Purslane stir fry....dig in!

Tonite was a special foraged meal....because it proves just how much we've learned during this whole gardening thing. 

We used to bust our backs weeding for hours and hours.  (I'm strange though....I LOVE weeding)  The point being we discovered (by way of Brigitte Mars, master herbalist) that what we thought were weeds, were actually purslane!  At the end of last season, we left some of the stranger looking weeds to grow.  The purslane flowered these cute little yellow flowers here and there.  That's what helped me identify them officially.  The are chubby stalks with meaty leaves.  The stalks are green or red depending on the type of purslane it is.  It turns out we have an obsene amount of sea purslane in our garden and its all edible.


Our radish row that has more purslane than radish.


We created something...as you may find yourself doing the more you garden.


Purslane stir fry

 It started with simmering 1/2 a cup of diced white onions in veg oil until clear.

Then we added diced orange peppers and diced ham (we had to eat our ham up tonite...but next time I would use almonds instead!).  Approx. 1/2 cup of each.

I dumped in a cup and a bit of pre cooked wild 5 grain rice from the bulk barn.  It added a wonderful nutty taste to the fry up.  Simmer on med for about 5 min.  I splashed in a lid and a half of lemon juice.  A couple of grind from our coriander grinder (grown 2 years ago and getting low!) and a dash of red pepper flakes.  S & P to taste.  Then we added a generous handful of washed, rinsed and spun purslane.


How much for that purslane in the window?

The purslane is already quite peppery so I could have left out the black pepper.  The salt made the purslane taste almost like edamame (steamed salted soya beans)!  We already tried it cold in a previous post.  When raw it tastes like spinach and pepper's lovechild.  It tastes even more healthy in salads than spinach (and I am a hardcore spinach fan). When cooked, purslane tastes like spinach crossed with a legume.

All in all, I'm considering taking purslane to the farmer's market and setting up a stand...samples daily.  Its so versatile and we've only just begun to figure out the possibilities.

Please, send me you purslane recipes...if you have any.  Or if you choose to experiment with this years weeds, let me know what you come up with.  We're up for anything!

Check out my facebook page too...there are bi-weekly picture updates of our garden this year.  The occassional tip or trick.  Sometimes additional recipe pictures too!  You never know what you're gonna find.  My facebook community has been a source of information as well as support.  Thanks guys and dolls!      

Strawberries!

Its a little bit late, but strawberry season is upon us (although I think its just about done at this point...in our area anyway) 

Our strawberry plants took 3 years to make a decent crop.  Growing strawberries is definitely a labour of love and an act of patience.  I was hoping it would be worth it in the long run, but like anything in the garden, you never know how its going to turn out.  This year seemed to be a jackpot, so I decided to forgo the annual strawberry picking trip and try our hand at home harvesting our load of freezer jam.  Its one of our favorite fishing trip snacks as well as a bedtime snack (PB&J sandwiches) so we go through a lot of it!

In previous years, we have gone to two different pick your own places in our area.  Both were 20 min drive away, so I felt good about not using any fossil fuels to get to our berries for a change.  Fruition Berry Farm off of Hwy 15 and Paulridge Berry Farm north of Napanee on Palace rd are both great places.  The kids have enjoyed both farms for picking.  The one thing I'll say is that Paulridge had a lovely shaded area for the kids to play in...which was a welcome site after a couple of hours in the field under a burning hot sun.  Paulridge is typically not open on Sundays...so that's when we opted for Fruition.  The best part about Fruition is they have THE best teenagers working there.  Helpful, polite and eager...which is a great thing when you have a crazy moment of thinking you can pick berries with a 2 yr old in a stroller...by yourself!  (I clearly didn't think that one through)  Both places run about $8.50 per big white basket.  You can bring your own containers and they weigh them on site.  We purchased the big white baskets years ago...for a whole $0.50 a basket.  It added a bit to the price of our berries, but we've used them every year AND we use them in our garden too.  A good investment indeed! 
 

We picked our first batch and ate most of them, throwing some into pancakes to start.  By the second and third pickings, we had enough to make jam.

Crushed berries (1 3/4 cups worth in a liquid measuring cup), 3 cups of white sugar (I cut down the recipe from 4 cups, as our berries were small and super sweet), 2 tbps lemon juice and one packet of Certo.  Its the fabulous no cook recipe!  Stir the sugar and berries and let stand for 5 minutes.  Stir in the rest of the ingredients and let set for 10 min.  

 

Fill plastic containers so that there is about 1 inch left before the lid.  Let stand (covered) on a countertop for 24 hrs.

Freeze in the freezer! 

That's it!  That was all there is to it!!!  We ended up with 6 plastic containers in the freezer, 4 strawberry and 2 strawberry rhubarb.  Now the next sweet berry will be the raspberry.  Blue berries follow shortly after that.  We aren't in a good part of Ontario for peaches or cherries...but one can still hope. 

I have several strawberry recipes that I want to test out this year, but I may have to resort to local picked berries.  Our patch seems to have stopped producing for this year anyway. 

I was so excited to plant strawberries 3 years ago, that I had no idea there were types of strawberries.  I had no idea there was a variety called the ever-bearing strawberry.  Now that I know, I will pass along this piece of advise.  RESEARCH before you do anything...as our plants are now so established...it would be a shame to dig them all up now.  However, the idea of having strawberries for longer than the month of June is almost to much to bear!

Now all that's left to do in our strawberry patch is to keep on top of the runners, which will continue to try and make new strawberry plants until the fall comes.  Its quite a bit of work, but, like I said, its a labour of love.

Are you making any preserves with the sweetness of Ontario summer?  Tell me about it!

Delightful Summer Starter!

I've been so obsessed with foraging lately that my garden (in its infant stages) is losing some of its luster.  Don't get me wrong, I'm loving how the garden is taking off right now.  Its just hard to be patient for each thing to mature.  I definitely don't like waiting.  While I wait for the bounty that my garden will provide eventually...I've started to open my eyes to what nature is already offering...to those who know what to look for....and when.

I look around me and see the supermarket at our door steps now.  The cattail is something I've always seen in the landscape but rarely do they ever make it to my plate...ok never have they made it to my plate.  I read an article about them in Outdoors Canada magazine.  It was the Food Special Edition called "The Best of Living Off the Land" October 2009.  The article talked about what you could do but was lacking in pictures.  I need a visual to help me through the process.  Thats when I discovered The 3 Foragers blog!  See below for the link to their cat tail post:

http://the3foragers.blogspot.com/2011/06/foraging-cattails.html

Best pics ever!

Then they went and posted this video of their outing with Blanche Derby.  It made me wish we had a Blanche Derby around these parts.  Then I figured I might as well become the local Blanche.  Why not?

FYI Verona, Ontario is host to the 2nd annual Cattail festival and hopefully I can wow them with my recipe further on down the post! 

http://the3foragers.blogspot.com/2011/06/cattail-video-with-blanche-derby.html

Its the time of year for picking cattails, but its also a great intro to the season of purslane.  I first heard of eating pursland from Brigitte Mars.  Her video shows her in the garden and pointing it out, but alas, no recipes.  Turns out we're regular purslane farmers and didn't know you could eat this stuff!  They grow in abundance in our garden patches and we've been weeding it out every year. 

Here is Brigitte Mars talking about purslane, Ghandi's favorite food:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwMNaPx77VE

I showed my darling husband the cattail posts...the next thing I knew he was bringing home a bunch of the male cattail flowers!!!  He also harvested the tender shoots at the base of the plant.  Then he had a basket in the garden and was grabbing purslane leaves.  The result was an amazing summer breakfast-for-dinner affair!




A shot of the whole brilliant meal

Sunny-side up Dill eggs, Cattail on the cob, Tomato, Onion & Cattail shoot salad on purslane with whole wheat toast

I'll break this down for you:

Sunny Side up Dill eggs with fresh dill from the baby herb garden.  Just another reason why we're seriously contemplating raising hens in our shed....

Cattail on the Cob is what I'm going to call this from now on.  You take the male part of the flower before it has pollenated the female part (which eventually puffs out and becomes the brown part we all identify with cattails).  You simmer in water for a few minutes then brush with butter and sprinkle on salt just like corn on the cob!  Strange but true.


Close up on the cattail on the cob





Eats just like corn on the cob!





Don't eat the stem...

Tomato, Onion and Cattail shoot salad served on purslane is a wonderful fresh salad.  The cattail shoot are like artichoke hearts...tender and soft.  They taste like a strange hybrid of cucumber and celery with a cucumber texture.  If you can't bite through it easily, you'll need to peel off a few layers and try another bite.  I chopped up 2 tomatoes, not even 1 half of an onion, a dozen or so cattail shoots, fresh cilantro from the garden then added a tbsp of veg oil, a half a lid of white vinegar, a full lid of lemon juice and fresh ground salt and pepper to taste.  It was like a fresh tomato-cuke salad but way better!  The purslane adds a peppery taste to the mix.  Like you added hot spinach or something.  A very interesting twist on the usual fare.  We would definitely have this again...perhaps as a side to fresh caught fish? 




The salad that rocked!




All dressed up with purslane and ready for eating! 

 A great resource for purslane recipes is the link below:

http://sustainable.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/98promotions/april/recipes.html

I look at the swamps and my garden with eyes wide open now.  It's amazing what you can find, when you train your eyes.  You can literally find food ANYWHERE!  Its a very liberating feeling.

Asparagus Anxiety...

This year started out great for our asparagus!  It was daily picking for a while there.  I felt spoilt with my asparagus lunch bags at work. 

Then one day I saw them.  And I remembered why last years picking was so dismal.  These annoying little black bugs with red wings eat the spears for lunch and laid eggs on the stalks!  They were back!!!  I found them a few weeks ago.  I yanked the afflicted stakes hoping that would throw them off the scent...but to no avail. 

My facebook page for this blog turned out to be just as much for my help as it was for others.  My friend Shelley posted a simple solution for getting rid of pests organically.  Dish soap!  We added some to a spray bottle and doctored the asparagus patch for a few consecutive days.

Bam.  Like that.  Well not quite that dramatic, but it seemed like we were back in the asparagus business.

I celebrated with one of my favorite reasons to grow asparagus.  You can make those hoity-toity omlettes you pay big bucks for in restaurants. 



Asparagus makes a triumphant return to our table!

 Asparagus omlette with Moors & Christians on Spinach:

Omlette:

2 egg omlette with 1% milk, Stirling butter and Wilton cheese. 
Asparagus steamed (over my son's hard boiling eggs no less!  Can I say I reused the steam?) 

Moors & Christians:

1 can of black beans, fried in 2 tbsp veg oil, 1/4 cup of diced white onions, 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes, 1juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/4 tsp cumin, S & P

Side:

Wild and brown rice mix and fresh garden spinach, with fresh, local, hot house tomatoes on top!

I love the eggs and the rice together.  I love the blend of cool and hot flavours to savour.  The rice and beans remind me of my sister's wedding in Costa Rica.  The tomatoes and spinach make me feel proud of my garden.  So much emotions on one plate!  Thank goodness it was too delicious to be too sentimental.  In addition, this meal (minus the beans and the rice) has a realitvely small carbon foot print (meaning most of the ingredients came from VERY close to my home, making less carbon to get to my plate) and it generated almost NO garbage.  The bulk of the waste was composted here, with the expection of the metal beans can and the plastic bag from the rice that will both get recycled.  Gastronomically healthy to boot!

I also wanted a chance to explain my disappointments in the garden and (in this case) my triumph over pests.  My garden is pretty organic considering all I actively do water with cached rain and weeding manually.  I don't spray or treat my garden in any way.  I prefer to let nature take its course.  Its hard not to get protective on something you've watched grow from seed, but bugs gotta eat too right?  So thank you to Shelley for helping me keep my garden from becoming a radioactive test site.  (I was tempted, I really do love me some asparagus!)