Print this entry

Zucchini Flower Recipes
The Zucchini has both male and female flowers with the male having a thinner stem ideal for making it suitable for use in a hot pasta. Try with any of the following: butter, parmesan cheese, anchovies, garlic, capers, semi-dried tomatoes, nuts or olives. You’ll use at least two dozen or so. You could also just use any of these ingredients and add the flowers for 3-4 minutes before serving.  The female flowers are much stronger and have the little baby zucchini attached which makes it ideal for deep frying. Allow 3 or 4 flowers per person. For deep-frying, stuff with equal quantities of grated parmesan, gruyere and breadcrumbs; handful of the flat style Italian parsley with seasoning of your choice and fill the female flowers carefully. Dip in batter and pinch the tips of the flower together. You can also roast or braise with a sauce. Both are suitable to stuff. Use the same day you pick them. Don’t use if the stamen or stigma is dark and be sure the flower is firm at the tip.

Print this entry

• Yellow Mangosteen Butter by Jenny Scodellaro
  Mash 3 yellow mangosteens (about 1 cup of pulp)
  In a heat proof bowl beat 4 eggs with ¾ caster sugar
  Add the juice of one large lemon juice and 125 gms softened butter.
  Add the mangosteen pulp and place in a double boiler or try a heat proof bowl on a metal egg ring in a saucepan of water. Bring the water to a gentle rolling boil, stir the mixture regularly for 30 minutes until it thickens. Cool and pour into sterilised jars.
   
• Yellow Mangosteen Sauce   by Christine McMaster
  The tree is fruiting beautifully this year so I made a savoury sauce that is totally yummy. Remove the skin by pouring boiling water over and allow to stand for a minute or so. The skin then peels off easily. To cut the flesh from the stone, cross-hatch the flesh all around the fruit and cut it away from the stone or squeeze the fruit to flip the stone out.
  5 cups mangosteen pulp, ½ cup maple syrup, 3 cups water, 30 g pectin (Jamsetta) or do it the other way with lemon pips etc.
  Boil together to reduce the moisture slightly and bottle. This makes about six medium-sized jars of sauce.

Print this entry

Mix together: 2 cups SR flour, 125gm dark chocolate chips, handful of sultanas, ½-1 tsp cinnamon, 2 cups White Sapote pulp (pulp can be frozen for inclusion in future cakes) Bake 180º for 45 minutes or until cake bounces back in the middle

Print this entry

Sheryl:  This talk was taped by member Ted Newton who attended Nimbin’s Open House and Garden back in 2013. Led by wild food expert Peter Hardwick, this tour took you around the back streets of Nimbin. Many thanks to Annette McFarlane for typing it up. Edited by Peter and myself.

Peter   Many modern illnesses are often a problem because of modern diet and if we get wild food phytochemicals back into our diet we may be able to treat chronic illness like high blood pressure, inflammation and cholesterol.

The enemy of the urban food forager is the whipper snipper! An unmown path is a bountiful thing with the biggest range of wild foods! One of my favourite tricks when I was young was picking hibiscus and nasturtium flowers when wandering the streets and eating them to shock my friends.

Vary your diet
It’s interesting to look at the diet of some of the preserved bodies of people who have been dug up (eg the Bog man of Denmark – 5000 years old). His last meal was a mixture of 46 different food ingredients. One of the strategies that people can take from this is to eat a range of different things rather than big helpings of one thing. Feasts did occur seasonally (if they came across a bountiful mulberry tree for example), but the range of wild greens that they ate, were often very mixed and not just a single ingredient.

Some were eaten raw and also cooked as stews and wild seeds were mixed into breads. The boiling process with cooking greens often helps to lower toxin levels to a tolerable/safe level.  As a back-up, we also we have the liver to detoxify plant toxins.

Some vegetables can be eaten raw like milk thistle. With boiling, toxins go into the water and you discard the water. Steaming does not reduce the toxin in the same way as boiling, so if instructions say boil, make sure you boil.

Boiling reduces alkaloid levels (especially in black nightshades). Black nightshade in Europe is used to make a cooked salad, but you need to know what you are doing. No one has really investigated them here. I do not recommend eating any black nightshade plants unless you have specific cultural knowledge (like people from Cypress or Greece) on preparation and consumption of this wild green. This is critical with toxic greens such as these.

Black Nightshade
The shoots of black nightshade can be eaten if boiled to remove alkaloids, but please note that steaming would not achieve the same effect. If references suggest to boil a particular wild food, be sure to boil it and do not substitute steaming.

Carrot weed or Wild Celery
Carrot weed has a really good flavour, but like all weeds it can be bitter following long periods of dry weather.  Harsh growing conditions can make the flavour a little bit stronger.  It is really rich in flavour and nutrients. This introduced weed is rich in good phyto-chemicals and has anti-cancer properties. You can eat the roots, flowers and seed heads of carrot weed. Chop it up in scrambled eggs or add it to salads as an alternative to parsley.

Chickweed
Chickweed is tenacious and I love it. I use it in salad and also cook with it. Environment will affect how it grows. There are three types of chickweed, Tropical chickweed (glaucous green) is poisonous, but medicinal. Mouse-eared and common chickweed are edible.  Scarlet pimpernel looks like chickweed but is poisonous.

Clover
Nice to add to a salad, (flowers and leaves), with sour thistle and celery and nasturtiums and chickweed. But look out and avoid any black mould on leaves when you are harvest.

Dandelion
Dandelion has anticancer properties. There is sound scientific research to support this. It is a fantastic medicinal herb. It is a bit bitter, but you can eat them raw. You can also cook it. Dandelion has a single flower stem and the cat’s ear has multiple flower heads. Cat’s ear leaf is also more coarse and hairy. That is how you can tell the difference between them.

Dock
Yellow curled dock is a great plant. The seed heads are like little hearts. Swamp dock is lower growing. All docks are edible, but all contain soluble oxalates, so boil them up and the oxalates will go into the water. They have found the seed of docks in prehistoric man. Was it just contaminated in their spelt or other grains?  Some people seem to think that it was deliberately included. The seeds are very high in tannins – including quercitin that you buy from the chemist as a supplement. It is probably in the leaves as well.

Docks have three uses – roots used as medicine, leaves as a spinach (boiled for about 5 minutes) and the seed/seed heads you can mix with your bread or in a pancake. It gives astringency to the bread. It reduces your blood sugar spikes. If you are oxalate sensitive do not eat docks. The other way of counter this is to eat oxalate containing foods in combination with dairy (for example weed spinach rolls with cheese).

Throw dock seeds into a coffee grinder and it grinds it into a fine brown flour. It is more husk than seed, but it is more of what we need and a really good food source.

Yellow dock root can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute.

Swamp dock is the native dock. It is easy to see the difference between the leaves. The seed heads on this attach to your clothing when they are mature. Yellow dock seeds do not stick to your clothing. This plant contains an anticancer compound in both the leaves and the roots called musizin. The roots of swamp dock are yellow. It seems to have a lower oxalic acid compound, but do not eat a lot of it raw (it can give you nausea). Boil or blanch the leaves.  Use the roots as a medicinal.

Farmer’s Friend
Some people say this is edible but research from early last year indicates it may contain a nasty alkaloid toxin – we are waiting for follow-up research to clarify this. Farmer’s friend does not have a huge history as a food plant. It is used in South America as a medicinal. Comfrey has a similar toxin and should not be eaten. Some things are toxic no matter how little you eat ( comfrey and bracken shoots). As we learn more about phyto-chemistry in wild foods, we discover more about these plants and our ideas of on what can be eaten will change.

Madiera Vine
It is a local weed and you can eat it. It is related to Ceylon spinach. It is a garden escapee. Be careful when harvesting, never spread it around or it may escape into your garden or the surrounding environment. That is a risk with some of these weeds.

It is said to have been used as a laxative. Cook it up/boil to prepare. As a general practice I don’t like to eat huge quantities of a single wild green species. My strategy is to eat a mixture, so that you do not get too much of any one thing. Eat a range of things not big helpings of one ingredient.

I don’t eat Madiera vine raw. I boil it lightly, drain away the liquid and eat it as spinach. There is recent research from Indonesia indicating that Madiera vine is safe.

Paddy’s lucerne or Sida
This plant has medicinal properties and mallow-like qualities (it comes from the mallow family). It stops dysentery. It is strong and bitter in the dry weather and has a yellow flower. You can eat the leaves raw in salads. Most of the sida species are safe to eat.

Shamrock (Oxalis)  It is sour. You may have eaten them as kids. They contain oxalis acid. Just do not eat too much because of the soluble oxalate levels.

Sow thistle
One of my favourites.  You see this around a lot and it is common in gardens. It is a great plant and really nice in salads. The taste is similar to chicory or lettuce. When it is younger the leaves are quite big and lush. It has a yellow flower. It is a really good candidate for domestication (perhaps better than lettuce). It can be a bit bitter, but it is nice mixed in with other salad greens. Be careful with the daisy family, it’s notorious for having sneaky toxins. Do not eat thick head weed. Bracken fern was once thought to be edible. Then they found out that consumption of bracken fern fiddle was carcinogenic, even though this was a traditional part of the Japanese diet. That is why you need to be cautious. Some of the references on what is safe to eat from 20 years ago and now out of date.

Wild mustard/wild brassica
You can eat the yellow flowers on wild brassicas. Wild radish is strongly flavoured. They grow wild in some areas and become naturalised on roadsides. They are full of glucosinolates. Wild brassicas have these compounds in much higher amounts than cultivated greens. It is best to boil brassicas really well.

Nasturtium
Nasturtium has a multitude of uses and is a great garden escapee. Throw it in salads. Seeds can be pickled as capers. They are yummy. I like pickling them in bush lemon juice and salt and some spices (like Dorrigo pepper)

Shepards Purse – This is in the brassica family. It is a small, subtle herb and comes up a lot in cooking in Celtic/European history along with yarrow. It is used for food and medicine. You can eat the leaves and the seeds. I have not tried the seeds.

Lots of the weed seeds were distributed via ballast bags filled and pack into boats. The soil was tipped out at the docks and that is how the weeds were spread.

Plaintain
There is a broad leaf plantain and a narrow leaf one. They are both edible anti-inflammatories.  They were a staple of Celtic people. They have a mushroom flavour and a slight bitterness. I chop it up mix it with the leaves of clover and dock, boil them put them into a pie or a stew. The younger leaves are more tender. Just use a small amount. They are said to lower cholesterol. Psyllium husks comes from a type of plantain. Comment from participant – ‘The narrow leaf plantain is traditionally used as a poultice’.

Weeds to avoid
Morning glory is toxic (even though wallabies do eat it). Be cautious about bindii – I do not know precisely the toxicologically, but it is related to things like hemlock, so be cautious.  Watch out for fungus on grasses. Wheat grass is edible, but not all grasses are edible. Be careful with jute and do not eat kale every day, especially in drinks. The availability of phytochemicals is much higher in a green smoothie. Try sow thistle in a green smoothie but do not use yellow dock. It is too high in phytochemicals. The potency is so high.

Print this entry

• A quick Vegetarian Curry    From Judy Walker
  Chop 2 medium potatoes and 1 medium sweet potato then steam or microwave until partially cooked
  Heat about 1tbsp oil in a large pan or wok, add 1 chopped onion and 1 chopped red capsicum and cook over medium heat for a few minutes until soft. Add 2 cloves of chopped garlic, 1 tbsp curry paste and 1 tbsp masala and stirfry for a minute. Add vegetables, 1 small can coconut cream and 1 small can chopped tomatoes, bring to boil and simmer until vegetables are tender – about 5 minutes.
  Optional extras – chopped ginger root, green vegetables eg sliced beans, broccoli etc, chopped coriander parsley,garlic chives for garnish, a can of drained chickpeas.
  Add a handful of lightly roasted cashews(microwave or pan) just before serving.
  Notes:  
  Masala is a mixture of spices without chilli, garlic, ginger. It is very cheap in a big jar from Indian stores. I buy mine at a store in Chelmer. You can just use masala and chillis if you wish but I add some curry paste for extra flavour. The paste I am using at present is Patak – coconut and coriander. Roghan Josh is my favorite with meat curries.
  Hotness usually depends on added chillis but I prefer extra root ginger for heat.
  For flavour Ardoma is the best local brand of Aussie tomatoes otherwise you can use the imported Italian  ones. The flavours of a curry are enhanced if made a day before eating.
   
• Pumpkin Damper
  Mix together: 1 can pumpkin soup, 2 cups SR flour, 2 eggs
  Bake at 160º until a skewer comes out clean. Enjoy the warm buttered damper with hot soup.
   
• Malabar Spinach – Basella rubra  is one of the best tasting greens that I know of.  As the name implies, it can be used like spinach.  I prefer it cut in 1 cm wide strips and stir-fry very quickly with only black pepper and salt and just enough olive oil to keep it from sticking to the wok. Ref: Thurston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basella_alba 28/01/20011 Ref: Russell Reinhardt]
   
• Taro/Sweet Potato Soup   4 parts taro to one part sweet potato, cooked in 1/2 can of coconut cream with a bit of honey added. Was mashed to a very fine soup like consistency. Really delicious!    Ref:  Oscar, Hawaii

Print this entry

Lime or Passionfruit Syrup    by Jenny Scodellaro
Boil 6 cups sugar with 4 cups water
Add 2 cups lime juice
Pour into hot sterilised bottles and seal at once. This syrup should keep for 6-8 months.
(In our experience, it keeps a good deal longer.)
Stir into iced tea, mineral water and into thick yoghurt together with some fruit of the season for a common breakfast in our home.
Passionfruit Syrup: recipe is the same, but substituting the passionfruit of course for the lime; but, in addition, do add 1/8 cup of lemon or lime juice to the 2 cups of Passionfruit juice.

Print this entry

Sugar-free Desserts contributed by Diane Moscheller from various authors over many years

Froyo
Combine 4 cups Greek yogurt, 1 cup frozen fruit of choice, 1 tab of honey. Push through a sieve to avoid icy chunks. Mix in food processor til well blended. Freeze a few hours. Ready to scoop!

Strawberry Icecream
500g strawberries, 2 medium bananas, 1 avocado, ¼ cup honey, ½ cup orange juice or 2 tabs tahina (for a creamier texture) Blend high speed. Pour into a container and freeze.

Vanilla Ice cream
4 small bananas, peeled, chopped and frozen, ½ cup soy or thick nut milk, 1 tspn vanilla, 1 tab tahina, ½-1 tab honey. Blend and freeze.

Banana and Caramel Ice cream
8 very ripe bananas (1.3g) Peel, thin slice. Freeze at least 6 hours. Remove from freezer, rest 5 mins. Place in food processor til smooth. At this point add 12 Medjool dates – pits removed.

Cashew Cream
1 cup cashews (best activated overnight in water in frig), ½ cup of water or orange juice, 1-2 tspns honey
Blend nuts and liquid as finely as possible. Add a little honey and nutmeg. Use as a topping for fruit.

Strawberry Jelly
Soak 2 tabs agar flakes (from sea vegetables no sulphide) overnight in 1 cup of water or a minimum of 2 hours. Heat agar til boiling and simmer til flakes dissolve.
Blend 500gms strawberries, 1 cup fresh apple juice, ¼-½ cup honey.
Combine strawberry mixture with agar and blend briefly. Pour into a mould and refrigerate til set.

Tofu Lemon Cream
400g tofu, ½ cup lemon juice, grated rind of two lemons, maple syrup to taste. Blend well & refrigerate.
Note: You can omit the honey/ maple syrup in all these recipes.
For a sugar replacement flavour cinnamon is ideal.
As these are all fresh they only have a limited shelf life so make and enjoy within days.

Print this entry

We have found an excellent use for our Araca Boi (Eugenia stipitata) a really great chilli sauce can be made from this most productive of bushes. 6 ripe fruit (125 mm) were peeled, seeds separated, 200 grams of Cayenne chilli, 1½ cups of sugar and a dessert spoon of salt were blended and microwaved until just bubbling then poured into a one-litre juice bottle with a small amount left over. It has poor keeping qualities and the bottle is nearly empty after only a week when taken to work. It’s hot but would have to be one of the best tasting chilli sauces ever.   Ref:  George & Judy Allen

Pitaya Coulis:  50g castor sugar; 50 mls water; 1 Red Pitaya; 1 tsp Lime Juice. Place all ingredients into saucepan. Bring to the boil and reduce to simmer, allow for the fruit to break down. Remove from heat and let cool.

Print this entry

Must We Eliminate Sodium from our Diets?
I very much fear that the current eat-no-salt recommendations will induce lots of guilt but have very little effect on heart disease and stroke. (Did eat-no-fat succeed in preventing obesity?) Salt-fear, resulting in maternal iodine deficiency, is already putting newborn New Zealand babies at risk of permanent brain damage. Nutrition is a complex problem not aided by simple-minded formulas and knee-jerk mental attitudes.
There is enormous evidence that by eating more potassium than sodium, most if not all of the damage from salt (sodium) can be prevented. (Excess sodium not affects not only blood pressure but also bone loss.) The evidence includes both short-term studies where potassium supplements were given for a month or so, and long-term studies where lifetime diets of hundreds of thousands of people were matched with their deaths from heart disease, stroke, and other causes. Consistently, high potassium intake was found to reduce or eliminate sodium damage.
This evidence has been available for years, published in reputable peer-reviewed journals and summarised by such agencies as the US Center for Disease Control and the American Heart Association. Yet I have never seen any publicity that emphasizes the logic of eating high-potassium foods such as potatoes, silver beet, oranges, bananas, and sweet corn. The publicity machine has locked itself into a rigid anti-salt mode. After all, why give consumers the good news about potassium, when it’s much more rewarding to make us guilt-ridden for not overriding our inbuilt biological urge to eat salty foods.
As a simple target, we should aim for twice as much potassium as sodium. For instance, 100 g of McDonald’s much-maligned chips contains 576 mg potassium and 233 mg sodium, a K:Na ratio of 2.5. For athletic young men who will burn off any excess fat from these chips, they are a healthy food! (People with kidney disease have to avoid potassium. That is not the case for most of us.) If you try to buy groceries with high levels of potassium, you will be dismayed at how many food manufacturers do not list the levels of this important nutrient. So much for any claims that they are genuinely concerned with our health!
Sheryl: Jay Mann is a professional plant biochemist. Since his retirement from Crop and Food CRI in 1993, he has been a consultant, preparing reviews on topics as diverse as ways to lower blood cholesterol, feedstuff composition, chicken flavour, and industrial use of enzymes. Food for people has been a lifelong interest. I met Jay many years ago when he was a speaker at a Skeptics Conference I was attending. He has written a book called “How to Poison your Spouse the Natural Way – A Kiwi Guide to Safer Food” Website: http://www.saferfoods.co.nz/ We called in to see him on our recent visit to NZ. 
Book Review from the web: One of the great myths of alternative medicine and the health food industry is that natural things are better than artificial or synthetic things because natural is natural and Mother Nature wouldn’t want to hurt us. Wouldn’t she just? Plants and animals have had many millions of years to evolve ways of protecting themselves against predators and competitors for resources. Humans have had about 100,000 years of hunting and gathering to evolve natural resistance and about 10,000 years of agriculture to breed out the nastiness, and these times are just not long enough to make much difference. We are surrounded by plants and animals which can do us great harm if we are not careful about what we eat, and also by a myriad of fungi which delight in making safe foods unsafe. The book is divided into three sections – “Dangers we should worry about but don’t”, “Things we worry about but need not”, and “Things we ought to know”. The first section is about the dangers out there which are often ignored because “natural is safe” or simply because people don’t know any better. Some of the warnings are well recognised, such as the dangers of rhubarb leaves and anything to do with oleander plants. Others, such as the dangers of moulds, are often ignored because they are secondary to the main event. An example would be a herbal medicine which is harmless if the herbs are kept dry but which can become deadly if it becomes mouldy through bad handling or storage. If you want to be really scared, think about saxitoxin and tetrodotoxin in seafood which can paralyse someone to the point where bystanders think that they are dead but which leave the victim fully conscious and aware of what is happening. This is the stuff of horror movies. The second section deals with irrational fears about chemicals. Much of the hysteria about genetically-modified foods, additives, preservatives and other ways man interferes with nature is based on ignorance or fear of the unknown. This is not to say that we should not be careful, but if you are eating in an Asian restaurant you probably should be more worried about zearalenone in the corn and chicken soup or aflatoxin in the sate than about the MSG in the sweet and sour sauce. The third section of the book gives a good explanation of how to interpret research and statistics, as well as some good advice about exercise. Some of this book will make you think very carefully about what you put into your mouth and some of it will reassure you, but I recommend it to anyone who wants to find out the reality of food dangers and safety.