Weeds -- Don't kill, Eat them

Wonderful World of Weeds

by Lynn Smythe

Okay, so I finally got my husband to try edible flowers in some of the salads I serve him made with ingredients picked from our organic garden. He was really thrilled when I told him I was writing an article on edible weeds. I have banished him from the kitchen so he can't see what I'm adding to the meals I prepare. After he gulps down dinner then I can tell him what he just ate (I just ate purslane, isn't that the stuff growing all over our paver stones in the front yard that you won't let me spray with Round-up!?!) Yup honey, and you're still alive to tell the tale. His co-workers think I'm insane - they never seem to accept our dinner invitations, I wonder why?

Here are some weeds you may want to consider adding to your culinary creations. Many of these weeds can now be purchased from garden centers (either as plants or seeds) so you can grown them in your own yard if you can't find them growing in the wild.

Burdock (Arctium lappa) - cultivated as a vegetable in Japan where it is known as gobo. The stalks are scraped and cooked like celery. The roots can be eaten raw in salads or added to stir fries.

Cattail (Typha latifolia) - the pollen can be used to enrich flour. The unripe flower spikes can be cooked as a vegetable and the young shoots and inner stems are eaten raw or cooked.

Century plant (Agave americana) - the flower stems and leaf bases can be roasted and eaten. Certain species can be made into alcoholic drinks such as tequila.

Chickweed (Stellaria media) - can be added raw to salads or cooked as a vegetable.

Chicory (Cichorium intybus) - the roots of this plant are used as a coffee additive. The sky blue flowers are also edible and make a terrific addition to salads.

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) - the flowers can be made into wine or jelly. The roots are sometimes used as a coffee substitute. The young leaves make a nice addition to salads.

Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) - a tropical American weed commonly used in Mexican cooking to flavor corn, beans, mushrooms, seafood, fish, soups, and sauces.

Garlic mustard (Alliaria officinalis) - the young leaves add a mild garlic flavor to salads, sandwiches, and soups.

Goldenrod (Solidago spp.) - the leaves and flowers can be used for herbal tea.

Horseweed (Conyza canadensis) - the young leaves can be cooked as a vegetable.

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata) - AKA Japanese arrowroot. It is a prolific weed in south Florida. A starch can be made from its roots. This starch can be used to thicken sauces and gravies as you would use cornstarch. The leaves can be battered and fried.

Lamb's quarter (Chenopodium album) - the young leaves can be added to salads.

Milk thistle (Silybum marianum) - the young leaves with the spines removed are eaten raw or cooked as a spinach-like vegetable. The flower buds can be eaten, they are like miniature artichokes.

Plantain (Plantago spp.) - the young leaves are edible if the fibrous midribs and veins are removed. The seeds are also edible.

Prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola) - the young leaves can be eaten raw in salads or cooked as a vegetable.

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) - tastes similar to spinach and the leaves and stems can be eaten raw in salads or cooked or pickled in vinegar. Cooked purslane has a mucilaginous texture similar to okra.

Sheep's sorrel (Rumex acetosella) - the young leaves can be added to salads, sauces, soups, and egg dishes.

Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) - has been used as a food for thousands of years. The seed pods have a peppery flavor and can be used as a seasoning.

Stinging nettle (Urtica diocia) - the cooked young leaves can be eaten like spinach, added to soups and egg and vegetable dishes. Do not consume raw leaves, they are covered with highly irritating hairs thus the name STINGING nettle.

Edible Weed Salad

3 cups mixed greens such as lettuce, spinach, kale, Swiss chard.
1 cup mixed weeds such as:
-dandelion leaves
-chicory leaves and flowers
-chickweed leaves and flowers
-lamb's quarters leaves
-purslane stems and leaves
-shepherd's purse leaves

Toss all the ingredients together in a large bowl along with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and a few to many crushed garlic cloves depending upon your personal preference. Make sure you use the young, tender leaves of any weeds you will be adding to your salads and other culinary creations. Older leaves tend to turn bitter, tough, and stringy.

Caffeine Free Coffee Substitutes

The roots of both chicory and dandelion can also be used as a caffeine free coffee substitute or coffee additive. Harvest the roots, wash well to remove dirt then cut them into small, thin slices. Place these slices on a cookie sheet on the lowest setting in your oven until they are dry or use a food dehydrator if you own one. If you are using the roots for medicinal purposes once the roots have been dried and have cooled down to room temperature they can be placed in dark glass containers and stored away from direct sunlight.

If you are using the roots as a coffee substitute the dried roots must be oven roasted at approximately 250 degrees for 30-40 minutes so that they obtain a coffee-like appearance and taste. The oven roasted root pieces can then be ground up in a blender or coffee grinder then made into coffee using your favorite method of brewing (i.e. drip coffee maker, French press, etc...) You may also make a coffee blend by mixing around 50% coffee beans with either 50% roasted chicory or roasted dandelion roots.

Medicinal Uses of Weeds

All of the weeds mentioned in this article serve double duty by also exhibiting many medicinal properties. Here are a few medicinal weeds you may want to consider using for their healing properties:

Dandelion is a bitter-sweet, cooling herb with diuretic and laxative effects. It also stimulates liver function and improves digestion.

Horseweed is a slightly aromatic bitter tonic that acts as a diuretic and checks bleeding.

Kudzu is a sweet, cooling, tonic herb that increases perspiration, relieves pain, relaxes spasms, lowers blood pressure, and soothes the digestive system.

Milk thistle is a bitter, diuretic, tonic herb that regenerates liver cells, stimulates bile flow and relaxes spasms.

Plantain (P. psyllium) contains up to 30% mucilage, which swells in the gut, acting as a bulk laxative which also soothes irritated membranes.

Purslane is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids that can help to reduce one's cholesterol levels.

Sheep's sorrel is best known as an ingredient of Essiac, a native American anti-cancer remedy.

Safety Precautions

When using any type of plant material moderation is key. Ingesting too much of even the most benign substance can cause you to become ill.

Never harvest weeds from the side of the road. These plants may be contaminated from vehicle exhaust fumes.

Never harvest weeds in the wild unless you are absolutely certain of their identification and you have the permission of the land owner and you know that the field hasn't been sprayed with any harmful chemicals.

The safest way to harvest weeds is to look in your own yard. I have purslane growing allover my yard but I had to purchase seeds to establish my patches of chicory and dandelion which I planted in my garden next to my other herbs and vegetables.

Always practice organic gardening techniques in your garden especially when it's food you intend to eat.

Be an Expert on Anything

[Source: Wired Magazine]

CHOOSE A SUBJECT THAT'S ACTUALLY SECRET. Dan Brown invented a secret subject for The Da Vinci Code, so now he is forever an expert on this secret subject that no one can challenge. Anybody who attacks the secret subject is, by definition, part of the cabal.

GET YOUR OWN ENTRY IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

USE THE WORD ZEITGEIST AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don’t really know their definitions: zeitgeist, bildungsroman, doppelganger – better yet, anything Latin. But avoid paradigm. It's so 1994. If you say the word paradigm, everybody knows you're a poser.

BE SURE TO USE LOTS OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS. Someone who says the words operations security may be educated, but the person who uses the military abbreviation Opsec is clearly an expert. If I use the term Gitmo, that means I've actually been there. If you say, "We're going to Defcon 1," it means you probably have the launch codes. Real experts don’t have time for extra syllables.

SPEAK FROM THE BALLS, NOT FROM THE DIAPHRAGM. In the expert game, you've got to have sack. That means speaking with confidence. In America, you’ve got to steer clear of nuance and ambivalence – and don't even contemplate doubt.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE THINGS UP. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They're qualified to.

DON'T LIMIT YOURSELF TO CURRENT KNOWLEDGE. If you worry too much about being up-to-date, you miss out on vast territories of obsolete knowledge just waiting to be reclaimed. Think of leech-craft and all the lonely experts in the use of the little creatures, which are now experiencing a renaissance in health care.

GET AN HONORARY PHD. They work wonders. I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

MAKE A HABIT OF NAME-DROPPING. Say things like "I was talking to John Hockenberry yesterday for my story in Wired. Have you seen my cover?" I plan to use this issue of Wired to assert that I now know everything about wires.

BE FAMOUS. IT HELPS.

- Stephen Colbert

The Pleasure of Doing Nothing Useful

By Roger Housde

You might think there could be nothing more simple than doing nothing for no reason; doing something merely for the pleasure of it, without any thought of future profit or gain, without adding any skill or knowledge to your store, without any usefulness at all. Yet even doing nothing has now become something to do. Relaxation, the quintessential doing nothing, is something you have to "practice," and seriously, in a class for which the time slot is logged in your diary. A party is an occasion to "work the room." A weekend at the shore is an opportunity to get to know those well-connected neighbors.

A friend of mine, a magazine editor, told me recently how difficult she found it to leave her job behind. We were sitting in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, and she was aware that she was constantly noticing the clientele, the decor, seeing if there was any angle that might work for a piece in her magazine. She longed to be able to sit down at a table without her work, to have a conversation with a friend that promised no more than the pleasure of their company. Yet her mind wouldn't let her agenda go.

We each in our own ways have an agenda. We are all lobbyists for our own cause, our own opinions, aspirations, status, or career. While there's nothing wrong with getting ahead, whatever that may mean, it can also be an enormous relief now and then to lay down our own cause and enjoy wherever we find ourselves on its own terms.

You might think that all you need do to have no agenda and do nothing in particular is to allow yourself to sit down one morning in a spontaneous sort of way in the local cafe without looking at your watch. And, perhaps, to ask for a china cup.

It's true that the cup matters. It not only affects the coffee, it confers stability on your person. It means you are here to stay, at least in the short term. It means you are likely to be around for as much as the next half hour; that you are willing to be part of the quiet bustle and spectacle of the cafe you are an observer and a participant at the same time, and you don't have to do anything for the privilege except to sit there. A cafe offers one of life's rare opportunities to happily do nothing in the company of others who are also doing nothing more useful than sipping coffee. American civic life could derive only benefit from switching to china, though I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Cafe life, without question, is one of the more enjoyable benefits of civilization. You can sit at your table for half an hour or more and watch the world go by, all for the price of a cup of coffee—or tea, if that is your preference. I know there's an irony in speaking of coffee and doing nothing in the same sentence; but the cafe isn’t really about the coffee or tea at all. It’s about the sitting there, hearing snatches of conversation, having your own thoughts, being aware of the other customers around you, watching the passerby, eavesdropping on the waiter's repartee.

Yet we are so good at being busy, we can even turn a cup of coffee into something to do. You may seem to be sitting there innocently sipping, but all the time you may be preoccupied with waiting: not just being there, but waiting for a certain amount of time to pass; waiting for your date, or for the train. Or you're busy sizing up the opposite sex. That may not seem far from doing nothing, but even so, it's not quite the same.

When you sit there and do nothing in particular at all--no waiting, no Palm Pilot, no cell phone, no agenda, nothing that will get you anywhere anytime soon--then a space can open up in your mind. Thoughts can float by without the habitual impulse to jump on their back and ride them for all they are worth. It may even happen that the taste of coffee gives way to the taste of yourself--the delicious relief of being-in-yourself.

As for waiting, there are some pleasures for which even the pleasure of the cafe can wait. I once spent more than the first hour of a morning in the bath of my hotel room in Paris, keeping the water hot with an occasional turn of the tap with my toe. Nothing seemed more pleasurable and fulfilling than that tubful of hot water--a tub that must have been made in the twenties, large enough for two, with claw feet and taps that stood almost six inches tall, easy for toes to play with, in a capacious bathroom of old white tiles and a large steamed up mirror, an art deco one.
Outside there was the Louvre to visit, the Opera House to gaze at, that delicious sense of forgiveness that invades the mind in any great city away from home. I am typically full of curiosity and enthusiasm for the new, but that day I felt no movement in me to get dressed and open my door. I could hear the city of cities outside my window, the drone of traffic, the tolling of a distant bell, the sporadic shouts and cries of human voices. I knew I could accuse myself of wasting time.

I knew there was the beautiful Place des Vosges to visit just around the corner, the Seine to stroll along, the wonderful district of St. Germain to meander through. But none of it seemed worth getting out of the bath for. Not that day. I must have daydreamed of this and that, the way one might also do in a comfortable armchair in front of a warm log fire; but I don't remember a single thought of any significance that passed over me during that hour or so. No, mostly I was vacant. Not in a way that was unconscious, of half-asleep, but in a way that transferred the locus of my unconsciousness from my mind to my body. I became a floating, wrinkly breathing white body, with arms languishing along the roll top of the tub, toes flat against the end under the old chrome taps. It is a marvel, the human body, how it can lie there happily undisturbed for as long as you care to let it, soaking in the pleasure of hot water and an empty mind, empty and alive.

An hour in a bath may not be your idea of a good time, but the point is not the bath but the rested mind that, in my case, it gave rise to. We all have our own ways. It's not what you don't do, it's the way you don't do it.

A $55.000 Yoga Class?

GWYNETH PALTROW is struggling to plan the perfect yoga lesson - as a fan has paid $55,000 (GBP30,000) for a stretching session with the actress. The lesson was snapped up by the star-struck health fanatic at a charity auction in aid of British charity The Prince's Trust's 30th anniversary. Paltrow is now desperately thinking of ways to create a masterclass which will be worth the staggering amount of money. She says, "Someone's spent a great deal of money on it so I'm going to have to really come up with an excellent plan. "Unfortunately I can't do it in the nude or anything to make it really exceptional but I will try and come up with a good plan.

Pursuing Happiness

[Source: The Economist]

It's the pursuit, rather than the end-product, that makes Americans so American

ONE of the most striking things about the document that Americans celebrate with such gusto on July 4th is that so much of it is dull-hardly worthy of the tons of fireworks and barbecue that are sacrificed in its honour. There are lists of complaints about the administration of the courts and the quartering of British troops. There is an angry passage about King George's habit of summoning legislators “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records”. But all this tedium is more than made up for by a single sentence-the one about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

The sentence was remarkable at the time—a perfect summary, in a few pithy words, of exactly what was new about the new republic. Previous countries had been based on common traditions and a collective identity. Previous statesmen had been exercised by things like the common good and public virtue (which usually meant making sure that people played their allotted roles in the divinely established order). The Founding Fathers were the first politicians to produce the explosive combination of individual rights and the pursuit of happiness. It remains equally remarkable today, still the best statement, 230 years after it was written, of what makes America American. The Book of Job gives warning that “man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” Americans, for all their overt religiosity, have dedicated their civilisation to proving Job wrong.

Everywhere you look in contemporary America you see a people engaged in that pursuit. You can see it in work habits. Americans not only work harder than most Europeans (they work an average of 1,731 hours a year compared with an average of 1,440 for Germans). They also endure lengthy commutes (who cares about a couple of hours a day in a car when you have a McMansion to come home to?). You can see it in geographical mobility. About 40m of them move house every year. They are remarkably willing to travel huge distances in pursuit of everything from bowling conventions to factory outlets. You can see it in religion: Americans relentlessly shop around for the church that most suits their spiritual needs. And you can see it in the country's general hopefulness: two-thirds of Americans are optimistic about the future.

Since Americans are energetic even in deconstructing their own founding principles, there is no shortage of people who have taken exception to the happiness pursuit. They range from conservatives such as Robert Bork, who think the phrase encapsulates the “emptiness at the heart of American ideology”, to liberals who think that it is a justification for an acquisitive society.

One criticism is that the pursuit is self-defeating. The more you pursue the illusion of happiness the more you sacrifice the real thing. The flip side of relentless mobility is turmoil and angst, broken marriages and unhappy children. Americans have less job security than ever before. They even report having fewer close friends than a couple of decades ago. And international studies of happiness suggest that people in certain poor countries, for instance Nigeria and Mexico, are apparently happier than people in America.

Another criticism is that Americans have confused happiness with material possessions (it is notable that Thomas Jefferson's call echoes Adam Smith's phrase about “life, liberty and the pursuit of property”). Do all those pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes really make you happy? Or are they just a compensation for empty lives à la “Sex in the City”?

If opinion polls on such matters mean anything—and that is dubious—they suggest that both these criticisms are flawed. A 2006 Pew Research Centre study, “Are we happy yet?” claims that 84% of Americans are either “very happy” (34%) or “pretty happy” (50%). The Harris Poll's 2004 “feel good index” found that 95% are pleased with their homes and 91% are pleased with their social lives. The Pew polls show that money does indeed go some way towards buying happiness: nearly half (49%) of Americans with annual incomes of more than $100,000 say they are very happy compared with just 24% of people with incomes of $30,000 or less. They also suggest that Americans' religiosity makes them happier still: 43% of Americans who attend religious services once a week or more report being very happy compared with 31% who attend once a month or less and 26% of people who attend seldom or never.

Weep, and you weep alone

The pursuit of happiness explains all sorts of peculiarities of American life: from the $700m that is spent on self-help books every year to the irritating dinner guests who will not stop looking at their BlackBerries. It also holds a clue to understanding American politics. Perhaps the biggest reason why the Republicans have proved so successful in recent years is that they have established a huge “happiness gap”. Some 45% of Republicans report being “very happy” compared with just 30% of Democrats. The Democrats may be right to give warning of global warming and other disasters. But are they right to give the impression that they relish all the misery? The people's party will never regain its momentum unless it learns to relate to the guy on the super-sized patio, happily grilling his hamburgers and displaying his American flag.

The pursuit of happiness may even help to explain the surge of anti-Americanism. Many people dislike America because of its failure to live up to its stated ideals. But others dislike it precisely because it is doing exactly what Jefferson intended. For some Europeans, the pursuit of happiness in the form of monster cars and mansions is objectionable on every possible ground, from aesthetic to ecological. You cannot pursue happiness with such conspicuous enthusiasm without making quite a lot of people around the world rather unhappy.