Happy Dandy Lions forced in the living room, glad to have been invited into the warmth. Little do they know though that I had a cruel plan to put them into last night’s quiche!
Quiche is one of some 20 generic dishes I’ve evolved over the years for using perennial veg as there are no recipes for the veggies I grow. As always, we use coarse whole grain flour (organic emmer wheat and svedje rye flour). We also used forced Allium senescens onions and leeks and swiss chard from cold storage in the cellar as well as garlic and rehydrated winter chantarelles. Super tasty and healthy!
This week’s perennial veg stir-fry with soba (buckwheat noodles), Japanese style contained the following (roughly left to right in the picture): Nettles / stornesle (Urtica dioica) Burdock / storborre roots (Arctium lappa); stored in the cellar Wapato tubers (Sagittaria latifolia); stored in the cellar in water Ramsons / ramsløk (Allium ursinum) Caucasian spinach / stjernemelde (Hablitzia tamnoides) Giant bellflower / storklokke (Campanula latifolia) Himalayan water creeper (Houttuynia cordata) – reddish shoots Sand leek / bendelløk (Allium scorodoprasum) Garlic / hvitløk (Allium sativum)
Somebody asked me to show how I force veggies indoors in winter, so here you have a link to a short video showing what is available at the moment! At this time of year, most of our leafy greens used in salads and cooking are either harvested from the forcing pots shown in the video or directly from the cold cellar under the house. Here is a mixture of perennials, biennials and annuals. Still looking for a good perennial chicory for forcing. See the list of plants shown below. Follow the link to the video. Witloof Festive Chicory (sikori / julesalat) Witloof Væres Venner mix (my own selection from the community garden based on several varieties from various gene banks) Hristo’s onion (Allium flavescens x nutans?) Kandahar cress (karse) from the Experimental Farm Network (seed harvested in the community garden) Wild buckwheat / vill bokhvete (seed harvested in The Edible Garden) Garlic bulbil sprouts / spirte hvitløk bulbiller Nodding onion / prærieløk (Allium cernuum) Dandelion / løvetann
Sorry, but I ceremoniously sacrificed all the dandelion flowers, buds and scapes for a delicious omelette today…and what a wonderful view they had on their last day on earth! Also in the dandeliomelette was chicory “Witloof” sprouts, an old Finnish shallot, garlic, thyme and the last of the wild buckwheat sprouts (løvetann, sikori,sjalott, hvitløk, timian og vill bokhvete)
Wild Enoki, Oca, Hablitzia, wild buckwheat sprouts, Allium nutans with dandelion, garlic chilis mixed with scrambled eggs for a delicious home grown and foraged lunch! Enoki is one of the hardiest fungi appearing often midwinter in mild winters. Also known as velvet shank (vintersopp in Norwegian, meaning winter fungus; Flammulina velutipes). Many had been reporting finding this species recently, and I too found some when I visited the botanical garden the other day! It’s difficult to believe that this is the same fungi as Enokitake or Enoki, sometimes offered in supermarkets and one of the most popular cultivated fungi in the Far East. The cultivated fungi are long and white as they are grown in the dark in an enriched CO2 environment which gives longer stalks.
With record temperatures recorded in this area at the moment after a mild winter when all the cold spells coincided with good snow cover means that the soil was hardly frozen all winter and garlic shoots had appeared a few days ago at least two weeks earlier than I’ve recorded before and I also found the first ground elder (skvallerkål) shoots – welcome back my friend and, be warned, I will be eating you until the autumn! It’s the marbled purple stripe garlic varieties that I grow that appear first: Aleksandra, Estonian Red, German Hardneck and Valdres!
The harbinger of the season of plenty: ground elder (skvallerkål), I LOVE YOU!I noticed Aleksandra garlic shoots on 13th March!This is a group of two year old garlic which were started from bulbilsGarlic being grown on an two year cycle can potentially give bigger total yield than if harvested every year. In the second year as shown here each clove has germinated and will produce a clump of garlics by autumn!
People are always asking me for recipes. I rarely follow recipes as my ingredients vary so much and I just use what I have available. However, I do follow a number of basic, mostly lacto-vegetarian recipes which I’ve evolved to my liking over the years. For instance, last night I used a) Pea shoots (erteskudd), harvested about 25cm high (before they get too coarse to use; I don’t cut them right down to the soil as they will then resprout once or twice before giving up; to do this, they must be grown in a bucket or similar in deep soil); the peas were a mixture of about twenty home grown varieties, including several heirlooms such as Norwegian Jærert and Ringeriksert). b) Swiss chard / mangold (it’s been too cold for this to regrow in the cellar where it’s planted in soil) c) Chicory “Catalogna gigante di Chioggia” (sikkori) (this had resprouted in the cellar from the roots) d) Leeks / purre (also stored in soil in the cellar) e) Yacon (sliced tubers) f) Scorzonera / scorsonnerot (sliced tubers) g) Oca (oka) (Oxalis tuberosa) h) Garlic / hvitløk i) Chili / chili j) Bulb onions / kepaløk k) golpar (ground seed of various Heracleum species; bjørnekjeks / Tromsøpalme) The roots are stir-fried first (in olive oil), then the onions are added and at the end the greens for 5-10 minutes, finally mixing in chili, salt and pepper. Served either over whole grain spelt pasta or mixed as a risotto (I use barley normally for a barlotto) with strong cheese or parmesan.
Pea shoots
Pea shoots
From bottom: swiss chard, chicory, leeks, pea shoots
Stir-fry
The roots are stir-fried first (in olive oil), then the onions are added and at the end the greens for 5-10 minutes, finally mixing in chili, salt and pepper. Served either over whole grain spelt pasta or mixed as a risotto with strong cheese or parmesan.
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
