by Diego Bonetto
photo care of Capertee Valley Landcare
I had the great pleasure of spending the day with a local Landcare group in Glen Davis in the beautiful Capertee Valley, NSW.
These are folks that know their stuff: they live on the land, they manage properties of various sizes and engage with the difficult task of looking after land.
Many of them practice regenerative agriculture and try to change the way we engage with natural resources in this country.
I was invited to talk about weeds, but not the usual talk on how to kill them, but new/old perspectives: define what is useful, acknowledge abundance and even harvest the seasonal supply as food produce.
It was an informal, fun, very open discussion, in which everyone had the chance to say their piece. Luckily some troublesome invasive species can actually be used as food.
And so we cooked them and tasted the possibilities.
Here below are some of the dishes from the long lunch.
Purlsane (portulaca oleracea) is quite abundant at the moment and a few people used it in their cooking. Here it is as a Tzatziki.
It is prickly pear season (opuntia spp) and for the long lunch we had them raw, juiced and as sorbet!
Wild fennel (foeniculum vulgare) is abundant all the time, and a well loved ingredient in many cuisines. Excellent baked and flavoursome as a pesto.
This salad featured fennel pollen (foeniculum vulgare), a highly sought after ingredient that could easily be sourced everywhere.
And of course the Greek style weeds pie, or hortopita, filled with whatever wild green is on season. This one was prepared with stinging nettle (urtica spp), fat hen (chenopodium album), celery and feta.
Purslane (portulaca oleracea) again, this time with spearmint, apples, nuts and coriander
A popular appetizer using two of the most common weeds of the coast: farmers friend (bidens pilosa) and rambling dock (acetosa sagittata)
And to finish it off we had a few sweet treats, here is the classic Anzac biscuits, with Paddy’s lucerne (Sida rhombifolia)
Not all the dishes are featured here, as some got eaten before I could take the picture, a great testament that those weeds are actually tasty after all.
More will come of this, in the meantime you can enjoy some of the recipes on the Wildfood.store website.
Follow us on our journey to elevate weeds as possible food sources. It will be yummy!
