My sister and I have been taking Susanna Reppert’s class (she’s teaching Rosemary Gladstar’s course, and we get the “in person” aspect – and yes, we both highly recommend it), and next month will be our last class. We will be sad to see it end!
Part of the last day involves a Wild Food Pot-Luck. Maryanne and I have a lot going on in the next couple of weeks and were worried we’d miss our planned “weeds” so we started today. We have a couple other surprises up our sleeves, so I don’t feel bad about showing this.
I wanted to do pasta. Here’s what I gathered:
The nettles, violet leaves, and dandelion leaves went into a pan with about 3/4 cup of water and steamed for several minutes. In the meantime, I stripped the seeds off the lambsquarters (a cousin of quinoa), snipped the yellow petals from the dandelions, and chopped the basil and thyme.
Note: we mow the nettles so there are always fresh young leaves.
When the greens were steamed, I threw them and the water into my Ninja and liquefied them.
Into 1 1/3 cups of flour, I added 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and the liquid. After mixing with my hands to pull the dough together, I added the seeds, petals, and herbs, continuing to kneed for about 10 minutes. I forgot salt, but it will be added to the water when cooked. Then I formed a ball with the dough and let it rest while I did some other things …
Which included Maryanne’s project.
Our neighbor came over and asked if we’d like the berries/balls off the Kousa dogwoods in their yard. Ding! Ding! Ding! That would be Maryanne’s dish! We went over and gathered about a gallon of them.
Next we had to squeeze out the soft fruit out. 
We then ran the 5 or so cups of pulp through a food mill, resulting in JUST the 2 cups required for a “pudding” type cake.
The Kousa tastes very much like American persimmons. More work, but delicious. I’ve made persimmon cake before. Here’s a recipe that I think would work for either fruit:
https://theessentialherbal.blogspot.com/2008/11/persimmon-cake.html
We won’t have her cake to photograph for a while, and we don’t have a pasta dish, but this is how the pasta noodles look on the dryer.
I cooked a few just to be sure they were edible, and they are delicious! A tiny bit of butter and Parm – YUM! The addition of the lambsquarters seeds is way better than I expected. They add a tiny bit of texture and taste great, along with all the other flavors.
This was really fun. We’ll both put our projects in the freezer until the day before class. I sometimes forget how much I enjoy working with the foods in the yard (or the neighbor’s).
