Summer greens That you may have never thought about

That you may have never thought about. 

 This summer salad includes lettuce, with the additions of curly dock greens, okra and sweet potato leaves. I chop them up and take the ribs out before adding them to the salad. These leaves are very nutritious and I cannot decipher the difference between them and lettuce once I’ve added my dressings. The pasta Primavera also includes gifts from the garden. I added garlic, tomatoes, and basil, all from the summer garden.

so my curly dock was cut down to the ground at the middle of summer and now it’s sprouting new growth so the salad has curly dock in it for one. Also I have since planted okra and sweet potatoes. Did you know that you can eat the leaves of both okra and sweet potatoes?! I chopped them up very small and add them to my salad as they are a little bit tougher than what you’re used to if you’re just used to eating lettuce If you chop them up small though you’ll never know the difference :-) also the pasta Primavera had fresh basil, garlic, and tomatoes from the garden.

Maple leaf edamame

Cook these babies up just like edamame.  Delish! and fun to peal and eat.

sunchoke surprise

Last year my son grew tons of sunflowers, made soup, made stir fry, you name it... He gave me a huge basket of them and I used quite a few then decided that since winter was coming on that I would try to winter some of them over.  I dug a hole and planted the entire bucket into the hole, topped it with a shovel of dirt and a mound of leaves.  This spring they were as fresh and crisp as they could be so I have started cooking with them and of course, planting some for the pretty flower and the root. 

Poke Greens from the vacant lot

I went cruising for poke greens yesterday in the alley behind my house and hit pay dirt.  I will be making Thai Basil and Poke Green soup for tonight's supper.  I made eggless tofu poke quiche last night.  Delish!  

Fun with Eggs

decorated with redbud and violet flowes

I found a morell!

Curly Dock and Violet Salad

I am reading from Clair Goes Foraging

Jenny Solidago Mansell takes us on a mini yard tour of edibles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3HmA5kf4YE&fbclid=IwAR3BItA8ASeYV7zTYjsOyZNaIG3TFH_zL-4rOU5R-nij1AHrorH-aey8oGw

Things to do with your kids during a quarantine

Here is a great idea for families to do together while being stuck at home. Of course adults can do this without any kids present also. I am proposing a scavenger hunt of sorts. I’m going to send you a photograph of the different edible plants that I have growing in my very own yard right now. Some of these you’ve probably not heard of before so I’m also including a website where you can look them up and see what they are supposed to look like. Let’s see how many of these you can find in your own yards. I might suggest that you pick some of them grind them up and throw them in your next pot of soup. If the kids do this themselves they’re more likely to eat it :-)Also you can look up lots of different recipes to use these plants on your own but for me and easy way to use them it’s just how you would normally use other greens. Some of these you’re going to like and some of them you will not. Some of them are great in tea and some of them in soup and some of them, like the violet looks so pretty in your salad and you can eat the flower. ( you can also eat the blossoms of most fruit trees... check before you eat though)

See how many of these you can find.

I am only going to give you the names so you have to do a little detective work, find cooked and raw recipes, find out the nutritional value of what you have in your yard. ( look them up on the USDA website... you will be surprised, I bet) Then make some tea, add to your favorite recipe that includes greens, toss them in your favorite soup.
dandelion, henbit, chickweed, dead nettle, cleavers, violet, wood worrel, wild onion. Here is a great website that has these pictured and tells you a little about them.

Wood Ears

Look what my son found on his walk through the neighborhood!  He sent me a photo and asked, " are these edible?" To which I replied "Yes!!"  Wood ears... It has been a while since I have stumbled upon any.  On my way to work, I saw the tree that had been cut down and was now sporting several pounds of these delicacies.  I picked a bunch, brought them home and threw them on the dehydrator.  They shrunk down from several pounds to several ounces.  They are perfect to store now and delish when re hydrated

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Making Pecan Milk

Well we have a huge pecan tree in front of our house and I picked 60 pounds of pecans and hauled them to the pecan cracking place just in time before they closed for the season.  Wouldn't you know it, that tree dropped another 30 pounds at least and we are left to the old fashioned way of cracking them by hand.  I have a cracker but even then end up with a lot of little pieces that I just can't get out of the shell without spending a lot of time.  I was remembering a video I saw of a native American who was telling how they used to take hickory nuts ( which are a bear to crack and then even harder to extract the nut) and instead of cracking and eating the nuts, they ground them, shells and all and boiled them, ran them through a strainer and made milk which they added to rice instead of cooking in water, thus adding both protein and fat.  I decided to see if that might work on pecans and devoid of any recipe, I combined what little I could remember about the process with hickory nuts and also remembering to boil a few times, raw acorns to get rid of tannins, and set about making pecan milk.
Next time I think I will soak the ground up nuts/shells a bit first and pour off the water.  Anyways here is what I did:

I washed the shells first, then rinsed the cracked shells /meat and then ground them by putting them in a mesh bag and taking a hammer to them and then grinding in a blender with a little water.  I ran the whole thing through a mesh bag and tasted it.  Kinda bland and I could taste a little tannin so then I thought maybe I should boil the whole thing so I took the meat/shells/milk and put it in a pan on top of the stove and boiled them for a few minutes and then strained again.  To the jar I added just about  1/2 tsp of sugar.  I made rice with it that night and it tasted pretty good.  I think I might add a touch of vanilla and a touch more sugar if drinking it plain. 

If anyone has made this before and has a tried and true method for doing so, I would love to know about it.