Grant has been teaching us so much about different flowers and leaves that we can eat. These are some of my favourite ones so far.

This is a flower from a plant in the Brassica family – kale, cabbage, broccoli, etc. Every plant in the Brassica family will have these flowers: 4 yellow petals, 4 large stamen and 2 smaller stamen.When you see these flowers, that means that the entire plant is edible.

 

 

 

This purple flower grows on chives. These are really great for clearing your sinuses if you’re sick  – the flower heads taste like garlic!

A lot of the people here have allergies to things in the air and have been eating these flowers fairly often so that they can breathe for a little bit.

 

 

 

This is my favourite plant so far. It doesn’t look like much, and it’s easy to miss. This is the sorrel plant, which we have been eating as often as we find it. Each time, the taste seems to change a little bit. Sometimes it’s very lemony. When I had some yesterday, it tasted exactly like huckleberries.

 

 

 

They’re pretty easy to identify. The leaves on the sorrel plant are long and narrow, with two small sections on the bottom. I think it looks like a sword.

 

 

 

 

This is a flower from a bean plant. This flower has a very distinct pattern, with outer and inner leaves. Any plant that has this sort of flower is in the same family and is a “nitrogen fixer.” One of the things that plants need to grow is nitrogen.

When nitrogen is found in the air, it is triple bonded and is not readily available for plants to use. Nitrogen fixers have the ability to break down the bonded nitrogen in the air into a usable form and release it back into the soil for other plants.

 

 

 

 

This plant is called lovage. It can grow up to 2.5 meters tall. The leaves are edible, and there is some discrepancy on what exactly they taste like. Some people say it tastes very similar to cilantro, while others say it tastes more like celery. Personally, I think it tastes like celery too.

 

 

 

Yesterday, Melissa and I decided to try our hand at Ecovillage baking. One of the people from another program had his last day yesterday, and someone suggested that we make a cake for the occasion. They only request was that it be made gluten-free and vegan, so that everyone would be able to try it. Neither of us had tried gluten-free or vegan baking before, but we were excited to try it out.

We found a delicious sounding recipe (http://www.coffeeandquinoa.com/2014/03/fudgy-chocolate-beet-cake-with-chocolate-avocado-frosting-vegan-and-gf/) and got right to work. We had to first roast beets to mash up and put in the cake, which made it really moist. We did have to run out to grab a few ingredients that we didn’t have on hand at the village, but almost everything we needed was there already. I figured that baking with beets would be similar to baking with zucchini, which I’ve done before, and which keeps the cake nice and moist.

I think my favourite part was the chocolate avocado icing. The avocados made it so creamy! The finished products looked (and tasted) amazing. Melissa and I were really proud of ourselves for trying something new, and it was really satisfying to see everyone enjoying it.