As you know, Yard Food Day is a traditional post in honour of the first day that I eat something that is growing in my back yard, and in 2010, it is April 18th.

I've noticed that my chive plant has been growing for a few days now, and so technically, Yard Food Day could've been an omelet with some chives a few days ago, but that didn't happen.

Weedgeekery is shifting. Circa 1995, when Toxics Watch ran its "Lion's Tooth Festival" to celebrate the much maligned dandelion, there were few resources describing the uses of this valuable plant.

 
But today, there seem to be weedgeeks in the mainstream. My lunch recipe today was published in the April 7th, 2010 edition of the Globe & Mail's Food & Wine section: Salad of dandelion greens, pancetta and boiled eggs, a dish served at Montreal's Toque restaurant.

A quick ellipse.

At the 2009 Annual General Assembly of the Canadian Environmental Network, one of the presenters was local permaculture expert, Ron Berezan, who presented on the idea of no-till gardening. To help build up poor backyard soils, the no-till gardener applies layers of newspapers, leaves, and fall garden detritus to the yard to rapidly build up organic matter. I understand the initial layer of newspaper is supposed to suppress weed growth.

Of course, weedgeeks don't suppress their weed growth, so I left the newspaper part out.
The consequence of this omission is that what appeared to be ordinary, young dandelion plants growing atop a layer of leaves actually had 2 or 3 inches of sweet, tender, light-starved mid-ribs growing beneath them. Once picked, these plants resembled a true vegetable, kind of like a thin bok choy.

Notice the length of white underleaf in these plants: 

Compared to these which were growing directly out of the soil: 

My version of the Toque hot dandelion, pancetta and egg salad turned out like this:  read more... »

Today’s weedgeek post is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t make this product, but if I ever adopt brewing as one of my hobbies, this is definitely something I’d attempt as two of its main ingredients are prized crops in the Vacant Lot of Eden.

While riding home from a downtown meeting late last summer, I noticed a burdock growing at the southern approach of the Highlevel Bridge  read more... »

My weed books refer to the white part of the dandelion that connects the root to the leaves as the “crown”, but the term is confusing. Crowns are at the top of things, where the blossom on a dandelion is. As I was picking dandelions this afternoon for both this post and for a side dish to tonight’s Cassoulet-style Chicken dinner, it occurred to me that this part of the dandelion is the dandelion ‘heart’, just like the heart of celery, or the artichoke heart.

So, from now on, I’m calling them “dandelion hearts”.

Pick, trim and clean as many dandelion hearts as you wish to serve. I halve or quarter the larger hearts so that they are all a uniform bite size.
 read more... »

Readers at both my blog suite-mck.livejournal.com and here at greenedmonton.ca asked about the taste of the dandelion root coffee that I described here.

As you can see below, after grinding and brewing, it certainly looks like coffee, and the 50-50% blend with real coffee is barely distinguishable for having been economically adulterated.  read more... »

I’ll start this weedgeek post by saying that I know hardly anyone can pick dandelions the way I do. For most people with uniform yards of Kentucky blue-grass, extracting the yellow flower with an intact tap-root is a futile task. I’ve seen those screwdriver-like weed pickers that are sold in hardware stores described as ‘weed-breeders’ because they always break the root and any dandelion root fragment will just grow another dandelion.

Because I have no grass, I pick my dandelions with a pitch-fork.

There are plenty of reasons to celebrate the dandelion. People eat the greens and crowns. Make wine and fritters from the blossoms. But for me, dandelion-root coffee is the real prize. Because organic, fair trade coffee is pricey, it’s easy to quantify the value every scoop of dandelion coffee that I brew.  read more... »

While weeds have been a part of my diet for over thirteen years now, and I've had many occasions to speak about eating them, it's been a long time since I've actually served them to anyone. In fact, apart from my wife, I can only recollect that reporter from the St. Albert Gazette, and my room-mates from just before I was married. And with my roomies, it was only dandelion root coffee.

Dandelion root coffee and chickweed omelets were part of a strategy to introduce weed-eating to people using the least foreign tasting species. Something like prickly lettuce isn't a friendly starting point. "Just that picture of prickly lettuce in your blog looked menacing," amandi_khera said. "I don't think I'd ever put something like that in my mouth."

Today though, I'd start with lamb's quarters. It's not just "least foreign tasting". It really tastes good.

This was my supper tonight:

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Prickly Lettuce, a weed found in Edmonton gardens.

First: nomenclature. Which words to use?

Wild plants suggests wilderness. Untamed. Possibly dangerous (ie. toxic). But weeds implies a valueless nuisance. An overgrown eyesore.

Alright. We'll go with 'weeds'.  read more... »