i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
Haskaps, or Honeyberry, or Edible Honeysuckle (lonicera caerulea) is part of the honeysuckle family (and not all honeysuckles are edible) that produces fruit very similar to blueberries. It’s cold hardy as hell (some are hardy all the way to zone 2!) and unlike blueberries, tolerate …
I was always curious about the taste of gooseberries (ribes uva-crispa syn. ribes grossularia) but had never had the opportunity to try one. It seem financially irresponsible to buy a pie or a jar of jam of something that I wasn’t sure I’d like (and …
I plant beans every year, and have tried several different types including scarlet runner, snap peas, etc. I found though, that I like bush beans the best as far as taste and utility goes. The bush bean that I have (phaseolus vulgaris) is actually just a variation of the common string bean/green bean, which is very confusing because a lot of different beans, all with different tastes and uses are gathered under the common Latin name. However, instead of growing vines like regular beans, bush beans, as evident from their name, grows in an upright, bushy position with the beans clustered near the center.
One warning that should not be skipped over is that beans under this Latin name are all toxic when raw, although the toxicity varies from different types of beans (kidney beans being the most toxic.) However, string beans are often eaten raw, to usually no ill effects, due to the fact that it is very mild compared with the other types. The younger the beans you pick, the less toxic it is.
They do best in full sun, well watered, and is actually not picky about soil due to the fact that as members of the legume family, they fix nitrogen from the air into the ground to be used as fertilizer–this means vegetables planted near beans, especially those who are heavy nitrogen feeders, do very, very well. I always interplant my bush beans with the other annuals (mostly tomatoes) for this very reason, and my tomatoes are always exploding. They are annuals, unfortunately, which means they die when winter hits and new plants need to be bought or seeds started in order to grow again next year. However, some variations, like runner beans, if well protected, can actually overwinter in milder climates.
My favorite way to cook (and my family’s favorite way to eat) these beans is picking the beans when they are quite young, giving it a quick sautee with garlic, butter, and tomatoes. Then drizzling olive oil, sea salt, and cracked black pepper over it. It’s always a hit and reminds me that summer is here.
Now, the other thing I love to do with them is utilizing their leaves. The leaves are edible and is a great, mild flavored dark leafy green. I sautee it with duck fat and often eat it at breakfast with a sunnyside duck egg, on a piece of toast with a slice of tomato, or as a side dish for dinner in lieu of spinach. I love this plant because it is usable and edible in its entirety.
I bought two different types of peppercorn trees (no relation to black pepper) this year: The Sansho peppercorn (zanthoxylum piperitum) and the Szechuan peppercorn (zanthoxylum simulans) for my food forest. The sansho peppercorn is the main flavor you would find in Togarashi Ichimi-Shichimi powder, the …
It was so hard to come up with a pun for asparagus–you know, one that might be family friendly rather than raunchy, but I managed to do so after sleeping on it overnight. Asparagus officinalis (see, even they couldn’t come up with a better name) …
Ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris) has been somewhat of a bane to me–I love it. I want it. But in previous years, I had no luck with it until the one I planted last fall took. I don’t know how it’s possible to do so poorly (6 attempts) with something that’s supposedly hardy af, but I achieved it. I have no idea if it’s because it needed more water or less or more sunlight or less because I did all those combinations and only by sheer luck did my last one, which I gave up on and just chose a haphazard place to put it, thrive. It’s among a bed of Lily of the Valley that the previous owners planted, but which I will begin to pull out because it’s poisonous and useless to me food wise.
I tried to come up with a clever pun for the title of this post, but failed miserably. It’s sad because this is such an awesome plant that I managed to get a hold of here in the United States. Japanese Spikenard (Aralia Cordata), also …
Raspberries (rubus idaeus) belong to the rubus family which includes blackberries, thimbleberries, brambleberries, tayberries, etc. and can readily cross breed with them, so new varieties are constantly coming out. Some people find them invasive–but honestly, what’s so bad about a fruit that vigorously propagates itself? …
I hate ornamentals that have no utility other than looking pretty. I’m sorry, but in the event of the zombie apocalypse, everything on my property better have a use so that myself and my family can survive, and tulips and daffodils definitely won’t help on that front. So why did I keep the hostas that had been planted by the previous owners of the house?
Grown for its ornamental value, it is also a little known edible. The Japanese consider it a “sansai” meaning, mountain vegetable, sold as “urui” or “kiboushi” in Japan. It grows wonderfully in sun and shade, tolerates a wide range of soil conditions, and is both water and drought tolerant.
But how do you eat it? Conventionally, people eat the young shoots when they first come out in spring, steamed, tempura battered and fried, boiled, or in soups, but all parts of this plant are edible. The issue is that when it gets later in the season, it becomes bitter and tough.
(If you are interested in learning more about the edibility of Hostas, check out Perfect Plant’s article: https://myperfectplants.com/2020/08/10/are-hostas-edible/)
In comes what I prefer eating–the buds of the flowers. Of course, this is only such a short season of picking: maybe 3 days (I happened to realize early this year and managed to get them before they opened), tops, when all of them are sending up their flower buds all at once.
I like to pick the buds before they’re open, when they’re at their most tender, batter it (batter recipe below) and fry it. Garnished with pickled ginger, or swimming in a lemon soy base, it’s absolutely delicious, and the taste and texture is like that of fried artichoke hearts. There is a very, very slight bitterness, depending on your variety, but so soft I hardly even notice.
This is my favorite batter recipe, and works well for all vegetables, chicken, and fish. My husband would inhale this batter if he could and he’d die a happy man.
Recipe
1. You can either mix the egg in or use it as a wash. Both ways are good, but I’m lazy so I simply mix it in. Fry in vegetable oil (or duck fat) until golden and place on a paper towel to drain.
2. Equal parts soy sauce and lemon juice, with a .5 part dashi stock for a dipping sauce (with grated daikon if you have) works as a delicious dipping sauce, as does sriracha mayo. I’m sure you can also sautee it with some butter and garlic and it would be just as divine.
Regular strawberries are nice, but sadly we neither eat enough of it, nor have the patience to really protect it from all the creatures that want to devour it. The fruit sizes are varied, some years giving large ones, other years giving rise to strangely …