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!)

Cabbage trees!

Call me slow, but I didn't realise just how amazing Ti kouka and their rellies were until recently!

Today on This Way Up at 1.30, I'm chatting with Simon Morton about them, and I've just put up some info about them on Wild Picnic.

Next time I have a garden, the first thing I'm going to start planting is cabbage trees!

Geraniums ... I mean Pelargoniums!

We went foraging for these round the neighbourhood last week, and it's on This Way Up at 12.20 today.

The scented species of these plants are especially amazing. There's a huge 'rose geranium' bush down the road from me, whose leaves I've been tincturing for their fragrance; and I've just bought some apple-scented geraniums.

I mean pelargoniums.

I've written more about this group of plants at Wild Picnic.

Met a nettle expert

Was fascinating - and fun.

One quick thing!

Tomorrow (Sunday 2 Aug) I'm giving a low key, informal presentation at the Museum of City and Sea on 'Harvesting Without a Garden.' I'll be at a table from 2.30 to 5pm to chat about foraging and fermentation, and blending the two. I think it'll be fun!

Before that, Donna Lee will be presenting on home-made cosmetics (from 11am-12.30) and on natural household cleaners (from 1.30-2.30). I'm really looking forward to seeing her.

Wood Sorrel on National Radio

Today on This Way Up I'm wandering down our street talking to Simon Morton about wood sorrel. It should be on at 1.30pm.

There is nothing so excellent as a plant that's great in savoury AND sweet dishes!

If you've come here from 'This Way Up' ...

... you're probably after the info about chickweed, which is on my other blog Wild Picnic. :)

(Or if you're reading this on Sat morning, I'm talking about chickweed to Simon Morton on National Radio's This Way Up - shortly after 1pm today.)

Saturday

The first in a monthly series of little foraging radio pieces is on Radio NZ's This Way Up tomorrow at about 1.10pm.

I won't be able to listen as I'll be on a letterpress workshop up at Vic Uni's Wai-te-ata Press. I've wanted to start learning about letterpress for a long time, so I'm very excited about it! It's the start of my own personal journey to book independence ... Yay. (And thanks for recent feedback and inspiration from those who have been on this journey already for a long time!)

Independence Days update

The sugar beets aside, this is what I've managed to do over the last couple of weeks ...

Plant something: More peas and snow peas. Lettuces. Leeks. Red bunching onions. Plantago. The peas and lettuces are looking good so far. Nothing else has popped its head up at all yet.

Harvest something: Chamomile flowers (the more you harvest, the more they produce). Self-heal (starting to take over the herb garden). Wild red clover flowers. The last green tomatoes. More dandelions for cooked greens and coffee.

Preserve something: Dried the chamomile flowers, self-heal and red clover flowers. (The clover I'm going to send out in little packages to some people by way of a token apology. A few weeks back I was meant to give a foraging presentation - but for various reasons, at the last minute I couldn't. I still feel crap about it.)

Eat the food: Made a new recipe for lambs brain curry with my son. We are ever trying to build up our repertoire with cheap cuts and offal ... The lambs brain curry is a good one because you add the lambs brain at the last minute. That means you can take out some of the curry before adding the brains and reserve it to serve to those who don't eat offal or any meat at all.

Independence Days Challenge update

Am keeping up with the challenge so far. On days 1 and 2, I preserved things - dehydrating apples from our tree and making chutney with figs from my mother-in-law's tree.

On day 3, I cooked something new - making a caffeine-free coffee substitute from dandelion roots. I had done it before as a teenager, but the result was disgusting. This time I followed Euell Gibbons' instructions - cooking them on a very low temperature (around 100 celsius), for almost 4 hours. It wasn't too bad this time!

(First I tried doing it in the popcorn maker like we roast coffee, but the dandelion roots were so light they kept flying out onto the bench and floor.)

Then on day 4 (today), I recorded another show on foraging for National Radio's This Way Up with Simon Morton. I'm thinking maybe that counts as 'work on community food security'?

As before, I got tongue tied and said silly things, but at least I now have faith that they will edit it so that I magically sound more coherent than I really am! I think it goes to air in a couple of weeks and it will be the first in a monthly series.

Purslane!

Last week I was thrilled to bits to find a purslane plant had decided to make its home in our garden.

It planted itself next to a luffa plant that was growing in slow motion and was never going to fruit - so I pulled that out to give the purslane more room.

I'd been hoping I might find some purslane this summer. So far this is the only one I've found though. I wonder if I can propagate it?

I've put an entry on purslane up on Wild Picnic, as well as (finally) one one flax. Have also been tinkering with some other entries there.

I put a new recipe up on Wild Concoctions too.

Foraging on a tiny scale

With some wild plants in urban areas, it seems difficult to find enough of them at any one time to do anything useful with.

Still, if I can store little bits at a time and gradually build up a supply, that feels quite satisfying.

Blackberry leaves, for example.

We have only little patches of blackberry where I live, and the leaves that make the best-tasting tea are the newly sprouting ones. (I've tested this out - drying new leaves and old leaves separately, making teas out of them side by side, and comparing the smell and taste. The new leaves are fragrant and delicious. The old ones are a bit gross.)

At any one time, there are usually just a few tiny sprigs of suitable tea leaves on the blackberry bush nearest us. Whenever I go past, I pick those ones, and lie them in the permanent spot I now have for them by a window to dry flat. After a couple of days I add them to the jar in the pic above.

The level of the jar's contents fluctuates as I build the supply of dried leaves up, then use or donate some. (Blackberry leaf tea is good for upset stomachs.)



I've been using a similar principle with nasturtium seedpods as well as onionweed bulbs - which my daughter often finds little clusters of in the soil. (See above!)

I've made a pickle of 50/50 water and cider vinegar, with a fair bit of added salt, and I keep it in a jar in the fridge. Whenever we find nasturtium pods or onionweed bulbs I just drop them in. Although before pickling the onionweed bulbs, it's best to soak them in water and rub off the papery outside skins.

It's like a mix of capers and mini pickled onions.

Flax seeds again

In my travels round our suburb, I've so far found only one flax bush out of many that has really delicious seeds. Mostly they are quite thin and black-coated and bitter. But this particular bush has pods that are shorter and fatter than the others ...



And most of those pods seem to contain very sweet, white, meaty seeds ...



I don't know what this means though. I don't very well understand the taxonomy of flax. From what I've read there are two native species growing in New Zealand - and within those species there are many subspecies and varieties, and an enormous amount of genetic variation.

I keep hoping to find another flax bush around my locale with delicious seeds, but so far no luck. My sister has suggested I break off a fan of leaves from this particular plant, and try to grow it in our backyard.

I would have to ask the owner's permission ... The only reason I could get these particular seeds was that a big stalk of seeds had broken off and was lying across the pavement.

Changing the subject a bit - one thing we tried doing with these seeds was dry-roasting them. Flax seeds must be a bit tricky to dry roast I think, because they are so mucilaginous. We did two batches. The first turned out quite okay. The second, not so good.

Would be interested to hear from anyone else who's tried this.

The economics of urban foraging

I'm doing a show-and-tell about foraging for the next Wellington WAPF meeting. Then a few weeks later I'm going to lead weed walks during a Farm Day at our CSA.

Both organisations are keen to focus on the 'free food' aspect of foraging. And yet - I'm not sure if many of us in urban areas could manage to save more than a few dollars a week out of our food budget by foraging. (Although of course in tough times, even a few dollars are vital.)

Maybe even more to the point, I'm thinking that if lots of people in urban areas started foraging for any economically significant quantity of food, then supplies would rapidly deplete.

Still - I do think there are important economic benefits to foraging. The main one is that it keeps you out of other more expensive and consumerist mischief.

Although foraging is a bit of free food, it's better than that. It's a free hobby. It's as solitary or as social as you want to make it. It's educational. It gets you out of the house. It's family friendly. It can be challenging, or meditatively relaxing, or both.

Such endlessly absorbing free activities are in short supply in the city, and frankly I think it helps me save more out of my entertainment budget than anything else.

And now for some fluff

My children say they have outgrown fluffies. Meanwhile I seem to have grown into them. Lately, in an effort to reduce my caffeine intake, I've been drinking frothed-up milk flavoured with rose or lavender.

To make the lavender fluffies, I heat up milk in a lidded pot, along with with a sprig of lavender from my daughter's flower garden. When it reaches scalding temperature I add a bit of honey and stir it in. Then I take out the lavender, pour the milk into the coffee plunge-pot, and plunge the plunger up and down till the milk has frothed up.

I LOVE lavender as a drink. (A spoonful of lavender vinegar in chilled water is strangely nice too.) Lavender is supposed to help with focus and metal alertness, so I've convinced myself it makes a good substitute for coffee.

I like fluffy milk with a dash of rose-petal tincture as well. My parents have some beautiful dog rose bushes, and a few weeks ago I collected a bagful and tinctured them in vodka.

I collected a second batch of petals a couple of weeks later, strained out the old petals, and put the new ones in for a couple more weeks, to make a double tincture - so it's strongly fragrant.

And speaking of white fluffy things flavoured with rose - I was really pleased with the rose and chocolate chip meringues I made a wee while ago. I just added a couple of spoonfuls of rose petal tincture instead of vanilla to the meringue mix and folded the chocolate chips in.

I think it would also work well to put the rose flavour into the whipped cream instead of the meringues.

I guess to come full circle I need to make lavender meringues now ...

New foraging finds 2: fresh flax seeds

Jane, a friend we stayed with in Feilding, introduced me to flax seeds fresh from the pod.

Pick a flax pod, break it open, and take out the little flat seeds carefully. It's fascinating the way each seed tastes different - some very sweet, others more bitter. It partly depends on the ripeness of the pod and the variety of flax, but even within each pod there is some variety.


Since coming back from our short holiday I have been sampling flax seeds from plants (with pods in varying stages of ripeness) all round Newtown and Berhampore.

I'd like to collect enough to sprinkle on a green salad.

Apparently people have also roasted them to make a coffee substitute.

New foraging finds 1: Beach spinach berries

We went away for the weekend to stay with two different families - each of whom introduced me to a new foraged food.


First, at Tangimoana, Lynda and her lovely daughter took me to their favourite beach spinach spot - where a particularly lush crop of the stuff grows. Lynda noticed that it was in berry.

We are both fans of the leaves, but neither of us had read that you could eat the berries. We wondered whether we should try them.

Lynda is more intrepid than me, so she offered to go first. She took a tentative nibble, and said they were quite nice. I was still a wuss, so I just picked a few and brought them home to photograph on a bed of their leaves. (Above!)

Today, a good three days later, Lynda is still alive and well ;) - so I finally tried one of the berries. It was mild, salty, sweet and juicy all at the same time, with a texture a bit like watermelon.

I wonder if anyone else has heard of eating these berries? (Those of either beach spinach or its very close relative NZ spinach?) If so, I'd love to hear about it. In all the books and websites I've checked, the only use I can find for the berries is as a colouring.

Beach spinach is in the same family as iceplant, and certainly iceplant berries are known to be edible ...

I'll write about our other find tomorrow.

Wild mustard (and happy new year!)

Mustard can be made from the seeds of various members of the Brassicaceae family. A few months back I tried drying seeds from what I thought was wild turnip. (It wasn't though. It was a close relative, although I'm still not sure which one!)

It was all a bit of a disaster. I got over-paranoid about whether the seeds were toxic, and the seedpods were too small and few to make more than a pinch of mustard from anyway. Then to top it off, someone knocked the drying seedpods off the windowsill and the tiny seeds spilled and vanished.

Anyway, now that I know what wild turnip REALLY is, I'm trying again.

I was inspired to make wild mustard after reading Euell Gibbons' 1962 foragers' classic - Stalking the Wild Asparagus.

Gibbons lived in the United States and wrote about making mustard from the seeds of Brassica nigra:

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[The seedpods] ripen unevenly, and as soon as they are ripe, split open and the seeds drop out.

The best way I have found to collect these seeds is to gather the whole seedstalk ... just when the lower pods are beginning to shatter, and spread them on one of the large plastic sheets, which I have found such a handy help in foraging.

After drying out in the sun for a few days, they will be ready to thresh out by beating them with a flail. From one 9 by 12 sheet piled full of ripening seed stalks, I have winnowed out 1/2 gallon of clean mustard seed, and that is as many as I can possibly use in a year.

The clean dry seeds can be ground ... this will give you the same kind of dry mustard you can see on the spice shelves at your grocers, and it can be used in any recipe that calls for dry mustard.

To make the yellow pasty condiment that is called Prepared Mustard, put some flour in a pan and toast it in the oven, stirring occasionally until it is evenly browned ...

Mix this browned flour, half and half with ground mustard and moisten with a mixture of half vinegar and half water until it is the right consistency, and your condiment is ready to use.
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In a New Zealand context, wild turnip might be one of the best plants to make mustard from.

The wild turnip round our house is covered in seed pods at the moment ...

My son and I picked some bunches:

And they've been drying for a few days now. They've almost all dried and split and released their seeds. (I've tried a nibble of the seeds, and they're nice.)

Hopefully we'll be making mustard in a day or two - although not in such bulk quantities as Euell Gibbons!

Summer World Sweet World

It's out! This lovely magazine has made it to Issue 4, and thus through one whole year - with ever increasing distribution figures.

As usual, WSW is full of brilliant, creative ideas - including a scheme for Carbon Action Brownie Badges

I have an article in there on using wild blackberries. Since it was mid-spring when I wrote it, I had to trial the recipes using bought, packaged, frozen ones. They were nice, but had seeds the size of pebbles! And they were 'Packed from New Zealand and/or imported ingredients' - so they were undoubtedly injected with melamine, painted with lead paint, and treated with formaldehyde.

But at least they were 'Supervised and Approved as Kosher'.

I can't wait for the true blackberry season to arrive. Shouldn't be long. The blackberry bushes near our house already have some flowers ...

Elderflower and water kefir - a yummy duo!

Just had to share ...

On a whim, I mixed a bit of our elderflower syrup into some very tart already-brewed water kefir - and I tell you, it is DELICIOUS!

A quick google revealed that the combination of elderflower and kefir is not stunningly original, but it was new to me anyhow!

(And in passing I noticed some sites talking about the cosmetic applications of kefir . Anyone know anything much about that?)