Lonelilly
Doin' it my way.
May 10, 2009 at 9:14 pm
filed under Healthy Stuff, Sustainable living
We’re always trying to get closer to our environment, and we love doing fun, inexpensive, outdoorsy things that typically involve searching for “buried treasure.” The “treasure” can take the form of mushroom hunting, berry picking, clam digging… the list goes on and on when you live in the Pacific Northwest.
Today, the treasures were fish and wild edibles. We tried to go fishing at Bybee & Smith lakes in North Portland, one of the country’s largest urban freshwater wetlands. Unfortunately, they really are wetlands and they really are marshy! If we had a canoe, we’d have been able to get out into the lake, but as it was, we were not going to slough through muck just to put a hook in the water to maybe get a nibble.
So we tried Sturgeon Lake out on Sauvie Island–again, really marshy. While we were out there, we harvested dandelion greens and miner’s lettuce (Ev’s a seasoned veteran of the outdoors and I’ve been reading up on it so we felt pretty good about not poisoning ourselves). On our way home, we drove through Forest Park and found a couple stinging nettle patches. We plucked the fresh tips off the young plants and added them to the stash. Word of caution: unless you like throbbing fingers, wear gloves. It’s not a pleasant sensation to get stung by a stinging nettle!
Nettles are uber nutritious and taste a lot like spinach. They don’t sting after being dried or boiled, and they’re rich in vitamins A, C, D, K, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium. Historically, native communities in the Pac NW used stinging nettle to treat a variety of ailments. It continues to be in wide use today–just check out Wiki’s Medicinal Uses section for stinging nettle.
Miner’s lettuce contains large amounts of vitamin C and can be eaten fresh as a salad or boiled like spinach. Dandelion greens–those seemingly awful things that grow in your yard–are full of vitamin A, vitamin C and iron, and have more iron and calcium than spinach. Before picking, you want to make sure they haven’t been sprayed, and the best-tasting leaves come from plants that have not yet flowered.
When we got home, we combined and cleaned the miner’s lettuce, dandelion greens, and nettles and put them on the stove. They took almost no time to soften up, and the leftover liquid can be saved for stock or to be consumed as a tea (lots of nutrients in the cooking water). Here’s a pic of dinner–see, it looks like spinach!
Beans and greens baby! And leftover spinach mashed potatoes. Yum! 
Kelly
Looks amazingly good! You guys are great foragers, kinda like my ducks
http://www.whatupduck.com