May 2010 Archives

Plants do seem to grow slowly when you scrutinize them every day, and that's exactly what I've been doing to the few wild plants that endure the firm, rocky soil and high elevation of our backyard. I wonder if they appreciate the attention? (Probably not if they realized that I am diabolically hashing up plans to cook them for dinner...)

As a whole, the wild foods literature speaks highly of shoots and young leaves. The difficulty is that the young plants are often more difficult to identify than mature plants.

I hope I'm not boring you too much with my recent dandelion obsession, but we enjoyed yesterday's dandelion green salad so much that I figured I'd post it now and give the other wild plants a little more time to grow before I start messing with them.  

Since I'm referring to dandelions as "wild plants" here, it's probably a good time to mention an interesting bit I read yesterday in Samuel Thayer's book, The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, & Preparing Edible Wild Plants (2006) in a section about "The History of Foraging and Wild Food Literature." Thayer explains the way in which much of the Native American knowledge about edible wild plants was lost in the early days of European settlement, in part due to the fact that to eat wild plants was stigmatized as "savage" among European settlers. The few plants that were acceptable to eat in times of food shortage, he explains, were "dandelion, chicory, plantain, stinging nettle, curly dock, sow thistle" (and the list continues)--plants that the settlers brought with them. Thayer makes a distinction between these "quasi-wild, human-dependent agricultural tag-alongs that came from Europe" (which he says dominate the wild plants literature), and true, native wild plants.

I doubt I would have picked up this book on my own, but the college where I recently became an adjunct faculty member handed out Double Take: A Memoir (2009) after a two-day in-service on standardizing the curriculum (don't ask), and so I felt both touched (I am always tickled to be given books) and obligated to read it. It is the second book I've read this spring (after Twilight, that brain candy of a book). My understanding is that at some point the college will hold some sort of discussions of Double Take, so maybe I'll attend if I can get the date right. It would probably be useful to have a conversation with live book-readers from time to time, instead of always sending my thoughts out to the (largely, so far) unresponsive interwebs whilst I sit alone in my borrowed high-mountain abode, out of touch with reality, fixating too much on my purpose in life.

For more than two years now I have been editing a frustrating diatribe destined to one day become a book (please do not ask why I agreed to do it because it is a long story) that is perhaps now at its most frustrating point as I work to confirm and then incorporate all of the missing sources referred to in the text.

It's not that I didn't tell the client two years ago when we started that he needed to cite his sources. I told him, but he said he had them, and we put it off. (As for me, somewhere in the back of my mind I never believed that the book project would come to fruition--so really, what did it matter? Well, it turns out I was wrong.) And, after my speech about "It's not a real book unless it has a bibliography," he enlisted me and a recent college graduate of his acquaintance to research all of his wild claims and attribute them to one source or another. Egad.

It's not usually a good idea to watch a movie before reading the book, because nine times out of ten the book is better than the movie. But when it comes to Twilight--Stephenie Meyer's first book in her bestselling vampire series--there is really no harm done in reversing the order of things. This is because the movie is better than the book.

If you don't know the story already, it is about a 17-year-old girl, Bella Swan, who moves to her father's house in the small town of Forks, Washington, and then falls in love with her classmate, the pale and dreamy Edward Cullen, who turns out to be a member of a coven of non-human-eating "vegetarian" vampires. Over and over again, Bella drones on about how amazingly beautiful, how hauntingly captivating, and how dangerous Cullen is--dangerous because, even though he has chosen not to eat humans, he still has the desire to do so; and because out of all the humans, Bella's scent is the most irresistible to him.