Weedy recipes #1 – cooking with dock

Here is my simple dock soup recipe that I dedicate to my friends in weeds-expertise, Diego and Alexis.

1. Forage for dock, wild fennel and other wild plants such as warrigal greens.
2. Wash and cut up stems and leaves of dock, mallow, wild radish and/or mustard greens.
3. Chop up a few cloves of garlic, one onion, or if you find three-cornered garlic (onion weed) chop that up as well.
4. Place olive oil in soup pot and heat.
5. Cut a lemon in half and smell it freely.
6. Throw the garlic and onion into hottish oil.
7. Caramelise until smokey brown.
8. Throw in a few washed and cut potatoes.
9. Cook for a few mins on a high heat then pour in water.
10. Throw cut up dock and company into pot.
11. Add salt and let boil hot for 10mins or so.
12. Put heat down to simmer for an hour, and add lemon juice, wild fennel seeds or any other spices you enjoy.
13. Serve with your favourite bread.

Also, here's a simple dock vegetable dish:

Clean stems and leaves and cook in boiling water for several minutes. Strain off water, drizzle a little lemon and add pine nuts. Toss and serve. Yum!

Garden and forest foraging

We've been extending our local winter food base by eating local edible weeds. A friend of ours, Alexis, takes an edible weeds and wild food workshop at our local neighbourhood centre. We took his course last weekend and have been harvesting food this week we never thought we'd be eating.

It is so exciting to find new food plants in abundance that have taken no effort to produce and are highly nutritious. This new food supply is so beautifully radical and is collected and foraged with so much pleasure. It's more 'do-nothing farming' than we imagined was possible.

The primitive is alive and well in us and the skills we've lost are profound, we're realising. Yes! We are reclaiming a public food commons. Uncapitalised food is go!

Here's a recipe for a Greek-style horta dish adapted from one of Alexis' recipes:

Wild horta served with potato and leek soup from our garden.

Rinse under running water: foraged hawksbeard, wild fennel seeds, chickweed, water cress, spear thistle, garden kale and flatweed and boil for 10 minutes. Rinse again under cold water and again boil in salty water for another 10 minutes. This removes much of the bitterness.

Rinse again and mould into a ball, squeezing out excess water. Cut across the ball into slices. Throw into a bowl and drizzle olive oil and lemon or lime. Crush some fresh garlic and throw into a hot dry pan. Heat for several minutes, while tossing.

Sprinkle wild fennel seeds and throw back into the bowl and serve warm as a side dish to the soup. We ended up throwing ours in with the soup. It was delicious, however I was so exhausted after our afternoon walk that I didn't think to take a final pic. We were happy to have yet another gorgeous meal 100% gathered within walking distance of our home.

Warm fish salad

Here is a recipe that pretty much determined itself tonight. Almost all of the ingredients have come from what's on hand in the garden and from the nearby lake – beautiful Lake Daylesford.


Ingredients

Locals:

Baby silverbeet fordhook leaves
Green spouting broccoli
Snow dwarf peas
Sugar snap climbing peas
Spring onion
Spearmint tips
Peppery wild rocket
Baby broad bean leaves
Soft oregano tips
Parsley herb
Lemon (from George and Geoffrey)


Redfin (English perch caught by Meg)


Foreigners:

Tamari and sesame seed oil (to pan cook fish)
Salt and Pepper
Sun-dried Tomatoes
Olive oil

Procedure:

Throw all the herbs and vegetables into a colander and lightly rinse off any soil. Gut, clean and pan fry fish in sesame oil, add tamari and steam with lid to finish off. Remove cooked scales, head and bones and with the raw gut feed to the chooks for extra protein. Lightly toss fish meat in with garden salad and add salt and olive oil.

The result:

Delicious!

And now for more Fukuoka:

Culture is usually thought of as something created, maintained and developed by humanity's efforts alone. But culture always originates in the partnership of man and nature. When the union of human society and nature is realized, culture takes shape of itself. Culture has always been closely connected with daily life, and so has been passed on to future generations, and has been preserved up to the present time. The One-Straw Revolution, 1975, p138.