Swiss chard from the cellar (the light coloured leaves have started to grow in the dark), ocas, ullucos, Allium fistulosum, leek, dried tomato, garlic, bay leaves and buckwheat shoots
…for a stir-fry with chili and golpar spice (from Heracleum maximum seed)
Buckwheat (bokhvete) sprouts on the window sill (from seed collected in Hurdal)
Buckwheat (bokhvete) sprouts on the window sill (from seed collected in Hurdal)
Mustard sprouts (also from Hurdal), for some reason only germinated along the edges of the pot!
I returned home this afternoon from my 6 city tour of Canada to a beautiful cool day here on the Trondheimsfjord. Spring is further advanced than anywhere I visited in Quebec and Ontario…with many of the early spring flowers now out, blackbirds, robin and chiffchaff singing and an abundance of greens everywhere!
On the way from the airport in the bus
On the way from the airport in the bus
Approaching home
The red house on the hill…
Perennial onions and day lilies
Sorrel and caraway greens showing
Allium cernuum…I’ve now finally seen you in the wild too!
Angelica gigas
Perennial onions
Wild Hepatica
Primula elatior, oxlip
Erythronium dens-canis
Alliaria and ground elder
Alchemilla
Campanula latifolia and ground elder
Dandelions
My oldest Hablitzia
Rumex acetosa ” Non-flowering”
Rumex acetosa “Profusion” (non-flowering), not the crinkly leaves compared to the last one
Proof one more time that north is best for growing a diversity of tasty salad greens ;) Presenting (and claiming) my new world winter salad diversity record, a salad with over 140 ingredients all harvested locally without using any additional energy than is available in my house and cellar (no greenhouse; no freezer; no fermenting involved and only dried fruit and seed used apart from fresh vegetables!). Despite the snow cover I was able to harvest some 20-30 edibles outside. More on how this can be done will be the subject of a separate post!
The salad was presented and eagerly devoured by those who had bought tickets for the Gourmet Cinema event on 9th March 2017 as part of the Trondheim Kosmorama Film Festival! It went so quickly, I didn’t even get a taste myself!
The film was followed by a Food talk with a panel including the film’s director Michael Schwarz, the head chef at Credo Heidi Bjerkan, myself and Carl Erik Nielsen Østlund, the owner of the biodynamic organic farm that supplies much of the food to Credo, moderated by Yoshi!
As Michael Pollan concludes in the film: Eat Food, Not too much and (as many as possible) mostly vegetables!
The day before, I had prepared a 105 ingredient salad for the festival dinner at Credo restaurant (http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=10184). While preparing that salad, I made a second salad with the same 105 ingredients…and then added almost 40 additional ingredients that I hadn’t had time to harvest the day before!
Last night (8th March 2017) was the first of two events I had been asked to take part in celebrating the diversity of vegetables that our area has on offer (or could have on offer) even in winter! The Trondheim Kosmorama international film festival are showing two films related to food. Last night, the film “NOMA: My perfect storm” was shown and around 40 people also bought tickets to a fantastic 10-15 course, 4 hour meal (I lost count) at Trondheim’s NOMA: Credo!
I supplied a number of vegetables for the dinner and these are shown here, several being served for the first time in Norway :)
All the veggies including Primula elatior (oxlip / hagenøkleblom flowers)Blanched dandelions (løvetann)Oca, ulluco, Hablitzia shoots (stjernemelde) and Chicago onioBlanched horseradish (top left) with blanched wild dandelion, Aleksandra garlic bulbil sprouts, Chicago onion (Allium cernuum), different types of Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) and Ulluco (Ullucus tuberosus – green tubers)Sweet cicely / spansk kjørvel seed sprouts at the top with blanched horseradish shoots at bottom and blanched wild dandelion on the right
Chicories continue to grow in the cellar which is totally dark and about +4C… made into a chicory quiche, also known as chicoriche ;) Next year I plan to sprout perennial chicory roots!
100% wholemeal barley and oat flour crust and with garlic, masses of chili, sweet marjoram, dried chantarelle and with poppy seeds on top…and I won’t have to cook for a few more days!! Served with a few interesting heirloom potatoes….Cellar chicory shoots
I moved 10 buckets of roots and stratifying seeds of edible perennials for sprouting and eating before the spring greens come on tap…filling the hungry gap. These have all been outside exposed to the cold since November.
Bulbils of Egyptian Onion / Walking Onion / Luftløk will have a shock coming from outside into my living room!Allium cernuum has been completely unaffected by the extremes of climate we’ve experienced and are ready to eat…also in my living room…Seeds and roots in my unheated porch
In recent years, I’ve been experimenting with seed of perennials for winter greens, here the first time I’ve tried lovage / løpstikke sprouts. I sowed in November in a large pot left outside as they may not germinate without cold treatment. I then moved inside to an unheated room at the beginning of March and now there’s been mass germination and the taste is pretty good too :)
My favourite seed to sprout in winter is wild buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum), supposedly the wild ancestor of Fagopyrum esculentum the common buckwheat grown for the gluten free grain. I sow it repeatedly in large pots in earth on the window sill in the leaving room. The plants self-sow on my vegetable beds and each plant produces a lot of seed, so i just leave a few to grow and collect all the seed I need. Harvested some sprouts for lunch today:
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
