Category Archives: Food

Shungiku Soba

I have a special fascination for vegetables that are superstars in one part of the world but hardly known in others and one of those is garland chrysanthemum or crown daisy (Glebionis coronaria / Chrysanthemum coronarium) a wild and extremely common herb of early spring in Mediterranean countries, often growing in large quantities, and commonly available in supermarkets in Japan where it’s known as  shungiku. It had started to become available in Europe in vegetable catalogues in the 1970s and became known as chopsuey greens. I started growing it in the 1980s, not very successfully as it went quickly to seed in our long northern summer days, better in the years when I had a greenhouse in which I could sow in March.

This year, I started seed very early indoors and plants have for the first time been quite productive. Last night I made a soba (buckwheat pasta dish) with stir fried chopsuey greens and garlic scapes (with white wine, ginger, chili and soy sauce as flavourings). Chopsuey greens have a similar “aromatic” taste common to many other Asteraceae, including perennials like Aster scaber, Aster tripolium and Ligularia fischeri.  Try substituting these perennials  in chopsuey greens recipes.

I wrote an article about shungiku in the Norwegian herb magazine Grobladet, see

Shungiku article

At the time, I couldn’t find much evidence of this plant having been used traditionally in the Mediterranean countries. However, thanks to the many ethnobotanical studies over recent years to document the Mediterranean diet, it has now been registered as eaten both raw and cooked  both in Spain, Italy (including Sicily) , in a number of studies in Turkey as well as Palestine and Morocco. It is also sometimes cultivated.
More specifically, leaves and young shoots are used in the Mediterranean countries in salad (both raw and cooked), in pies, as a cooked vegetable,  in a Turkish dish unlama (flour, garlic and lemon juice) and in Moroccan bakoula salad, usually made with mallow leaves, but spinach and /or kale are substituted for them (see, for example, http://www.mymoroccanfood.com/home/bakoula-with-spinach-and-kale)

Garlic Barley Weedotto!

The last two nights,  Barley Garlic Weedotto (or Garlic Weed Barlotto) was on the meny at the Edible Garden!
I have a relaxed approach to weeds and weeding and don’t mulch my beds like no dig gardeners do as I consider the weeds to be an important edible resource which increases the yield rather than decreasing as most people think!  If weeding becomes harvesting, it becomes less of a chore!
The greens in the barlotto were mostly weeds harvested when weeding my garlic which has grown well despite the ground cover of weeds (the garlic roots are deeper than the weed roots).

NB! Barlotto (Barley risotto) is a local and more nutritious and healthy food as we can’t grow rice !

Garlic with ground cover of “weeds” ready to harvest
Allium oleraceum (wild onion / villøk), Allium scorodoprasum (sand leek / bendelløk), Stellaria media (chickweed), Urtica dioica (nettle / nesle), Taraxacum officinale (dandelion / løvetann), Urtica urens (annual nettle / smånesle), Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd’s needle / Venuskam; an endangered annual edible weed of grain fields in the UK, in the carrot family, deliberately introduced as a weed in my garden and encouraged by letting some plants self-sow), Sonchus oleraceus (common sow thistle / haredylle; see my book for more on my most productive and most used “weed”) and Chenopodium album (fat hen / meldestokk)!
Barley Weedotto!
Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd’s needle / Venuskam) in parsnip / pastinakk
Flowering Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd’s needle / Venuskam) in a reconstruction of a traditional wheat field in Utrecht Botanical Garden
The characteristic seed heads of Scandix pecten-veneris (shepherd’s needle / Venuskam)

Perennial pizza

Last night’s pizza, perennials apart from Atriplex hortensis “Rubra”; including sea kale broccolis, perennial kales, Allium nutans, sorrel, Malva moschata, Anise hyssop, nettles etc.
 
Pizza med strandkål brokkolier, flerårige kål, nesle, Allium nutans, surblad (engsyre), anisisop, rød hagemelde (Atriplex hortensis) osv.

Perennial pizza

Last night’s pizza, perennials apart from Atriplex hortensis “Rubra”; including sea kale broccolis, perennial kales, Allium nutans, sorrel, Malva moschata, Anise hyssop, nettles etc.
 
Pizza med strandkål brokkolier, flerårige kål, nesle, Allium nutans, surblad (engsyre), anisisop, rød hagemelde (Atriplex hortensis) osv.

Perennial pakoras

This week, we made pakoras from a selection of perennial veggies from the garden (which ones can you spot?)
Pakoras are made with chick pea (besan) flour! Looking for a source of broad bean (fava) flour as that would I reckon be even tastier and could be produced in Norway!

Bellflower-chokes / Storklokkeskokker

I’ve previously introduced the gourmet part of the dandelion, the dandichoke! I write in my book:
My favourite foraging author “(Samuel Thayer’s) favourite dandelion vegetable is what he calls dandelion crowns, as named originally by Euell Gibbons (1961). I prefer to call them dandichokes, as both these and artichoke hearts are located below the flowers. In the early spring, the very young flowers appear at the surface. The dandichoke is just the self-blanched crown between the top of the root, which is a bit below the surface, and the developing flowers. Although small and difficult to clean, they are very tasty”. See the picture below!

The same applies to another of the 80 in my book, Giant Bellflower (storklokke) which also has a delicious (sweet tasting) self-blanched stem between the root and the surface….bellfower-chokes or, even better in Norwegian, storklokkeskokker! I discovered this accidentally last year! I had earlier noted in my book the sweeter tasting spring shoots after blanching (covering to excude light).

Never before pizza?

More or less anything can be used in a pizza, but I wager these have never been used in the same pizza: Oplopanax horridum, Allium scorodoprasum, Crambe maritima (sea kale /strandkål), Ligularia fischeri and Reynoutria japonica (Japanese knotweed).

Karvekaalsuppe

Yesterday was time for the annual karvekaalsuppe party in Malvik.  The young spring shoots of caraway are ready for harvesting in early spring (April to early May). They have a mild parsley-like taste not at all like the seeds. They were traditionally used to make a soup (karvekaalsuppe). Karvekaal literally translates as caraway-cabbage or -greens. This soup is described in Norway’s first cookery book by Hanna Winsnes in 1845. She recommends that the karvekaal should be cooked to soup either with meat or fish stock. Jens Holmboe, in his wartime Norwegian book Free Food from Wild Plants (Gratis Mat av Ville Planter ,1941) wrote, ‘There are many homes around the country in which the serving of the year’s first fresh karvekaalsuppe brings on a real spring party atmosphere after the long hard winter’. I know exactly what he means.

This week’s veggie karvekaal soup was made from both leaves and roots, first fried in a little butter with onion, garlic, sweet marjoram, chili, salt and pepper with a little barley miso. Delicious!

When we had children, first Robin in 1983 followed by Hazel (1986), I had less time to forage for food and started moving some of my favourite wild edibles into my garden. One of the first was Carum carvi (caraway / karve). My foraging mentor, Jan Erik Kofoed, had taught me about using the spring greens and how not to confuse it with cow parsley (hundekjeks) and yarrow (ryllik) which it often grows together with here. Locally it grows on coastal rocks and meadows, further afield on farmland. However, I could never find enough. It grew well in the garden and I had it in the same spot for over 20 years, self-seeding and always there, giving the impression of being perennial.

Caraway was probably taken by the Vikings to Shetland, Iceland and Greenland, where it is still found. Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen describes having eaten karvekaalsuppe in 1888 at the beginning of the first crossing of Greenland where they pitched their tents on a grassy area: ‘…after a strenuous day, a fantastic warm karvekaalsuppe, which will be difficult to forget, was our reward for our efforts’.

In Norway, karve grows throughout the country, in the south even being found in the mountains and, in the north, to the Arctic Ocean north of 70°N. Its range otherwise is throughout northern Europe including the Baltic states, most of Central Europe and east into Central Asia, Mongolia, Kamchatka, northern China and spread in the Himalayas. It is also found in Iceland and Greenland and has naturalised in many parts of North America. Outside of Norway I’ve also found documentation of using the spring leaves in soup both in Estonia, Poland and Slovakia.

 

More on the multi-purpose plant caraway on  my blog as a root vegetable, spice or edimental: http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?s=caraway

9th April veggies

Tonight’s garden foraged perennial veggies for an oriental stir-fry!

Lots of Hablitzia (stjernemelde), ground elder (skvallerkål), Svenskelauk (a form of Allium fistulosum), sweet cicely (spansk kjørvel), dandelion (løvetann), day lily shoots (daglilje), blanched horseradish shoots (pepperrot) and a variety of Allium victorialis (victory onion, seiersløk) which is the earliest form I grow along with one from the Kola peninsular in northern Russia; other varieties have hardly grown yet!