Category Archives: Perennial vegetable shoots

permakulturplanter.no visit!

A great visit from my old friends Irja Frydenlund and Benjamin Bro-Jørgensen from Tingvoll and permakulturplanter.no popped in this afternoon with little Asimina and Ainora (what’s that backwards?!!). Great names and, apart from trying to fill in a hole I’d just dug, lovely kids!

Thanks for the Asimina (pawpaw) plants :)

Perennial veg pakora

Pakora or bhaji is a popular snack in Indian and surrounding countries. Growing up in the UK, vegetarian Indian food has always been part of my diet since I was a student. It is basically various vegetables dipped into a batter made from gram (chick pea) flour and stir-fried. It would be fun to use broad bean flour as we can’t grow chick peas here. The flour was mixed with water, salt and pepper, chili, cumin and coriander until you get a batter with the consistency of cream.
The pictures show the 15 perennials I used (2 types of dandelion) and the final delicious and simple veggie dinner served with sour cream (or yoghurt), Most of the plants are forest garden species.

Oslo Botanical Garden, Tøyen, spring edibles

On a break in my journey from Trondheim to Hvaler I had a few hours edible-spotting in the Oslo Botanical Garden (full of – not allowed to pick – food at this time of year) ;)
NB! Not all plants shown here are edible!
I’ll add captions later!

Webinar on winter perennial vegetables!

Thank you Emilia Rekestad for putting last week’s webinar on winter perennial vegetables up more permanently on youtube. Emilia first introduces the webinar and the polyculture project through which it was organised!
I hope you find it useful and please help us by sharing with friends and relevant groups!!
 

Noxious pizza

I’m still alive and well after last night’s noxious pizza. I’ll explain. I used pea shoots from the living room, onion, Allium cernuum shoots harvested from the garden (I forgot to include Hablitzia shoots), garlic and chili…on top of the pizza, I added seed of Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera), one of the “worst” noxious (invasive) species…

Wild “Asparagus” for the king and queen’s 80th birthdays?

I noticed in a recent number (3/2017) of the Norwegian Useful Plants excellent magazine “Sopp og Nyttevekster” a picture on page 41 (picture) accompanying a recipe for “Spring risotto with wild asparagus, sorrel and peas”, but I noticed a familiar plant in the picture which I don’t think is wild aspargus (Asparagus spp.) but rather another one of the 80 plants in my book, Ornithogalum pyrenaicum (Bath asparagus, aspargette in France or Latte di gallina dei Pirenei in Italy). This plant is in the lily family….and is commonly used over its wild range which stretches from the Caucasus through the Mediterranean countries as far north as the UK, where it may have been introduced by the Romans for food near to the city of Bath.
It’s noted in the article that wild asparagus was served to the Norwegian king and queen on their 80th birthdays….but it’s unclear if the picture is of this dish?
This isn’t the first time this species has turned up in Norway as my friend Ove Fosså told me a few years ago that he had found Ornithogalum pyrenaicum being sold as asparagus in a supermarket in Sandnes (Stavanger) and that he’d also noticed it captioned as asparagus in  Norwegian chef Eyvind Hellstrøm’s cookbook Bageteller…thanks to Ove Fosså for this picture:
Ornithogalum_Hellstrøms_Bageteller
Ove also noticed it on the pizza of a cheesemaker friend  “Lise Brunborg ( the cheesemaker who makes the great blue cheese Fønix in Stavanger). It turned out, she had it from her parents’ fridge and they had bought it at Madla Handelslag, a cooperative in Stavanger:
See https://scontent-bru2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13339542_1637168542978165_7831958122115280143_n.jpg?oh=9582cc6e3d56c44d832c448aa7f695f3&oe=5AB6F8BB
Bath asparagus has a mild but different taste but can be used like a wild asparagus!  
Originally the word asparagus is derived from a word meaning simply “spring shoot”.
 

Skirret harvest 2017

A good skirret (sukkerrot) harvest again…I don’t grow much as this perennial root and shoot vegetable is not totally hardy here. I have a few plants along the southern house wall which are covered in winter to protect against hard frost.
More on my blog and book!
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Skirret-chufa stir-fry
 
The tallest skirret challenge
(Nobody has challenged my world record 2.3m skirret)
 
Skirret shoots

Extreme winter record salad

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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!

http://kosmorama.no/en/2016/12/gourmet-cinema-in-defense-of-food

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!

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Kosmorama/ Credo diversity dinner #1

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 :)
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All the veggies including Primula elatior (oxlip / hagenøkleblom flowers)
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Blanched dandelions (løvetann)
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Oca, ulluco, Hablitzia shoots (stjernemelde) and Chicago onio
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Blanched 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)
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Sweet cicely / spansk kjørvel seed sprouts at the top with blanched horseradish shoots at bottom and blanched wild dandelion on the right