With the help of wild plants, winter-time cucumbers make a delicious dessert! Come into my post and see how!
A Tribute to Summer Cucumbers
Fresh from the garden, cucumbers have so much more flavor than any store-bought cucumber in the wintertime. That's one reason I like to grow my own produce or find it in the wild. And focus on eating what's in season. The flavors in everything are so much more alive. I wish everyone could experience fresh fruits and vegetables right from their own yard or neighborhood.
Getting My Ingredients Together
I knew my store-bought cucumbers weren't going to be top-notch in their flavor. But I didn't want to hide them, either. So I decided to make something mild -- and try to complement whatever flavor I could get from these cukes, rather than overpower them.
I know that first picture looks odd. Oh well. That's the way it is sometimes, when I'm using wild plants in the kitchen! In the top image: a scruffy old Borage plant protected from the weather in a blackberry patch, a prickly branch from a Colorado Blue Spruce tree, and a dried seedhead of Smooth Sumac. I use just the newly growing center of the borage plant. I snip off the needles of the Spruce and make a Spruce sugar syrup. And I take the fuzzy red sumac seeds for a quick spin in the blender. I sift out their hard seeds, leaving just a tart lemon-flavored fuzz.
In the lower left: the cucumber-flavored borage center leaves, spearmint leaves, and lemon balm leaves. And more of the gingko nuts I foraged recently. In the lower right: I'm steeping dried homegrown Bartlett pears in white wine. And doing the same with thinly sliced cucumbers. I let the pears soak a couple days and the cucumbers for a few hours. The wine really did take on the cucumber and pear flavors. It's worth drinking on its own, lol.
Just a quick word about those gingko nuts. I dry-roasted them until they popped open like popcorn. If you ever try this yourself, be sure to put a lid on the pan. Those nuts are downright ballistic when they pop open! After taking the nutmeats out of their shells, I chopped them. And dry-roasted them in a cast iron skillet on the stove until they were crisp. This makes them taste more nutty than when I boiled them for my Olive-Gingko Chopped Salad.
Serving It Up!
This is a pretty simple dish. I finely chopped a peeled cucumber, mixed the cuke cubes with a little sugar, and let them sit a couple hours to draw out their moisture. I made a syllabub by whipping the heavy cream with sugar until it was stiff. Then I beat in a mix of the pear and cucumber wine. I sampled the wine mix first, to decide the right balance of the pear and cucumber flavors - and then again to be sure it was just right. I was surprised at how well the cucumber flavor came through in the syllabub.
If I got this at a restaurant, I wouldn't even know what anything is. But this is one of the most delicious things I've eaten in awhile! The mild crunchy cucumbers. The spruce syrup has a resinous flavor offset by the sweetness in the syrup and the foamy syllabub. That does have a cucumber-wine flavor sweetened by the pears. The minty lemon of the herbs, the bright tart lemon of the sumac. And the crisp chestnut-flavored gingko nuts. That's a crazy combination!
What Do You Think?
- Do you grow cucumbers?
- Have you eaten any of the wild plants shown in this post?
- Do you forage for any wild food?
- Would you eat my cucumber syllabub dessert?
I eat a lot of wild plants and show you how, because I believe that we can all have lives that are richer, more secure, more grounded, and more interesting by getting to know the plants and the land around us – in our yards, our parks, and our wild places.
Thanks @progressivechef for creating the Steemit Iron Chef contest series!
I try to make content that's interesting! If you found this informative and helpful, please give it an upvote and a resteem.
Plant List
- Gingko - Gingko biloba - cooked nuts
- Colorado Blue Spruce - Picea pungens - needles
- Smooth Sumac - Rhus glabra - seedhairs
- Lemon balm - Melissa officinalis - tender leaves
- Borage - Borago officinalis - tender young leaves
- Spearmint - Mentha spicata - leaves
- Bartlett pears - Pyrus communis - fruit
