Canning Common Plantain!

Canned common plantain! I already know I like it used as a cooking green and I wanted to be able to preserve it. You can can greens using a pressure canner but some greens are not sturdy enough to withstand the process (like dock). I am happy to say that plantain works great!  You can also dry and freeze it.  However, I wanted something I could drain and throw into a pan with bacon and onion for a quick side dish.

Canned Common Plantain

Ingredients:

• common plantain leaves (just fyi, one gallon baggie of leaves makes two pints)
• salt

Directions:

Wash and slice plantain leaves against the grain of the leaf.  There are strings in the leaf which are bothersome unless they are cut and then you will not notice them at all. 

Parboil Leaves on simmer for ten minutes. Drain. It will not be soft but just wilted enough to easily place in jars.

Loosely place in jars (not pressed down).  Add 1/2 teaspoon salt to each pint jar. Add boiling water to cover greens and leaving 1 inch headspace.

Pressure can 70 minutes for pints, 90 minutes for quarts at 10 lbs. Don't forget to add a little vinegar to your pot's canning water to avoid the film on the outside of the jar.

 

 

June Foraging in Tennessee!

There are some great things growing right now!

Concord Park:

Teasel,  a medicinal plant that is said to help cure Lime disease.

Horsemint, the flowers and young leaves of this plant add a wonderful herbal/citrus flavor to tea.

Auricularia auricula (brown wood ear). They will be gelatinous and maintain their texture in soups!

Physalis sp., Ground Cherry, berries are yummy - especially dried as raisins! It makes a tasty syrup or jam, too. Otherwise known as cape gooseberry or Chinese lantern fruit (due to the little papery cases that the berries grow inside).  Do not eat the berries when they are green.  Cherries will ripen to yellow, orange or even red.  Some say ground cherries are particularly good for diabetics.

Pasture Rose, Rosa carolina. Rose petals and hips can be used to make jelly.

Growing Paw Paw fruit!

Elderberry Blooms, can be used for jelly, liqueur, or battered and fried.  However, if you want the berries, don't touch the blooms!

Lamb’s Quarters, the leaves make an excellent potherb that is considered by many people to be superior to spinach.

 

Harlinsdale Park:

Poke plants are still shooting up. 

Common Plantain, makes a nice cooking green or medicinal plant.

Perilla, in the mint family, makes a nice seasoning.

Mulberries are beginning to ripen!

Winstead Park:

This is going to be a banner year for grapes!  You can also use the grape leaves to make dolmas.

Staghorn Sumac beginning to ripen.  It makes a great drink which tastes like lemonade or you can make Za'atar seasoning with it!

Blackberries will be prolific this year!  Leaves can also be used to make a tea.

Have you found anything interesting so far this month?

Common Plantain in Peanut Sauce

Plantain was one of the first wild edibles that I learned.  There are two types that grow in this area, Common and English.  Common plantain is the type with the wide leaves while the English variety has narrow leaves.  Once you connect the picture to the name, you will see these everywhere.  English plantain tends to linger all winter, though the color turns a bit muddy green.  You can actually dig through snow and still find it, if you were desperate.  Common plantain disappears and does not return until spring. It is more tender.

This is a great plant to know for relief from skin irritations.  You can chew the leaves and place the wad of green pulp on a bug bite to take away the sting or itch.  However, making a salve out of it is much preferred.  I use the salve on everything and am always amazed about how well it works.  I prefer to use the English plantain for salve and the common plantain for eating. 

Both types have lines or veins that run the length of the leaves.  Within each vein is a string, which makes eating a whole leaf unpleasant.  However, if you cut against the grain of these veins so that you have strips of green leaf to cook, you will not even notice a string.  You want to choose the youngest leaf available as they are the most tender.

Common Plantain in Peanut Sauce

Ingredients:

1 gallon baggie of plantain leaves

salt for boiling water

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup water
4 tablespoons of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1/4 t cayenne pepper
1/2 t dried ginger

handful peanuts for garnish (optional)

Directions:

Bring a pot of water to boil.  Wash plantain.  Stack leaves to slice against the grain of the leaves into strips.  Repeat until all leaves are cut.  Boil in salted water for 10 minutes.

 

In a sauce pan, add remaining ingredients (except peanut garnish) and mix until smooth.  Heat until warm.

Drain plantain and mix in peanut sauce.  Place into serving dish and top with loose peanuts for garnish.

Mid-South June Foraging

This month is like the "Get ready, set..." because next month will be the "Go!"  Fruit and berries on the trees are growing and ripening!  Starting in July, blackberries and crab apples will be ready for picking and it will be a month of canning!  This goes all the way to August and September with different things ripening every week.

Here's what you can see right now:

Elderberry blooms!  The flowers can be used for jellies, syrups, wine and for making sodas (my son is doing this now!).  Scout these out now so you can pick the berries in August.

Sassafras leaves.  These have a citrus smell to them and can be eaten in salads or dehydrated for tea or as an herb called File which is used in gumbo.

Grapes are forming.  Now is the time to locate them for picking in late summer.  You can use the leaves now.  They are great to can for dolmas all year long! If you are local, you can find wild grapes everywhere!

Red clover.  It shows up a little later than white clover.  It's great in salads, dried for teas, or made into flour.  It has numerous health benefits.  I rarely find this in large quantities so when you find a large patch, remember where they are!

Black walnuts are forming.  They are still small and green, perfect for gathering to make a tincture.  Traditionally this tincture has been used to remove parasites.  You can make it yourself by soaking premature black walnuts in vodka or you can buy it on Amazon for an arm and a leg!

Common Plantain.  Can be cooked like greens or made into an excellent salve.  I made a salve using plantain last year and it seems to fix everything on us and our pets! Great stuff!

Smartweed.  See Green Deane's great article on this lovely plant!

Kousa Dogwood.  These are forming now and a great time to locate these trees.  The balls will turn into a fruit.  It will turn red with an orange/yellow interior.  The texture is similar to parsimmons with a tropical flavor.

This was may favorite find this month!  Autumn Olive Bushes loaded with future berries.  I have passed this church for ten years.  I finally stopped and walked the enormous grounds and discovered that it is surrounded with just a ton of Autumn Olives!  Many would call these interloping noxious weeds because they were brought here, escaped and thrived, but I think they are fantastic.  The berries are like sweet tarts and super nutritious with 17 times the lycopene of tomatoes!  I can't wait until these are ripe!  The leaves are green on the outside and silver on the inside.  This makes it easy to spot these bushes from a distance because they appear green grey, a different color than surrounding vegetation.  The berries will be red with silver flecks on them.

Hackberries.  Eventually these will turn red, but look around now for accessible branches.  This one was found locally at my son's scout camp.  Indians used to grind these up and use as a seasoning for meat or for making pemmican.  You can also make a type of almond milk with the berries.  Check out this website with instructions.

View of the Harpeth River after several days of rain and just before another storm.  One of the best things about foraging often is the view!

Sautéed Plantain with Bacon Grease and Onion

So good I could lick the pan.  Really.

This is a fantastic recipe for this time of the year!  Common plantain is beginning to grow in abundance and the leaves are young and least bitter.  It's the best time to pick them.  Plantain is one of my favorite plants. However, I generally like to dehydrate it because the leaves have strings that run through them. Once dehydrated, those strings crumble like the leaves for use in soups.

There is a way to make fresh plantain more user friendly.  Once you rinse the leaves, stack them with the grain of the leaves together. Slice against the grain to make strips of the leaves. Then the strings are no longer an issue.

Cut against the grain to eliminate the stringiness.

I am not sure if it is the bacon grease or the balsamic vinegar, but I like this recipe enough to want to eat the whole pan!  Just be sure when you cook your family bacon for breakfast, save the grease in a coffee cup, cover with wrap and put it in the fridge.  Once it is cold, you can scrape the clear top of the grease into your pan for cooking.

Plantain can last quite a while in your refrigerator!

Sautéed Plantain with Bacon Grease and Onion

Ingredients:

Gallon size bag of plantain leaves
1 onion, diced
Bacon grease from one cooked package of bacon
1 Tablespoon balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Rinse and slice plantain leaves.  Add to a pot of simmering water and cook until just soft.  Be careful not to overcook.  Meanwhile add bacon grease and diced onion to a skillet and fry until lightly browned.  Drain plantain and add to onion mixture.  Stir until mixed.  Add balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.

One of the best smells in the world is onion fried in bacon grease!

Spring Park Foraging!

I like to take walks in our local parks at different times of the year because you will find unique plants at each visit.  These photos are from Concord Park in Brentwood, Tennessee and the Franklin Recreation Center nature walkway in Franklin, Tennessee.

Violet, flowers and leaves are edible.  The leaves are great for salads and can be used as a spinach substitute in recipes.  They are also a tonic for the body’s lymph system and are rich in vitamin C.  The leaves are not stringy like plantain but are chewy.  They taste a bit spicy and nutty.  These plants are abundant right now!

Wood Nettle, Laportea canadensis, cousin to Stinging Nettle, the darling of foraging and a plant I have yet to locate in this area.  This can be used just like Stinging Nettle.  The stings on Wood Nettle are not as virulent as the Stinging Nettle but you should use gloves to pick.  It is a powerhouse of nutrition.  Once boiled the stings are gone.  This is great to flash blanch and freeze for future recipes!  It tastes green with a peppery zing, a favorite among foragers.

Star-of-Bethlehem, Ornithogalum umbellatum, not edible, however the bulb of the plant has been used in herbal medicine.  It contains chemicals that have an action similar to a prescription drug called digoxin used for congestive heart failure.

I am not an expert on mushrooms so I submitted this to a mushroom group to which I belong.  Their determination is that this is Pheasant's Back, aka Dryad's Saddle, Polyporus squamosus. It smells a bit like a cross between watermelon and cucumber! You can dehydrate them, crush them and used them to flavor different soups. You can treat them like any other mushroom...bread and fry.  It is one of the few mushrooms that can be eaten raw.  Always confirm mushrooms identification through multiple sources before eating!

Virginia Blue Bell, Mertensia virginica, flowers and leaves are edible.  Native Americans used this plant to treat respiratory illnesses.

Fleabane Daisy, Erigeron philadelphicus.  An herbal infusion of the roots has been used by Native Americans to treat coughs, colds and diarrhea.  Supposedly it is a bug repellant, thus the name Fleabane.

Close up of Garlic Mustard.

Garlic Mustard, aka Jack-by-the-Hedge, Alliaria petiolata, to some an invasive noxious weed but to others a favorite wild edible.  It has a two year growth cycle, the first as a small plant when it looks similar to Violets and Creeping Charlie, and in the second year, it can grow up to three feet high.  It is mild tasting with a garlic flavor that hits you about ten seconds after you chew it.  In April, look for the white flowers with four petals in the shape of a cross.  You find this most at the edge of woods with partial sun.

Common Plantain, Plantago major, a ubiquitous edible wild plant.  It can be cooked and eaten like spinach.  In the fall it will produce a seed head that can be ground for flour if you have the patience to collect the seeds!  Medicinally, it is a fantastic skin healer and wonderful in salves.  You can even chew it up and put it on a bug bite or sting for relief.  Also in the photo is dandelions, one of the first wild edibles that most new foragers try as it is easy to identify and tasty.  The flowers make great syrup that tastes just like honey.

Dogwood tree.  Some Dogwoods, like the Kousa Dogwood produce red berries in the fall which are edible and have been used to make wine.  The blooms are out now so scout out some Dogwoods and check back in the fall to see if there are berries!  This one probably will not have the fruit as the Kousa Dogwood's petals have a more pointed flower petal.  But it's worth a look!

While I diligently research and use what I post, please remember to do your own research and be 100% sure of what you are trying.  It is best to try just a bit of a new plant first to see if you have an unknown to you allergy or reaction!  Keep in mind, one of the reasons that plants are in the grocery store is because they are the most tame and acceptable to the majority of people.  Wild plants are less predictable but are often the most nutritious!