Читать книгу The Scout's Guide to Wild Edibles. Learn How To Forage, Prepare & Eat 40 Wild Foods онлайн

35 страница из 39

These milkweed pods are too big to use. They would be tough and fibrous.

EDIBLE PARTS & PREPARATION:

Young shoots up to 8″ high are tasty boiled, buttered and salted. Steam flower buds like broccoli. Small seedpods under 2″ long are tasty cooked, although given the rubbery hairlike projections, the mouth feel is strange.

WHEN TO HARVEST:

Shoots

Flower buds and flowers

Pods

SUSTAINABLE HARVESTING:

Harvest only a few shoots per collecting site; rotate sites when collecting shoots to give plants an opportunity to recover. This is one of the milkweeds that provide food for monarch butterflies. Harvest only where the milkweed is plentiful, and take only what you need for a single meal.

Common milkweed shoots have pubescent (hairy) stems, and the underside of the leaves is also pubescent. This is one of many ways they can be distinguished from the hairless common dogbane, which has a skinnier shoot and tastes bitter when cooked.

PRESERVING THE HARVEST:

Blanch, vacuum seal, and freeze shoots and flower buds. Pickle young seedpods that are less than 2″ long.