Native greens

There's a lot of satisfaction in being able to turn a bunch of garden weeds into a gourmet meal.

Warrigal Greens - organically grown and just harvested

Little plots of Warrigal Greens have turned up everywhere in my garden - in particular under the fruit trees and around the compost heap.  These are the native Australian creeping plant, Tetragonia tetragonioides, also known as Tetragon or New Zealand Spinach, but they were not always here; we acquired the original packet of seeds from an Organic Growers' Society market stall.  After cultivating a magnificent crop in the first season, we saw the plants die off and disappear.  But year after year they reappear, popping up in the most unexpected places.

Very similar in flavour to true spinach, but fleshier and more substantial when cooked, they can be used in much the same way.  My friend Colleen has published her favourite recipe for a delicious rice-based Warrigal Greens Pie which I enjoy. 

I've also used them with ricotta cheese in a cannelloni dish many times (the recipe is on the cannelloni  packet), but this time I decided to cook them in a quiche with a little onion and a few mushrooms.

This is how it turned out.   Yum.

The next variation to try is chef Sun Hyland's recipe for Warrigal Greens and Macadamia Cannelloni with bush tomato and red capsicum concasse .

This recipe calls for macadamia nuts (my tree is planted but not bearing yet) and mountain pepper flakes (a pepper bush sounds like my next quest!). 

There are a number of easily grown bush foods I'd like to experiment with.  Today I found the website of a Sydney home gardener devoted to the 'finding, planting and eating' of Australian bush foods.  Called How to Eat Australia, it seems a good place to get some ideas.  And a quick check confirmed that there was no mention of kangaroos or their tails.  As an almost vegetarian, I was glad about that.

Comments

[Val]

Mmmm, that quiche looks good! Could try that with silver beet too (I think that's called Swiss chard in the U.S.). So easy to grow, although that may be a cold climate thing.

Thanks for the explanation of the poppyseed tea cake. I'll try that. I was thinking I might try some substitutions. Cardamom powder might be interesting instead of cinnamon. I make a shortbread with cardamom and it's very intriguing.

[mimi]

That quiche is making me hungry even though I ate a big dinner. My garden was off to a great start but fizzled a bit. I'm not sure why. We got loads of zuchinni squash but not much else and the tomatoes don't look very good.

Mimi

[Tjilpi]

Hey Jude - when I grew up in Maryborough [MYB] we called Macadamia Nuts "Bauple Nuts" - Bauple Mountain lies south of MYB. I drove through the town of Bauple on the way from Brissie to MYB - exquisitely rural and hinterlandish now that the highway passes it by. There are even road signs extant which I first remember seeing when I was about 8.

By the way, Macadam was a Melbourne man - but Bauple Nuts was/is the local name around MYB. I believe there is a variety in PNG???

[Jude]

In all my years in PNG I didn't come across any nut similar to the Bauple. But thanks for the info on the origin of the Bauple name. Sounds like it could be an interesting place to visit. Did you check out the Bauple Mountain fairies when you went through?
See: http://www.bauplemountainfairies.com/Mountain.html