Thistles are plants that look like they want to eat you. But the good news is you can eat them.
Chances are when checking out your weeds, you refer to sow thistle as "the scary, ugly one." The thistles as a group have a menacing appearance. The leaves are spiky-shaped and often sharp with prickles or thorns at maturity.
The young leaves, however, can be picked and cooked up for a tasty sidedish. You can cook the older leaves, but it takes longer. And if they've become prickly and you have to knock all the prickles off, then it's typically more effort than it's worth. My backyard has some big thistles growing in it, which I will eventually throw in a pot.
If you ever got lost on a hike and didn't have any more food, it would be nice to identify a nearby thistle and set to cooking. So how to identify? The sow thistle has been annoying lawn owners as long as we've had grass, so most of us instinctively know what it looks like - even if we don't know what it's called. But the thistles that make the greatest impression on us are the mature, scarier ones. It's helpful to be able to ID the tastier young plants.
Fortunately, baby thistles resemble the dandelion, the most common and well-known weed. Dandelions and sow thistles both produce little yellow flower poofs. The trick is: dandelions produce a single yellow flower. Sow thistles produce multiple yellow flowers. The dandelion structure is also very ordered. The leaves form a circular, organized base and the flower sticks up from the center. The sow thistle is the drunk uncle of the dandelion. It's rougher around the edges and less symmetrical. It overgrows. It flops here and there. It gets ugly.
But how does it taste? Green Deane claims that it's delicious with some olive oil, spices, and a little grated cheese.
I hope to draw my own conclusions soon and report back!
This handsome man is an expert on identifying and cooking with weeds. He is also the distinguished host of Eat The Weeds, "the most watched foraging channel on youtube."
He will show you how to find your weed, harvest it, prepare it for cooking, and then give you a recipe to try. The Martha Stewart of survival!
Green Deane has made 111 episodes about eating weeds. One hundred and eleven. Who knew there were even that many weeds? The guy is a genius. And he has a sweet beard.
If there was ever a famine in Los Angeles, we could survive on mallow and skunk meat. The common mallow, or malva parviflora, is also known as "cheeseweed," because the leaves resemble a wheel of cheese. This makes it very easy to identify, and then to eat.
It is supposed to be really nutritious, but the taste is a little odd. It's apparently been used for a long time in Israel as a substitute for grape leaves, or cooked in a 'mallow and rice' dish in Turkey.
But what if you put it in a burrito? When I first found out mallow was edible, I went out to the backyard and harvested a bunch of it. I experimented by mixing it with spinach and other veggies in my eggs. And it doesn't taste bad.
There are some definite plus sides to eating mallow. It's free. It stays fresh way longer than greens from the grocery store. And it's super good for you, if the internet is to be believed. But I don't think I'll ever crave mallow the way I crave spinach or red leaf lettuce. It tastes a little foreign.
Would I feel differently if I had eaten it as a child? I'm not sure. Maybe it just goes better with Middle Eastern recipes. I could also see it fitting in well in Indian food.
Another internet rumor is that you can make shampoo with it. I haven't tried this one yet. It would be a fun experiment, but I'd probably have to be in dire straits to not mind my hair smelling like leafy greens.
I've recently discovered many of the weeds in my lawn that I've been spending hours crouched on the ground fighting with, are in fact, edible. And sometimes delicious.
Since it's Fat Tuesday, which in Ireland is known as Pancake Tuesday, you may be interested to know that you can put nutritious dandelion flower petals in your pancakes. Most people know or remember from kindergarten that you can eat dandelion flowers and greens. The greens are bitter, so they are best paired with other things in a salad. I saw them on sale at Albertson's, but I have plenty of them in my front yard. The flowers can be mixed into pancake batter or made into fritters, as thisawesome lady explains .
