Weed Lunch

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Photo: Photo: Masiandra, Povarenok.ru

How much time, effort and money is spent by most gardeners to fill their basements, cellars, pantries with vitamins for the winter, although nature has prepared many easily accessible plants for humans that do not require human care, containing all the nutrients necessary for the body, and, literally sense, spread them at the feet of a person.

Dandelion salad

Young dandelion shoots can be served immediately, while older leaves require half an hour soaking in cold water or bathing in a boiling water shower.

Nettle and sorrel cabbage soup

Cabbage soup or spring green soup with nettles and sorrel will surprise few people today. And yet, it's one thing to hear or read about it, it's another to take it and cook it yourself. Two big differences.

Dream garnish

Every weekend I weed my flower bed by uprooting the same grass. It has a juicy, almost transparent stem and carved leaves. The roots are located almost at the surface of the ground and can be easily removed by pulling on one tip. Looking at the root, I thought that any property contains both a plus and a minus. On the one hand, a branched root allows the plant to conquer territory faster and easier, on the other hand, such a root is easy to destroy. The process of pulling it out of the ground is similar to the formation of a ball of threads, which are sold in the form of skeins.

But I got a little distracted. The leaves and stem of my weed are a bit like carrot tops and smell good. I asked a neighbor who had lived in the village since childhood what the name of this herb was. "Sleep," she replied. And she added that when they kept the pigs, they fed them with blemish.

Back in the city, I looked for literature on dreaming and was pleasantly surprised. It is no coincidence that the pigs ate whitewash with pleasure. It contains a decent list of chemical elements and protein compounds necessary for the body. The nutritional value of dreaming is akin to that of nettle, while it does not burn the skin during collection and processing. It owes its pleasant smell to its affinity with carrots, which is why their leaves are similar.

You can make fresh salads from young dream, or prepare a side dish for main courses, like a cabbage side dish. It turns out that the Slavs fermented the whitewash, as we ferment today cabbage, and replenished the body with the necessary chemical elements in the winter.

If you add cottage cheese, pine nuts to the dream (there is all this in the village), you can stuff tomatoes, cucumbers, small zucchini with them and, sprinkle with grated cheese, send them to the oven for baking. Having tried it once, you will please your loved ones with an appetizing dish more than once.

Shepherd's bag instead of pepper

The seeds of a plant called "shepherd's purse" can replace peppers and mustard, forgotten in the city. I remember very well how at school we made a compulsory herbarium out of a dried shepherd's purse. But the teacher did not tell us that her seeds would be good as pepper or mustard.

Burdock cakes

We dig up the one-year-old roots of burdock, rinse, dry in the shade. When they are dry, grind them in a mortar or coffee grinder until they form a powder. Add two the same shares of rye or wheat flour, water, salt and bake cakes.

Herbal drinks

Why tea or coffee in the village when you can drink magical herbal health drinks all day.

The composition of the brewed herbs is as wide as the eye can cover the space in front of it:

Ivan tea, oregano, St. John's wort, thyme (thyme), lungwort, lime blossom, currant leaves, roots and stems of chicory, lemon balm, young leaves of almost any tree growing near your gazebo, where you have tea, nettles …