Dandelion and violet flower honeys and vinegars

Dandelion and violet flower honeys (Photo by bodhilens)

Dandelion and violet flower vinegars (Photo by bodhilens)

Paying attention to wild plants gives me a sense of abundance, and learning about them makes me appreciate their uniqueness and beauty. Many of them are actually nutritious and/or medicinal. I do not see them as unwanted and invasive "weeds" anymore, but instead I am always amazed by their vitality. I am even grateful for their generosity when I keep harvesting them to make herbal infusions, vinegars, tinctures, and honeys, and they keep coming back. I have just made small jars of dandelion and violet flower honeys and vinegars, and look forward to using them in teas, salads, and sweets.

Directions:

1. Select a glass jar that is a right size for the amount of your harvest.

(Ideally, fill a jar with flowers and honey to the top. I filled mine over a few days because I could only harvest a soup-bowl-full of flowers a day from my yard. Also, use a plastic lid or a parchment paper liner under a metal lid for vinegars.)

2. Pick flowers and rinse them with water to clean any dirt and small insects off.

(I usually just pour tap water in the bowl of flowers, stir for a minute, and scoop the flowers out in a strainer to drain.)

3. Air-dry flowers on a clean cloth.

(If flowers are dirt-free and/or you want to keep pollen, skip #2 and let small insects escape at #3.)

4. Sterilize the jar.

(I usually place a jar and a lid in a bowl and pour boiling water over them, carefully take them out on a clean cloth, and air-dry them.)

5. Put flowers in the sterilized jar and pour honey (preferably organic raw honey) or apple cider vinegar in. Use a clean chopstick to stir and make sure all flowers are mixed well with honey or vinegar.

6. Keep herbal honeys and vinegars in a dark place. Check everyday for a week or so and top off honey or vinegar to keep flowers mixed well with honey or vinegar. Enjoy consuming herbal honeys in 2-4 weeks, herbal vinegars in 4-6 weeks.

Here are some nice videos of Susan Weed making violet flower honey and dandelion flower vinegar. She explains that the medicinal properties of honey are "soothing and dissolving," and violet flower adds to the effects. Therefore, violet flower honey helps to heal bruises, minor burns, and sore throat. She also explains that vinegar extracts vitamins and minerals out of plants, and dandelion flower vinegar is especially good for digestion.

Last year I made and consumed quite a bit of dandelion leaf and root vinegar. It is even more nutritious and medicinal than the flower vinegar, and all the minerals extracted from the plant makes apple cider vinegar tastes mellower, which makes it perfect for salad dressing. The flower vinegar is prettier, though.

Recycling stale bread heals and baguettes

I always keep a bag of stale bread heals and leftover baguettes in my freezer, which becomes handy when I want some bread crumbs for a dish or rusks for a snack. I usually thaw some frozen bread in a microwave (and make sure it is dry), chop it into bite-size pieces, and run them in a food processor. Homemade bread crumbs retain unique flavors from whatever bread they were made of and tend to be crunchier and not so absorbent than store-bought bread crumbs, especially if they are made of heals or baguettes.

Ingredients

3-4 heels of bread or 10-12 slices of a small baguette (naturally stale or dried in a microwave)
2 TBSP of coconut oil and/or butter (melted)
1 TBSP of honey or sucanat
A pinch of stevia
1 TBSP of ginger (grated)

Directions


1. Cut bread into bites or slices.
2. Mix all the seasonings.
3. Coat the bread with the mixed seasonings well. (I use my hands.)
4. Place the seasoned bread pieces or slices on parchment paper and bake at 360F until they are golden-brown (about 20 minutes).

Mystery wild plant in backyard

Mystery wild plant in backyard (Photo by gardenfairy)

This is one of the wild plants in our backyard about which I have been curious for the past few years. The plant seemed to be biennial, considering that only its rosette base grew last year. I begged bodhilens to mow it around last spring so that I could find out what it is this spring. I initially thought it might be a kind of mullein because the forage was oval and velvety, then I wished it were white borage when someone at Garden Forums suggested that it might be a plant that belongs to the family of Boraginacease. When the flowers bloomed, however, it became obvious that they were neither mullein nor borage but appeared to belong to the genus of Erigeron in the family of Asteraceae, most likely Eastern daisy fleabane or Philadelphia fleabane.

Eastern daisy or Philadelphia fleabane (Photo by bodhilens)

According to some online sources, the name "fleabane" came from the belief that the dried plants repelled fleas, and people used to hang the dried plants in barns. We seem to have lost the wisdom, but birds, particularly starlings, still line their nests with the plants to repell mites.