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| Beautiful borage: Weed or wonderful? |
Last week a small Italian lady
challenged the way I think about plants. Again.
The first time my brain was
botanically challenged was moving to Australia and seeing pristine environments
for the first time. Growing up in Europe, every patch of land has been so
exposed to such a wide range of human activity for so long that even most
remote areas have been altered in some way.
By contrast, the combination of
Australia's vast size, the fact it is an island continent, and the Aboriginal
culture of living with the land rather than trying to overpower it, has meant
it has only subject to minimal mining, agriculture or introduced species over
thousands of years.
As a result, I've come to
classify all plants in Australia as either 'native' or 'exotic' (i.e. introduced
since European settlement) and, while not all exotics are necessarily bad, I
have no love for those introduced plants that tend to weediness and have spread
rampantly across the country, displacing the original flora. And causing me to
spend many hours weeding.
But last week Lina Siciliano from Rose
Creek Winery challenged all that.
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| Mark Dymiotis harvesting mallow |
At a Smart Gardening workshop on Wild Greens, led
by Mark Dymiotis and held at the Rose Creek Estate in Keilor East, many of the
plants that I curse for spreading too rampantly through my garden and the river
valley beyond were held up as prized crops to harvest and value. Which I can
pretty much cope with - I’ve eaten nettles and purslane and samphire before.
No, the most challenging moment
came when Lina kindly picked me a handful of wild broccolini seeds – so I
could actually encourage this weed in my garden. As she does. There’s a healthy
crop of broccolini, thistles, mallow, chicory and even nettles filling the gaps
between her neat rows of mustard, fennel, beans and artichokes, and it isn’t
there by accident or because she runs the farm organically and won’t spray
weeds; to her they’re not weeds, but part of the crop.
SO REALLY? You want me to
actually encourage these plants??
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| Lina's patch of broccolini |
That was a bit too much. I kept
the seeds for about a week – the cats played with them for a while and my
laid-back family shuffled them from one end of the kitchen bench to the other,
without questioning why mum had yet another weird-looking bit of plant material
dagging about the house.
But then I couldn’t bring myself
to actually spread weeds and I threw them out.
However, I have been down the
river gathering some of the ‘weeds’ that Mark and Lina introduced us to
– many of which I would never have thought of as food. Some, like mallow,
were a bit too moth-eaten to try; the nettles were just too painful to pick
after a few attempts (Mark reckons he doesn’t use gloves but my fingers tingled
from the stings for about 24 hours afterwards), and others I trimmed off the
bits I’d been instructed to use – usually the growing tips or, in the case of
wild broccolini, the flower buds – and pulled out the rest of the plant.
I’m not that much of a convert.
Later, I cooked them up using one
of the recipes Mark had shown us and it did get eaten, eventually, but the
family didn’t embrace it with the gusto I’d hoped for. Still, I’ll try again
and sneak some bits in here and there and see how I go.
Mark and Lina cooked us three
main dishes to try: a bean casserole, a pastry-lined pie (with rice included to
soak up the juices from the greens) and stir-fried greens with a dressing. Lina
also sliced up some of her wood-fire oven baked bread and dressed it with
chopped parsley, oregano and her best home-made olive oil, and that was the
yummiest of the lot! The oil is expensive but nothing like any other I’ve ever
tried.
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| One of the many edible thistles |
While Mark is of Greek descent and Lina's family is from Italy, their cooking methods were pretty much the same – except Mark adds lemon to everything!
The rule Mark follows when
cooking with greens is to make the bulk of the meal ‘filler’ greens –
silverbeet, nettles, thistles, broccolini, cat’s ear, chicory, dandelion,
mallow (on their own or a combination of a few) – and add in a smaller amount
of herbs and other greens for taste. These might include mint (good with
nettles), fennel fronds (either Florence fennel or the wild plant), parsley,
mustard, rape, or the tender shoots of radish or zucchini.
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| Mustard - great colour; fierce taste! |
He showed us a few basic cooking
rules but, in most cases, you use them in the same way as you would spinach.
The notes for the talk, with
photos, can be found at the Moonee Valley Council website, here.
If you decide to give this recipe
a try, good luck, but please don’t pick and eat any plants unless you’re
familiar with them and are 100% sure of what you’re gathering.
If you’re interested in learning
more, I’m happy to go out with Melburnian readers, and we run occasional weed
walks during open days at Werribee Park Heritage Orchard (see www.werribeeparkheritageorchard.org.au/,
and Mark also runs courses via the CAE. For details check with the CAE or visit
Mark’s website at: www.markdymiotis.com/
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| Bean casserole |
INGREDIENTS
1 cup of black-eyed beans,
(prepared as per below) or 1 tin of pre-cooked beans
Virgin olive oil, for cooking
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 x 400g tin of tomatoes
2-3 handfuls of wild
greens, chopped in roughly 2cm lengths
METHOD
If preparing beans
from raw, soak them overnight in salted water. Bring to boil in fresh water the
next day. When beans just start to split their skins, drain them and start
again with more fresh water. When beans are soft, drain and rinse.
Cover the base of a
large, heavy-based fry pan with virgin olive oil and bring to heat. When oil is
fragrant, add onions and reduce temperature. When onion is soft add the garlic
and cook for a further two minutes.
Add diced tomatoes and
cook for a few minutes, then add pre-cooked beans to heat through.
When combined, add the
greens (which should be damp from being washed; if not, add a dash of water).
Stir through then
cover and allow to cook for 2-5 minutes until soft, stirring occasionally.
Serve warm or cold, on
its own or as a side dish.
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| Marigold flowers are edible. |
Have you got a botanical name for wild broccolini? I'm not sure I've seen it in Sydney. And eating nettles?! I've heard of nettle soup but the thought of trying to harvest some is terrifying! I have had some Gold Leaf gauntlets that had fine enough leather to withstand the stings but what happens to those stinging bits when you cook and eat it?
ReplyDeleteHi Catherine! Mark Dymiotis uses the botanical name Brassica oleracea italica x alboglabra, which is pretty specific (I think you might need a var. in before the italica, checking my Weeds of the South East) but I've seen Lina harvest the different varieties of Brassica rapa as well and there seem to be heaps of hybrids around here too - all edible, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteAs for stinging nettles, you only pick the softer tips, which have smaller stinging hairs on, so regular garden gloves should be ok (I was stupid enough to be doing it with bare hands) and the hairs soften and basically disappear once you cook the leaves. A hint of wild femmes was the flavor I liked the most. Let me know how you go!