Recipes with Julie Van Rosendaal: Cooking up a solution to creeping bellflower

Is creeping bellflower taking about your lawn and backyard garden?

The very prolific, invasive weed is a typical irritation for Calgary gardeners, who have a hard time obtaining rid of it as each stem generates up to 15,000 seeds.

If you have plenty of it, there is some great news: you can consume it.

The leafy greens are mild with not much flavour, which makes them suited for soups, stews, pastas — even salads.

Acceptable the two raw and cooked, the tender leaves are significant in fibre and vitamin C and could be used alongside with other greens and herbs. They can be layered into lasagna, for illustration, or whizzed into pesto with fresh basil.

The more youthful, lesser leaves are much more tender, but even the more substantial, much more recognized crops are high-quality for cooking. And if you hold out very long adequate, you are going to have gorgeous, purple bell-formed bouquets to use as an edible garnish.

We talked about edible weeds on the Calgary Eyeopener this week.

Glance all over your garden and you may find a myriad of other edible vegetation, far too.

Individuals edible weeds include dandelions, lambs’ quarters (with textured leaves, they style a bit like nutty spinach), purslane (a world wide web of tiny leaves, it’s high in omega 3s) and plantain, which has flat, easy, ridged dark eco-friendly leaves that tend to lie flat on the floor and creep up in between sidewalk cracks.

Make sure you know what they are and that they have not been sprayed with any weed killer, and you could have a free of charge offer of great-for-you greens through the summer time.

Summery Greens Spanakopita

Here is a recipe for an straightforward spanakopita you can make with any combination of leafy greens and herbs — spinach, kale, chard, creeping bellflower, plantain, contemporary mint, basil, parsley, coriander, and so on.

This is a streamlined way of producing spanakopita. There’s no require to cook dinner the greens down to start with.

If you like, set a crushed clove of garlic into your ramekin of butter or oil to infuse it just before brushing in excess of your phyllo.

Ingredients

• 8 cups (about) refreshing greens — spinach, kale, chard, creeping bellflower, plantain, refreshing mint or other herbs
• 1 shallot, finely chopped (or about ¼ purple onion)
• 1-2 garlic cloves, crushed
• ½-1 cup crumbled feta
• Olive oil, melted butter or a combination, for drizzling and brushing
• Salt and pepper, to style
• 6 sheets phyllo pastry, thawed

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Tear your greens into a massive bowl, add the shallot, garlic and feta, drizzle generously with oil (or even melted butter), year with salt and pepper and scrunch with your arms to incorporate everything. Coat it with oil and crack the greens down.

Lay a sheet of phyllo into a baking dish (or deep pie plate) that is about 9-inches in diameter or a comparable volume, allowing the surplus phyllo dangle about the edges.

Brush the bottom (and some of the sides, if you like) with oil or melted butter and put another sheet on top rated, at a distinctive angle so that the sides overhang an exposed part of the pan.

Brush with butter or oil and leading with a third piece of phyllo, brushing that, way too (if you like — or skip it).

Pile the scrunched greens into the phyllo, then fold more than the sides that are hanging more than the edge of the pan. Scrunch three more sheets of phyllo and position them on prime, covering any uncovered filling, and brush or drizzle with much more oil or butter.

Bake for about 30 minutes, right until deep golden and heated by means of.

Serves: 6.