Tag Archives: Pizza

Seed saving talk weekend

Thanks to KVANN (Norwegian Seed Savers) colleague Andrew McMillion for coming up to Trondheim to give his seed saving course for local KVANN and Væres Venner Community Garden members! 


…and there was time for a Malvik visit, a seed saving and breeding chat, a tour of my seed boxes and a little salad with Witloof chicory and dandelion pizza.

Salad ingredients: Celery, three chicory varieties, dandelion (including one flower), carrot, Japanese yams, Allium cernuum and Hablitzia (from the garden), Hristo’s onion (Allium flavescens x nutans?), oca (2 varieties), apple (Aroma), horseradish shoots,  garlic, chives, wild buckwheat shoots and turnip “Målselvnepe”

Chicory / dandelion pizza with 100% coarse wholegrain Svedjerug (rye) sourdough base!

…and my seed archive:

20 year anniversary extreme pizza!

Around 25 years ago I started reading scientific papers written by various ethnobotanists on the back of the discovery of the traditional Mediterranean diet – people in mountain villages had low levels of cardiovascular disease. The diet is characterised by eating a lot of fruit and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, seeds and fish and contains little fat from dairy products and red meat, but rather monounsaturated fat from olive oil and unsalted nuts. Even here in Norway, this is the diet recommended by experts, latest in an article this spring at NRK article  in which it’s also suggested that it can also contribute to preventing dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer. Nice to know as this is the diet I’ve followed for some 40 years, although using more dairy products than would have been used. 
Reading those articles, it struck me that one component was missing in recommendations and that is a large diversity of notably leafy green vegetables, something not possible for most people in Norway as, unless you are a forager, this isn’t available. In fact, for most people, vegetables seem to be interpreted as tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, all fruits. 
One of the first studies I read was Gathered wild food plants in the Upper Valley of the Serchio River (Garfagnana), Central Italy by Andrea Pieroni, published in the journal Economic Botany in 1999. In this study, 133 species 
belonging to 48 families were documented and over half were plants used for their leaves and shoots. I could also read in this paper about multispecies dishes for perhaps the first time. Notably, in this area a multispecies soup Minestrella with typically 40 different plants was made and a similar 50 species dish, pistic, traditionally made inland from Venice is also referred to (pistic is also referred to in Stephen Facciola’s Cornucopia II).
This inspired my own multispecies dishes and, a few days ago, 24th August 2023 was the 20th anniversary of my world record salad with 537 plants which lead to me being called Extreme Salad Man on a Norwegian gardening program Grønn Glede the year after! The importance of leafy perennial vegetables and food diversity, both cultivated and foraged also became the subject of my book Around the World in 80 plants.
My main multispecies dishes (with links) made over the years since can be found at the bottom of this post.
On 24th August we decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the world record salad by making a pizza with as many plants as possible, although it was a busy week otherwise so I only managed 229 this time, 225 of which were grown in one of my 3 gardens, the onion garden at the Ringve Botanical Garden, the Væres Venner community garden and my home garden, The Edible Garden. It was served to an unexpecting group of psychologists who had booked a garden tour that evening! They were on a Somatic Experiencing mentoring weekend in Malvik (Vennatjønna Levebruk) and they spend the first evening “grounding themselves” in my garden (this was the second visit)! The list of plants can be downloaded under the pictures below from that evening!

The record pizza ingredients:

Download (XLSX, 19KB)



Other notable extreme multispecies dishes –
SALADS: 19th August 2001 –  363 different plants (382 ingredients); see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=29492 
            24th August 2003 – 537 different plants (over 90% were perennials); see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=18997
PESTO: 6th June 2015 – 230 different Alliums (see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=1507); a few were biennial (Allium cepa)
FERMENT: 412 varieties (7th June 2015)  – a mix of perennials and annuals (see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=1544); probably over 80% were perennials!
SALAD FLOWERS: 115 different flowers on 7th July 2015; see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=1904  (again probably over 90% flowers of perennials)




Unusual October veg

A few unusual vegetables this October from the Edible Garden and House:
1. I’ve been trialling around 20 different chicories this year from seed from the German seed bank IPK Gatersleben. This is one of the best producers, Sugar Loaf (Accession CICH 350) which ended up in yesterday’s Basella and Chicory pizza! I remember years ago on a work meeting in Venice enjoying a chicory pizza.

2. Gunnera tinctoria is the representative for South America in my book Around the World in 80 plants. Sadly, it is not very hardy and mine grows in a large pot half submerged in my small pond and is moved into the cellar for the winter where it goes to sleep for most of the winter. The edible leaf petioles don’t reach the size of plants grown outside and are therefore a bit more fibrous. Their crunchy texture and sweet-sour taste was nevertheless a good addition to a mixed salad earlier in the week.  
3. This summer was the first time I’d grown Okinawan spinach (Gynura bicolor). I cut it down earlier this week and used the leaves in the mixed salad together with the Gunnera. It’s the variety with red undersides to the leaves. Thanks to my friend Kim Jacobsen who leads KVANNs Stueplantelaug (Norwegian Seed Savers’ (Edible) House Plant guild) for sending me cuttings. It looks and tastes good!

4. I also grow Basella (Ceylon spinach) inside and it always produces berries and seeds for the following year and for sharing. This was used with the chicory (above) in the pizza.


5. Autumn is also the time that the perennial kales resprout and provide an abundance of greens. Here’s a video of the perennial kales in the Edible Garden this week. I have another similar sized plot at the community garden.

6. One of my favourite wild edibles is common sow thistle / haredylle (Sonchus oleraceus), although I deliberately cultivate it. However, apart from posts by myself, this is a plant that isn’t mentioned in Norwegian foraging groups in Norway. Is this because it needs some preparation in order that it’s merits can be properly understood, the bitterness maybe putting people off at first taste? This is a plant I devote several pages to in my book Around the World in 80 Plants and I document how this is an important wild edible worldwide. My introduction to its merits was in the book Native Edible Plants of New Zealand by Andrew Crowe and on a work trip to that country in the early 2000s I could see for myself how important this plant is for the Maori people with over 1/3 of all the vegetable stalls selling this plant. Known as puha to the Maori, it has become a so-called cryptocrop* of the Maori vegetable gardens, an annual “weed” introduced by the Europeans with a similar taste to the traditional perennial endemic sea-cliff inhabiting puha (Sonchus kirkii). Annual puha is encouraged in between the main crops as it has a cash value and increases the yield of the land. It has also been suggested that the large consumption of annual puha by the Maori (hardly used by people of European descent) protects them against some forms of cancer. I was so inspired by the story of how a plant much hated worldwide could at the same time be a superfood appreciated by the Maori and all the other peoples around the world who are in the know, that I introduced it to my garden and it is now become my most important vegetable from late July to the first frosts! From it becoming a burden to weed out this coloniser of open soil, I now weed this “weed” leaving only a few plants to grow strong on the edges of my vegetable beds….and hate is turned to love! Much more in my book!
*Crytocrops: a distinction has been made between cryptocrops
from weeds by Diego Rivera et al. in a 2006 paper: “This led us to distinguish cryptocrops from weeds. Both are not cultivated plants living in crop fields and competing with the main crop. The fundamental distinction is the intensity of gathering by man”.
7.  I have a special fascination for vegetables that are superstars in one part of the world but hardly known in their area of origin and one of those is garland chrysanthemum or crown daisy (Glebionis coronaria, early known as Chrysanthemum coronarium). This is a wild and extremely common flower of early spring in Mediterranean countries, often growing in large quantities, and commonly available in supermarkets in Japan where it’s known as shungiku. See more on this blog post Shungiku soba (a standard offering in soba restaurants in Japan): https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=22710
There is a legend that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy from China. In an article “Fra Malta til Japan og tilbake” (From Malta to Japan and back again) that I wrote 15 years ago for a Norwegian herbal magazine Grobladet in 2006, I suggested that Mr. Polo gave chopsuey greens in return (see and download the article here https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?page_id=3493).
When I first wrote about shungiku in 2006, I could only find one reference of its use in the Mediterranean for food. Since then, there have been carried out numerous ethnobotanical studies throughout the Mediterranean and a quick search carried out now revealed that this plant has been used traditionally throughout the area, although by no means a common wild edible:
In Turkey: numerous studies (leaves, young shoots and stems are used) have recorded this plant used as summarized in a paper from 2019 by İsmail Şenkardeş and others: “An Ethnobotanical Analysis on Wild Edible Plants of the Turkish Asteraceae Taxa”
In addition, it is recorded in two studies in Spain, in Morocco, Palestine and in Sicily it was both cooked and used in salads.
This plant fits nicely into my diversity cooking as it produces new shoots in smaller amounts throughout the summer from July to the first frosts and they are usable even after the plant has flowered and produced seed.
There are many cultivars with different flower colour, double and single and serrated and whole-leaved forms. I’ve grown some 10-15 different cultivars this summer, the seed from the collections at IPK Gatersleben in Germany.





Cherokee Pizza

AROUND THE WORLD IN THE EDIBLE GARDEN; Part 1 – The Cherokee lands of Eastern North America
The first in a series of dinners from Malvik’s Edible Garden where we “forage” from different parts of the world!

Cherokee Pizza is of course better known as Cherokizza…go on, look it up :). This is the classic Native American Italian dish and it was made in Norway today!   All you need is a good selection of Cherokee wild vegetables:
Appalachian greens / kyss-meg-over-gjerde (Rudbeckia laciniata); see http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=22018
Nodding onion / prærieløk (Allium cernuum)
Stinging nettle / brennesle (Urtica dioica)
Virginia waterleaf / Indian salad (Hydrophyllum virginianum)
Dandelion / løvetann (Taraxacum spp.) (a giant individual, as you will see from the pictures, growing on seaweed on the sea kale bed)
Cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum)

I used a thick 100% whole grain rye sourdough base for the pizza, so a bit of Denmark in there too!




Himalayan Balsam and Albatrellus ovinus pizza

Tonight’s veggie pizza (with part of the bread dough as I’m also baking bread this evening) had some unusual for me ingredients: perennial kales, a mix of oriental brassicas (pak choy, mizuna, mustard greens etc.), various spring onions (all hacked out of the frozen soil) with garlic, chili, oregano, dried fungi – Albatrellus ovinus (fåresopp in Norwegian) and topped with dried seed of highly invasive himalayan balsam (kjempespringfrø), the seeds of which are quite attractive (see the picture)