#ground elder

[kristo-flowers]

Ground elder

[balkanradfem]

Testing Ground Elder in a soup

So I saw a recipe for using wild carrot leaves in a soup, and I'm not confident in recognizing wild carrot at the moment, at least not until it flowers. But, I know ground elder, and that thing tastes like a carrot top and is related to carrot, so I'm going to try it with ground elder!

This is Ground Elder, it grows from early spring. We call it 'the seven leaf' because it has 7 leaves! If you rub the leaves together you can smell carrots. It's called ground elder due to the leaves superficially looking like elder leaves. I harvested some a few days ago and it's still doing well in my kitchen waiting to be used, it doesn't die off quickly.

This is how the instructions go:

Cut the leaves into the tiniest bits you can

Mix them with semolina and egg to make a dough

use it as dumplings in a soup!

That sounds good, except I don't have an egg, so I'll just mix them with flour, salt and water. Here is my process:

Now for the rest of the soup, I don't really have legit soup ingredients so I'm just using whatever I can find. And that's some green cabbage, bear's garlic, a half of vegetable bullion cube, dried carrots and mushrooms, a tiny bit of tomato sauce and some fake soy sauce. I also am gonna mix in pepper and chilli powder because my sinuses are acting up and this is going to clear them up.

I mixed all of this in a pot and added my dumplings. At this point I'm worried this soup wont be that great because I'm just using whatever, but! After it was done it somehow tasted great, and I don't even know which ingredient did it. Half of the ingredients were from the forest! I can confirm mixing ground elder into the dumpling made it taste great. Cooked ground elder tastes better than raw.

Now you could make the exact same soup without the ground elder and it would taste similar but, the point of using wild ingredients is to utilize all free resources available, and to get extra nutrients, because wild plants have more minerals and vitamins than whatever we grow in the garden. And it's extra fiber in the time of year when fiber is difficult to come by. So adding them to meals is a good idea!

[kawasemi-automatic]

[aphermion]

Aegopodium podagraria

[axololtls]

Aegopodium podagraria, a edible plant related to carrots.

[morethansalad]

Goutweed Soup with Coconut Milk and Tofu (Vegan)

[awkwardbotany]

In Praise of Vagabond Plants - A Book Review

In Praise of Vagabond Plants – A Book Review

A weed is a highly successful plant that shares a close relationship with humans. In many instances, weeds are seen as nuisance plants, interfering with the goals and intentions we have for a piece of land. In natural areas, they are blamed for, among other things, threatening the existence of the native flora, despite the fact that human activity and disturbance brought them there in the first…

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[painter-shishkin]

Goutweed-grass. Pargolovo, 1885

Ivan Shishkin