Green greetings to you all.
It's almost the end of the merry month of May, the month when the fairies come out to play. The moment the fairy gate opened, the fairies beckoned to the leaf buds, and the leaves unfurled. Then the fairies stirred the roots, and shoots shot up. The fairies danced, and mushroomed bulged from the earth. The fairies sang, and flowers in all the colors of the rainbow bloomed.
Late May is a great time for adding wild plants to your salad. There's lots of chickweed and dandelion, garlic mustard and violet leaves, five-finger ivy and wild mint to bring green blessing to your salad bowl.
It's a wonderful time to experiment with new wild foods, too. I believe that eating wild foods is vital to optimum health. Wild foods give us healthy doses of soil bacteria and other micro-organisms that make the gut optimally healthy, and this translates into less diabetes and fewer chronic diseases. Wild foods are usually richer in minerals and anti-oxidants, reducing muscular and skeletal aches and pains and protecting us against cancer. Wild foods make our cells fall in love again. We are re-wilded when we eat wild food, even one bite. And we are rewired into the Earth matrix when we eat wild food regularly.
We'll talk about some shoots of early summer – cattail, daylily, hops, and poke – to experiment with.
Have reservations about eating wild foods on your own? Join us for the Green Witch Holiday. We pick wild salad every day, and eat lots of other wild things, including mushrooms. In addition, we spend an entire day making herbal remedies at Herb Hill with Gretchen Gould, purveyor of fine infused oils. Do join us.
Cattail Side Dish
One of the oldest surviving family of plants is the Typhaceae, the cattails. Euell Gibbons dubbed them the "natural supermarket." The Boy Scouts claim to be able to make "anything" from cattails. Though tough and fibrous, all parts of the plant are edible. And the leaves can be woven into bags, baskets, and mats, which can be used for clothing and shelter.
If you look online, you will find dozens of recipes for cattail dishes, many focusing on the roots, which are starchy and potato-like. Because there is far less cattail in my area than there was even twenty years ago, I treat it like a mildly endangered plant and avoid disturbing or harvesting the root.
Instead, I pull the shoot, leaving the firmly-anchored root in place. Here is a bunch of cattail shoots ready to be prepared for our meal.
The first step is to cut off most of the leaves. Then treat the cattail shoot like a leek, slitting the heavy green layers so they can be peeled away leaving the sweet white center.
Then slice the white center into thin rounds. The green parts of the leaves that are tender are edible and may be included.
Heat a fat of your choice – bacon fat, butter, olive oil – in a skillet. Add the cattail slices when the fat is hot and lower the heat.
When the slices are soft and some are a little brown, they are ready to eat.
Serve your cattail slices as a side dish over rice or beans or any vegetable. Although they look a lot like onion, they don't taste spicy at all. The taste is rather bland and a little sweet. And very easy to enjoy.
Green blessings are everywhere, and many of them are delicious.