Weed Salad
May. 6th, 2010 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaA few nights ago, we had weed salad with dinner, which is to say I foraged some wild foliage to make a salad to go with dinner. Miner's Lettuce, Lemon Balm, wild Mustard, Sorrel, some very young blackberry leaf, and some sour clover. Ended up being quite tasty and nobody died so hurray! ^_^
As we've been working on the yard, we've also been trying to identify more plants as we come across them. This has revealed an interest hole in my plant knowledge. The parsley family. Much like mushrooms, as a child, I was told to strictly avoid parsley family plants because while there are many edibles there are also a bunch of things like poison hemlock, water hemlock, fool's parsley, water dropwort, etc.
So... Decided it was time to fill those holes in my knowledge. So far we've identified three different members of this group. We have some chervil, poison hemlock, and (probably)cow parsley. Of them, it turns out the hemlock is relatively easy to identify. The others less so. I've nibbled on the two that are not toxic. Chervil is kind of nice but quite mild and probably not really worth the effort to collect it, and the cow parsley is... Kind of like parsley but not as good, though the deer seem to like it. I might use it in a pinch but I've got parsley sprouting in pots right now so odds are I won't. :)
For now, I'm going to leave the hemlock alive because it makes a good base for comparison of other plants. On the whole so far? I think identification of wild mushrooms is less difficult.
As we've been working on the yard, we've also been trying to identify more plants as we come across them. This has revealed an interest hole in my plant knowledge. The parsley family. Much like mushrooms, as a child, I was told to strictly avoid parsley family plants because while there are many edibles there are also a bunch of things like poison hemlock, water hemlock, fool's parsley, water dropwort, etc.
So... Decided it was time to fill those holes in my knowledge. So far we've identified three different members of this group. We have some chervil, poison hemlock, and (probably)cow parsley. Of them, it turns out the hemlock is relatively easy to identify. The others less so. I've nibbled on the two that are not toxic. Chervil is kind of nice but quite mild and probably not really worth the effort to collect it, and the cow parsley is... Kind of like parsley but not as good, though the deer seem to like it. I might use it in a pinch but I've got parsley sprouting in pots right now so odds are I won't. :)
For now, I'm going to leave the hemlock alive because it makes a good base for comparison of other plants. On the whole so far? I think identification of wild mushrooms is less difficult.
