Oxalis is a Sometimes Food

I imagine for most people it's not a food at all, but some Oxalis species have a long history of culinary and medicinal use. One is wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella).

It has small, pretty, lime-green leaves and pinkish flowers.

Raw, the leaves have a sharp, sour, slightly lemony taste. They can be used to flavour soups and salads. Because of the plant's high oxalic acid levels you don't want to eat too much, but general consensus seems to be that in small amounts, it's fine. (Unless you have gout, kidney troubles or rheumatoid arthritis and are avoiding all high-oxalic-acid foods.)

Wood sorrel is often paired with fish. Appropriate I reckon, since most ocean-caught fish should be a Sometimes (If Ever) Food too - given the world's declining fish stocks.

The other night we had tarakihi baked in a herb butter I made from wood sorrel and onion weed. We were in a hurry to go somewhere so I ended up putting it under the grill for the last couple of minutes to speed the whole process up.

The combination of onionweed and wood sorrel was lovely. Definitely going to make it again, and next time just oven grill it from start to finish.

Invalid cooking - and the joy of junket

Up until the early years of the 20th century, when medical care was removed from the home and firmly established within hospital walls, there was a branch of food preparation known as ‘invalid cooking’. Almost every household cookbook had a section devoted to dishes that were expressly for the sick, all accompanied by helpful hints on when to administer them …
- Pat Willard, A Soothing Broth (1998)

The above book is what I've been reading over the last few days.

Interested in the concept of 'Invalid Cooking', I looked up my edition of the iconic Victorian cookbook Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery, and it does indeed have a chapter devoted to that – full of beef teas, jellies, eggnogs and junkets.

Junkets! I never got to try junket as a child, and I recall feeling quite deprived. I read about it in books and dreamed of its sweet milky puddingness - but could I persuade Mum to make it? (Sorry Mum, if you’re reading this – it’s nothing personal!)

So yesterday, after perusing Mrs Beeton's recipes, and bursting with pent-up childhood longing, I set out to make junket. I used Mrs Beeton’s version as a base:

JUNKETS
1/2 pint milk
1/2 - 1 teasp. rennet (see directions on bottle)
Sugar to taste

Heat milk to blood heat; stir in rennet and sugar. Pour into 2 small glasses. Leave in a warm place to "clot"
NOTE: With pasteurized milk it is advisable to use double quantities of rennet.
Never put junket into a refrigerator until firm.

The results were good! (Junket-making could become addictive.)

A few notes:

* I used vegetarian rennet from Curds & Whey cheesemaking supplies - and you only need a few drops, rather than the half teaspoon in Mrs Beeton's recipe.

* I took blood heat to mean 31 degrees, and I kept track of it with a thermometer (again following the existing instructions I had for this rennet).

* At my children's behest I added vanilla along with the sugar.

* I sprinkled cinnamon and nutmeg onto it.

* Mrs Beeton's book can be found online.

* I can't wait for the blackberry season! I think vanilla junket would be delicious with a blackberry topping!

Cleavers spring tonic

My son and I were holed up at home yesterday feeling sick and sorry for ourselves, so I dug out a lovely book I got 2nd hand last year - A Soothing Broth by Pat Willard (1998). The subtitle is Tonics, Custards, Soups and Other Cure-Alls for Colds, Coughs, Upset Tummies, and Out-of-Sorts Days.

It’s a mix of essays, anecdotes and old-fashioned recipes, detailing Willard's personal journey to rediscover the lost art of ‘invalid cooking’.

In one chapter, entitled The Change in Seasons, Willard writes:

It is an age-old tradition among most of the world’s population to produce specific brews from native plants and roots just for the fall and spring. The spring elixirs were formulated to purge the blood and organs of sluggish waste (the by-products of heavy food and inactivity) so the body would regain its strength for the summer months …

Spring tonics are foods or drinks that usually contain the young shoots of wild spring greens. And as Willard says, ‘If it can’t be scientifically proven that they purify the system, they certainly hit it with a vitamin wallop.’

I often get sick during seasonal changeovers. Maybe, I thought yesterday, what my son and I need is a spring tonic.

In her spring tonic recipes, Willard focuses mainly on dandelions, but elsewhere I’ve seen recipes using chickweed, nettles and cleavers.

Since we’ve got loads of cleavers in our garden, and since I’ve never done anything with it before except stick it to my clothes for momentary amusement - I decided to try that.

Raw cleavers leaves taste mild and slightly salty, and some have just a faint bitterness. The texture is unpleasant though - like eating velcro. Cleavers is, I've read, a perfect candidate for juicing.


I spent a good 20 minutes in the garden snipping off nice-looking bits and filling a colander. We don’t have a juicer, so I whizzed it up in the blender (stems, leaves and all), then squeezed it through muslin.

My son and I each had a couple of tablespoonfuls added to homemade lemonade. Later we added some to rosehip cordial.

Both were nice, but we preferred the lemonade combo. I've written down my Cleavers Lemonade recipe at my recipe journal blog.

An exciting parcel

My son and I have been having a gloomy day at home sick - so it was nice to look out the window and see a parcel in the letterbox. It was the long-awaited water kefir from Rebecca.

She's painstakingly grown a jar of water kefir grains for Deb and me to split between us.

In the parcel she also included detailed instructions on looking after them (which I for one will need), PLUS a small jar of her very own Kaitaia sourdough starter.


The idea is that Rebcca and I will do a sourdough swap by post - except I'm not able to meet my end of the bargain until the weather warms up a little and I'm game to try making one again. (I started one last summer, kept it going for several weeks, and made several loaves of bread, before one day accidentally washing out the dough bowl without saving any.)

I really love this idea of swapping wild ferments from different parts of the country by post. I wonder how much the microbial colonies vary from region to region. I was fascinated to take a sniff of Rebecca's starter - it smells quite different from the way I remember mine. It's more vigorous than mine ever was, too. It was bubbling away like anything, and I had to open the jar verrrrry slowly.

Spot the nettle!

This is an overgrown patch of city council land, just across the road from us.

I got so excited yesterday when I was walking past it and suddenly saw - in amongst all the usual puha and onionweed and nasturtium and chickweed and black nightshade and hemlock - that single, little nettle plant.

To spot it you'll probably have to click on the pic to make it big. (And if by any chance you think I've misidentified it, and it's not an Urtica at all, but just a dead-nettle or something like that ... do let me know, but break it to me gently!)

On our wild foraging email list there's been some talk of nettles, and one member's enthusiasm for their nutritional and medicinal qualities is catching. I've been hoping for a few weeks to find some growing wild, but couldn't recall ever seeing any in my neighbourhood. Then suddenly - there it was.

Here it is close up.

Now what shall I do with it ...? Cook up some leaves for our dinner? Gather some and dry them for tea? Take cuttings and try and grow some more in our back yard?

It's a lot to ask of one little plant. Perhaps I'll just let it be for a few days while I think about it. (And wait to see if anyone pulls the rug out from under my feet and tells me it's not a real nettle at all ...)

Here's a nice article about nettles.

Fermenting juice with milk kefir (Cheat's Apple Cider)

Hooray! I've just heard that Rebecca has some water kefir ready to send us - so soon I'll be able to ferment all sorts of different sweet drinks (assuming I can keep the kefir grains alive this time.)

In the mean time, my son and I have been fermenting apple juice using milk kefir. The apple juice is from our CSA and is very sweet and concentrated so it lends itself well to fermenting with kefir I think.

Opinion's divided over whether milk kefir grains can or should be used to ferment anything except dairy products. In Wild Fermentation, Sandor Katz writes that you can use them to ferment almost anything you like, as long as you give them some time to recuperate in dairy straight afterwards - so we thought we'd give that a go.

We've developed a system where we use half our grains to ferment apple juice, while the other half ferment milk or cream. Then we do another dairy ferment with all of the grains in together, then divide them in half again and go back to the beginning of the cycle.

I think that means that, taken over time, each milk kefir grain is spending roughly a third of its time in apple juice and the rest in dairy. (Any mathematically minded person able to confirm that?)

Here's some apple juice we fermented - with the grains still floating in it.


We call it our Cheat's Apple Cider. Apparently milk kefir can be very slightly alcoholic, so I suspect this apple juice is too, but only a little. When you take the first gulp, you get that warm feeling flowing through your veins ... but none of us have ever managed to get tipsy from it!

Something foraged, something fermented

Last night we had big chunky potato wedges - made from a mix of huakaroro and urenika potatoes - with chickweed pesto and kefir sour cream on the side.


Actually I'm going to stop calling the chickweed thing 'pesto', out of deference to Italian friends! It wasn't a true pesto, but was a paste based on this pesto recipe.

I used chickweed instead of basil, and cashew nuts (soaked and dried) instead of pine nuts. I was pretty inaccurate with measurements, and when I had a taste and found I'd put in far too much garlic for me to bear, I added a whole lot more cashew nuts. It turned out deliciously in the end!

(Speaking of foraged herb pastes, Hannah from World Sweet World has had success with Nasturtium leaves.)


The kefir sour cream was a batch I'd started a couple of days earlier. I put all our milk kefir grains in with 400 grams of organic cream and left it for about a day and a half in a warm cupboard, then strained out the kefir grains.

Usually when I've made sour cream this way, the cream has a tendency to separate, and after straining out the kefir grains the soured mix is still not thick enough. I have to leave it to sit for a few more hours to separate again, then spoon off just the creamy stuff on the top to use.

However, this time the cream must have been extra thick because it didn't separate at all; it just fermented into one big mass of sour cream!

Wild mustard seed update

I may be being paranoid, but I'm wondering about shelving our plans to make mustard paste from the wild turnip seeds we collected.

Wild varieties of Brassica rapa - like the one we've been picking - can have a lot of erucic acid in the seeds. (Apparently nasturtium seeds are also rich in it).

On the other hand, we only collected a miniscule pile of seeds, and from what I'm reading in articles from various food safety authorities, a tiny bit consumed on a very occasional or short-term basis is probably okay.

I'll do a bit more research.

As a plan B, there's some Shepherd's Purse, another member of the mustard family, growing along the bank beside our house. Perhaps we could try making mustard from the seeds of that instead (assuming they are less rich in erucic acid).

They're absolutely tiny, those Shepherd's Purse seeds, and it would be fiddly, but it could be fun. My daughter is already quite taken with this plant's little heart-shaped seed pods.

The NZ Water Kefir Crisis of 2008

(over-dramatised only a little)



It started unportentously enough. Deb from WAPF asked me if I still had the water kefir grains she had given me last year, as hers had died.

I checked. Mine had died too. Not that there was anything too ominous in that; I (unlike the conscientious Deb) can be a bit crap at looking after live ferments, and I had certainly neglected my water kefir.

It wasn't until Deb started contacting other locals, and finding theirs had died too, that things started to look a little bad.

Then I read Kaitaia smallfarmer and fermenter Rebecca's blog. Yes, her water kefir had also died, and she was looking for more. (Turned out she had already been in touch with Deb.)

Deb, Rebecca, and others were soon busy getting in touch with all their fermenting contacts throughout the country, but it seemed there was no healthy water kefir to be had here at all. Water kefir was extinct in New Zealand!

So Rebecca ordered some from the very knowledgeable Dom in Australia. It was quite expensive, and it took a while to arrive - but she finally has it and is growing it carefully in the hopes of soon having enough to distribute.

Why did everyone's water kefir die? Well, Deb and Rebecca have been researching how best to look after it, and it turns out to be pretty high maintenance - the diva of live ferments. If it doesn't get the service and attention it demands, it sulks mightily and eventually turns up its precious little toes and expires.

When there's enough water kefir to go around again, I'm going to have another go at keeping it. I'm a little nervous about it though ...

Red Dead Nettle - wild but mild greens

Identifying Red Dead Nettle is relatively easy at the moment, in the lower North Island anyway. Maybe in other places too. It's in full flower round here, and apparently also all round Palmerston North. It's much easier for an amateur like me to identify when it's flowering.

This is a Red Dead Nettle plant in our garden.



Red Dead Nettle (Lamium purpureum) isn't really a nettle. It's from the mint family. Its leaves have a very mild taste, especially the small, young leaves. You can eat them raw or cooked. I prefer them cooked - they're a bit hairy raw!

We had some in an omelet the other night. That was nice.



Red Dead Nettle is closely related to Henbit (Lamium amplexicaule), which also has edible leaves ... However, both plants can be confused with Staggergrass - which I'm pretty sure is NOT edible. (I haven't found any references to people eating it yet, anyway.)

Staggergrass has a hairier stalk than the other two, so that's one way to tell the difference and avoid it.

There are a couple of websites that I've found helpful in telling these three plants apart (and reassuring me that what I have in my garden IS Red Dead Nettle). Firstly there's the Massey Weed Database. And then there's the Virginia Tech Weed Identification Guide.

I wouldn't eat the flowers of either Red Dead Nettle or Henbit. I haven't read anywhere that they're edible - but I'm always more than happy to be corrected!