about foraging; thank you.

Isa said...

Wow, eating onion flower? Really? I have tonnes of it on my lawn... I must have subconsciously known there was a reason for not mowing over it (other than it looking so pretty). Am enjoying chickweed in salads at the moment.