Hello Blogosphere. Long time, no see. Again. It’s been a busy year, and I have been completely remiss in my blogging activities, so I wanted to publish something for this summery season. This post is about my attempts to make the best use of my garden. Full disclosure: I actually drafted this last summer, and never got around to posting it (surprise, surprise). So I have amended some of the text, but the actual recipes I made and most of the photos in this post are from last year. I would have updated those too, but everything seems to have gone through an accelerated growth this year, followed by a huge storm in Ontario that left us without power for eight days. So the window for picking and cooking anything was very small. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
We moved into our house three years ago, and having lived in an apartment for the previous four years we were finally happy to have a nice garden. A large garden. Which requires a large amount of work!
There’s a huge apple tree which despite my insistence that it will have a bad crop at some point, has over provided (and has certainly provided the kind of exercise that comes with raking up apples) since 2019. Judging by the budding apples growing at the moment, this year will be no exception.
Then there’s the rhubarb; another wild and wonderfully untamed plant that has given us ample supply of frozen rhubarb to last until next season, and enough seeds to plant another hundred or so rhubarb plants. Last year we also started a vegetable garden. It was definitely an experimental work but this year’s bigger effort is going well and given the coming food crisis, last year’s little test run has really paid off. Although since the recent storm I have been picking a lot of mini maple trees from the beds…
However, there is a wealth of other plant life lingering in the lawn and along the borders, and it got me wondering what else might make a tasty treat. What else could we eat that would provide a little respite from grocery store-bought goods. The first step was to hit Pinterest! All of the recipes in this post were found by a quick search for ‘foraging’ – there’s a lot online; reflective of how many people now want to live off the land, even if the ‘land’ is just a public walkway or a vegetable box on the balcony.
Our lawn is not so much grass as a mixture of clover, moss, ground ivy, and that spring staple: dandelions. It was seeing these that really prompted me to look further into the foraging. They’re weeds if you want a nice lawn, but I figured that it was a garden not a golf course, and I find that its current make up certainly attracts a lot of wildlife – a definite plus.
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of dandelion recipes online. After all, they grow almost everywhere and make for easy foraging. (Just don’t pick any where dogs are walked or where they grow close to busy roads seems to be the most touted advice). They’re interesting plants in that you can cook with the flowers, leaves, and roots. But my focus was on the flowers and leaves, since they were the easiest to harvest.
Dandelion tea was the obvious first choice, since it seems to top every recipe list and is a staple of homesteading tutorials. I went with a simple recipe that involved pouring boiling water over a bunch of washed dandelion flowers (note: they looked much sadder after a good wash than they looked when I was picking them), leaving it to steep, draining out the flowers, then adding a little honey to taste. I left the dandelions in the water until it had cooled, as I made a big batch and couldn’t really taste much after the 10 minutes indicated in the recipe.
Yes, it looks a little like the world’s largest urine sample. But I made a big jug that I kept in the fridge for a few days and, once I got used to the initial, slightly bitter taste, it actually made a quite refreshing beverage.
The dandelion leaves were next, but I didn’t want to just go down the easy route of throwing them in a salad. At the time I was eating far too many Town House Flip Sides crackers, so a dandelion pesto to dip them into seemed most appealing. As with some of the other recipes I found, I had to adjust this one significantly because it required really large amounts of leaves. On the flipside (ha ha) there are only two of us, so a smaller amount as a snack was ok.
I was pleased with how it worked out. I have only a Kitchen Ninja to work with, so it was a bit lumpier than it would have been if I was using a better food processor but I actually liked that texture. Again, it has a slightly bitter taste to begin with, but the flavour is very full and you can bask in the knowledge that you’re getting a healthy dose of nutritious greens.
My final experiment was with violets, and this was the most time consuming. I love violets; the splash of colour and the way some of them smell, and most importantly the memories they evoke of my grandmother who was named for the flower. They grow in my garden both in the drier soil next to the house, and under the immense lilac bush (immense plants seem to be a strong theme in my garden) which is much shadier and where the soil is wetter.
I really wanted something sweet and floral and, once again, I had to significantly reduce the amounts in this simple violet syrup recipe I found because the violets in the garden don’t grow in huge numbers.After washing and removing the stalks I poured boiling water over the flowers and left them for 24 hours. When I took off the lid the next day I was greeted by something that looked and smelled less than appealing, and I wondered how this could possibly become a floral delicacy.
I sieved out the flowers and added a drop of lemon juice to the blue liquid… which thanks to some magical chemistry turned an attractive shade of purple. Boiling it along with sugar produced something that really amazed me: a delicious sweet syrup with distinct floral undertones. It was great on pancakes, and I’m certain it would have made a great addition to hot chocolate or in ice cream.
In all I was pleased with the results of my dabbling. Next year I’d like to make use of the lilac blossoms (Jeff Buckley can’t be wrong), and try some dandelion root coffee. There are a couple of other tempting dandelion recipes including ‘honey’, butter spread, and shortbread to explore. There are Jerusalem artichokes growing at the moment and I’d like to try something with them. Plus I’ll undoubtedly have a significant amount of fridge space full of apples to experiment with for the next couple of months 🍏
Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.