-George Bernard Shaw
This season has offered manifold opportunities for me to practice my cooking. I have been foraging some, for wild onions and dandelion roots early in the spring. I cured the onions for a day in the sunshine, and then chopped up the whole thing - from bulb to greens - to add to something I was cooking. The dandelion roots I washed and air-dried, and then a month later roasted them in a moderately warm oven (350 degrees - any hotter and they would start to burn), until they were so dry that they broke in half very easily. I ground them in a coffee bean grinder, and, using a French press, percolated 1 tbsp for an 8-oz cup of "dandelion coffee." It tasted very earthy. Which is to say, Larita and I liked it, and noone else on staff did.
Ann and I went strawberry picking a couple of weeks ago, in the rain. We picked two gallons of ripe, polyploidy-large strawberries (which are not, botanically, berries at all) at a U-Pick farm north of Greenville, SC, with the dozens of Latin American workers. For a week or so, my friends and I ate one gallon fresh. I washed, defoliated, and sliced to freeze the second gallon for later. I froze the strawberries in layers under waxed paper so they would not freeze in one big fruit chunk. I am not sure what I will do with them.
I spent one of my days off weeding our massive mint patch - quartering the space it takes up in our herb garden, making room for tarragon, chamomile, callendula, lavender, and chives. I harvested enough mint to cover my window screen (5' x 3') with leaves to dry. After 4 days of drying, I put the mint into ziplock bags and froze it. Today we are making mojitos with some of it!
1 comment:
We should continue to keep the prison in Cuba operating, but change it's mission to one of re=educating those poor lost souls who spray weed-killer on dandelions. I love to wander by freshly-mown lawns in the misty predawn scattering my stash of officinale seeds, especially when the wind is blowing from the street towards the lawns.
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