New Zealand Spinach (Warrigal Greens)
Tetragonia teragonioides (Warigal Greens or New Zealand Spinach), is another bush tucker plant which is popular in restaurants which serve bush tucker foods. You would pay a premium price for a dish containing this, so grow your own.
It is a ‘juicy’ plant the leaves of which need to be blanched before eating. It is used in dishes in which spinach or silver beet would be used. Just make sure of your identification before trying any of the native plants as foods.
It seems to be a hardy plant for areas without frost. It is salt tolerant. Propagate by seed or cuttings.
Also take care that plants are not growing in or near areas that have been sprayed with chemicals! Friends had looked forward to a feast of field mushrooms last week. Having cooked them they could not eat them as they could pick the taste of some chemical in them. Others possibly would not have been noticed the flavour except that these folk are ex farmers.
Coffee from Kurrajong
I have been looking through an old (2004) Journal of the Society for Growing Australian Plants (Queensland Region). There is an interesting article on using the seeds of the Kurrajong (Brachychiton populneus) as a coffee substitute. The early settlers in the region first used it as such, including the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. The seeds need to be husked, and then roasted like coffee beans, before being ground and brewed.
The tree is grown quite widely in Australia, including many areas of Southern Australia. The foliage has often been used as fodder for farm animals. They are often planted as ornamental trees in public parks. In summer the trees have clusters of creamy grey flowers which have red splotches all over the cream interior of the bell shaped flowers. The seeds are found in green seed pods, which gradually turn brown and then split open with yellow seeds.
Now is a good time to be looking for the seed pods. It is best to pick the lot once about a third of the pods have become brown. The problem comes at this stage because the birds love the seeds. Cockatoos, rosellas and choughs are partial to the seeds. Store the green pods out of reach of the birds for a few days while they ripen.
From the information in the article, it would be worth growing the tree to use the seeds, if you can win the battle with the birds.
The seeds have fine hairs which irritate greatly, so take care. Use a knife to split the pods and use a pair of leather gloves to rub the hairs off the seeds. Blow the hairs from the seeds and dry the seeds for a few days before storing them. (Watch out for the birds.)
Use a frying pan with a lid to roast the seeds on high heat, or if using an ordinary stove top pan stir all the while. This is how coffee is treated. The roasting is done according to the strength of the flavour you prefer. According to the article the flavour of the brewed ‘coffee’ is something like Mocha or long black Espresso coffee. The roasting is carried out until the Kurrajong seeds are the colour that you like in coffee.
Once roasted, the seeds are stored in a glass jar until needed for grinding. The suggested amount to use is a heaped dessertspoon of ground Kurrajong seeds per cup. Put the ‘coffee’ in a saucepan, cover with boiling water and bring back to the boil. Let stand a few minutes before straining and serving.
I don’t like coffee at all. I would rather try different teas. However I would be very interested to find out how this truly tasted.
Bush Foods
1 Comment »25th March, 2006; Category: Bush Tucker
When I log onto Firefox I have the ABC page open up. I noticed in the science programme on ABC Radio National an ad about bush potatoes that was on at lunchtime today. Someone discovered them growing in one of the poorest soil areas of the country and they would be a good food crop for countries where soil is nutritionally depleted.
What made me look it up was the fact that my Solanum centrale (bush tomato) seed is germinating. These are becoming the in thing in restaurants that use indigenous foods in their cooking. I had plans for a separate garden area where I wanted to grow bush tomato, Wild Peaches, Muntries and Acacia victoria, and anything else that would cope with the conditions here. One day I bought some dried lemon myrtle last year to try in fish dishes and in biscuits. This plant would probably have to be a tub plant here. The smell of the leaves is wonderful. Wattle seed is supposed to be good in biscuits also. Haven’t tried cooking with them yet.
I put a number of wild peach seed in individual pots last week. There seems to be no ‘real’ method to propagating these. A friend used a tennis racquet to send them around his block, hoping that they would germinate where they landed. Some germinated at the base of shrubs that he planted, and being parasitic plants, they were well placed to latch on to the roots of the host plant.
I’ve read also that cracking the stone and/or peeling the skin from the kernal, putting the stones in a hession bag and putting behind the garden shed and forgetting them, putting seed in moist peat etc are all supposed to work.