tiger lily flower buds

I remembered hearing somewhere that lily flowers are edible. My parents have a ton of tiger lilies in their yard, so I decided to try eating them. Most of the plant is edible including the small potato-like roots. When cultivated for the root, the unopened flower buds are removed to stimulate root growth[1]. This explains the presence of the flower buds aka "golden needles" in Chinese and Thai cuisine.

I battered and deep fried some of the flowers, and added the rest to a stir fry. When eaten raw, they have a slight peppery flavor.

On a side note, echinacea is growing everywhere in Illinois!

rose hips

On a bike ride the other day, I came across a few rose bushes that were loaded up with rose hips. I loaded myself up with 11 oz of these fruits that have numerous health benefits. They are best harvested after the first frost makes them kinda squishy. Last year, we dried out our harvested rose hips for tea, so this year I wanted to make something more wet, like rose hip honey freezer jam:

Someone told me that you could put raw rose hips in a food mill to extract the pulp from the seeds. It didn't work out so well for me--the flesh was just too stuck to the seeds. Maybe it would work in a motorized juicer.

So, instead I stewed the rose hips in water for a long time and strained them through a jelly bag. I cooked some sugar into the liquid to make rose hip syrup. I put the now cooked seed-pulp through our food mill (thanks Davey for giving it up!) and was able to get about half a cup of pulp out. I combined with an equal amount of honey to make this delicious jam. I'm keeping it in the freezer because the water content might be too high to safely leave out as you would with honey. Luckily, it doesn't freeze solid, so it is convenient to pull out to spread on spent grain bread. Technically, this still contains the irritating hairs that surround the seeds, but they've been cooked so much they haven't bothered me yet. The cooked berries have long been used in native cooking, in soups and stews, as well as a dinner vegetable, served with butter and salt.

The pulpy seeds that were left in the food mill looked like they would be good for some more flavor, so I stewed and strained them again and boiled with sugar to make another syrup. This second one came out pretty thick...almost like candy.

sumac-ade

This beverage, made by soaking sumac berries in cold water, tastes remarkably like lemonade. I got the idea from the collaborative map on Urban Edibles Boulder, which had the location of sumac listed along with a suggestion of how to use it. Urban Edibles originally started in Portland, OR and there is another branch in Amsterdam, as well as similar projects in Urbana-Champaign, IL and Los Angeles.

The berries can be stored and used throughout the winter--a good way to get vitamin C! This article has a nice description of sumac and sumac-ade. Here are some ways the berries have been used medicinally:

"An infusion of the fruits has been used as a tonic to improve the appetite and as a treatment for diarrhea. The berries are astringent and blood purifier. They were chewed as a remedy for bed-wetting. A tea made from the berries has been used to treat sore throats." (Littleflower)

You can easily tell the edible sumacs (including staghorn and smooth) from the poison sumac, which has white berries. If you are allergic to cashews and mangos, you probably should stay away from all sumacs as they are in the same family.

I want to try using the foraged sumac berries to make the reddish purple powder that is used to garnish hummus and other middle eastern foods. I don't know how to go about separating the seeds from the powder though... Has anyone out there tried this?